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This transcript has been edited for clarity and space.
Seth Ehorn
Hi, I’m Seth Ehorn, and I’m the editor of “Exodus in the New Testament.” I currently teach as the Assistant Professor of Classics and Biblical Languages at Houston Christian University.
David Capes
Dr. Seth Ehorn, welcome to “The Stone Chapel Podcast.” It’s your first time with us.
Seth Ehorn
Happy to be here.
David Capes
You’re in my office in Houston! We worked together briefly up at Wheaton College. I got to know you and was so impressed with you and the quality of your work. I’m just thrilled that you’re at Houston Christian University now. I’m glad to know you there and here. All right, for those who don’t know, Seth Ehorn, who is he?
Seth Ehorn
Let’s see, I am a father. I am a scholar. I am a researcher and a teacher. I work in New Testament and Christian origins, especially its interface with the Greco-Roman world surrounding the New Testament. I also consider myself a Greek grammarian of sorts. I teach a lot of Greek. I write on those kinds of things, including in Septuagint studies. One of my major projects is the “Baylor Handbook on the Septuagint,” of which I’m a coeditor and have written two volumes in that series. When I’m not doing scholarship or teaching, you can find me on a river or a lake fishing. I love to fly fish, and I love to bass fish.
David Capes
Texas ought to be a place you could do a little bass fishing.
Seth Ehorn
There are a few fish down here. I haven’t found them yet, but that’s because I haven’t gone fishing yet. I spend a lot of time with my family as well. I’ve got young kids and a dog, and we just love to be outside.
David Capes
Oh, excellent. We’re going to talk today about this book that you’ve edited called “Exodus in the New Testament.” And you know, I’m fascinated and have been for years with issues of intertextuality. How New Testament writers received, understood and then wrote about and thought about the Old Testament and its significance to them. And part of that goes back to my Doctor Father, who was Earl Ellis. Back in the 1950s he wrote a book, “Paul’s Use of the Old Testament,” which became very much a standard book in those days. But a lot has happened since the 1950s in this area. And this is an excellent book. It’s part of the Library of New Testament Studies, where the series editor is Chris Keith, who’s a good friend of mine and a good friend of the library. And I’m just grateful that you’re here to talk
about this book. Talk about the big idea, the main emphasis of this book.
Seth Ehorn
Let me give just a really brief bit of context about how the book fits into a pattern of books in this series, and that will help with the question that you’ve asked. There are several other books that have come out, also in the same LNTS, Library of New Testament Studies series. Genesis in the New Testament, Isaiah in the New Testament, the Minor Prophets, the Psalms and Deuteronomy. So five that have come out before, giving a survey of how these different books, Old Testament, scriptural books, are being used by authors in the Second Temple period, especially the New Testament authors. This fits within that pattern.
There’s also a connection, not just within the products themselves, but the editors of those previous books. One of them happened to be my doctoral examiner, Steve Mounce. After my viva and some further correspondence, he suggested that I might take on the mantle of this project. That’s why I became involved in it.
David Capes
At that point, did you have a particular interest in Exodus as a book, or do you see it as a very significant, formative book for New Testament writers?
Seth Ehorn
Both. I definitely did have some interest in it, because some of the work I did on my doctoral thesis involved looking at Exodus, the Decalogue in particular, in household codes. We can talk about that, perhaps in a little bit, but also just more generally, interested in quotation culture. And this fit within a lot of things I was already working on and am still working on. I’m specifically interested in it, and also generally interested in what the field of intertextuality is doing.
David Capes
Now that this book is out, you’re working on Jeremiah.
Seth Ehorn
That’s right. Jeremiah in the New Testament is in the same series, with a similar concept. With another fantastic group of contributors to that as well.
David Capes
Tell us a little bit about those who did contributed to this volume [on Exodus].
Seth Ehorn
We had a nice range of people, I’m happy to say, both with the Exodus book and with the Jeremiah one that’s coming up. I was able to get a fantastic scholar of, in this case, Greek manuscripts of Exodus from of the Septuagint, as well as somebody who has expertise in the Dead Sea Scrolls manuscripts of Exodus. It is Drew Longacre, and he wrote a fantastic survey of how these texts were copied and about the state of the manuscripts. There are various issues with the book of Exodus, especially the tabernacle traditions such as the shortening of them, and ordering of them. And he walks you through all of the evidence that’s important to know and understand. That provides a good methodological foundation for everyone else to work from. Because when we think about a New Testament author
using a tradition, we have to ask what tradition specifically might they have had access to, and he’s the one who lays out all that evidence in a nice, clean way.
David Capes
You’ve talked about the Septuagint a couple of times. And for those who don’t know, what is the Septuagint?
Seth Ehorn
The Septuagint is a scholarly shorthand for Greek versions of Israel’s scripture. So, scriptures that have been translated from a putative Hebrew Vorlage (German) for Hebrew “source” into Greek. I’m being a little bit circuitous in my language, because that’s one of the issues in our field. We talk about the Septuagint as if it’s something you can go and pull off a shelf and say, oh yeah, Paul had this, or Matthew had this. And that’s, of course, fictional. The only access they had was mediated by whatever texts their local community would have had.
David Capes
They had some Greek text available. In the second and third centuries BC [or BCE] are the beginnings of these translations because Greek was becoming such a dominant language in the world. Particularly among Jewish people, not necessarily living in Israel, but most of those scattered throughout the world.
Seth Ehorn
That’s right. These translations are meeting a linguistic need of communities to have Scripture in a language that they are speaking. And the issue then is that there’s not a uniform translation program. They can’t say let’s all go to Zondervan and get this one agreed-upon translation. It’s happening organically in different spaces, and so you can have different principles of translation. Maybe your local community has a rigorous, strict, word-for-word policy. Or maybe you have a more loose method in another.
