Whose Decision? Editorial Norms, Translation Studies and the Greek Bible of the New Testament

New Testament scholars who read their texts against the Greek Bible usually take the upper text of a critical edition to be ‘the Septuagint’. This article describes what that upper text is. It is the result of editorial decisions taken according to rules which the editors themselves printed. Descriptive Translation Studies supplies a vocabulary for such a description, since Gideon Toury counts editors among the agents whose behaviour norms govern, distinguishes textual from extratextual evidence and warns against taking normative statements at face value. These instruments are applied to Rahlfs’s Prolegomena to Psalmi cum Odis, to Ziegler’s introduction to Duodecim prophetae and to two passages on which exegesis relies. At Ps 39:7 in Heb 10:5, the Göttingen text prints a reading found in no surviving Greek manuscript of the Septuagint. At Amos 9:11–12 in Acts 15:16–18, the two standard editions print different texts, and the boundary of the quotation moved between the 27th and the 28th editions of Nestle–Aland. Two surveys of the exegetical literature show that these decisions and their printed grounds are largely unknown to the scholars who build on them. The conclusion draws from this an answer to the question of how historical context and theory belong together in New Testament studies. The context is itself a product, and theory supplies the words in which the procedure that produced it can be described.