The Character of God’s Words [Septuagint is a Fraud]

The Dean Burgon Society ^ | July, 2005 | H. D. Williams, M.D.

[attiladhun2]

Technically, the Old Testament Apocrypha consists of the following books

• I Esdras
• II Esdras
• Tobit
• Judith
• Addition to Esther
• The Wisdom of Solomon
• Ecclesiasticus
• Baruch (with the Epistle of Jeremiah)
• The Song of the Three Holy Children
• The History of Susanna
• Bel and the Dragon
• The Prayer of Manasses
• I Maccabees
• II Maccabees
  
  What you have listed is a mishmash of Old and New Testament Apocrypha and Psuedopigraph. Since much of what is generally referred to as "Apocrypha" by Protestants is included in the RC Church's "Second Canon" (the Deuterocanonical books), of course a Catholic authority would not list them as being apocryphal. Since they are not in the Hebrew canon and are only found complete in Greek translation, they are rightly excluded from the canon of Scripture used by Protestant churches.

[Titanites]

Technically, the Old Testament Apocrypha consists of the following books

No, technically it does not.

Since much of what is generally referred to as "Apocrypha" by Protestants is included in the RC Church's "Second Canon" (the Deuterocanonical books), of course a Catholic authority would not list them as being apocryphal.

Yes, the Protestants did co-opt the word apocrypha to apply to a different set of books.

Since they are not in the Hebrew canon and are only found complete in Greek translation, they are rightly excluded from the canon of Scripture used by Protestant churches.

What authority set the rule that they had to be in the Hebrew canon to be included in the canon of Scripture?

And your comment about being found complete only in Greek translation is not true. The Greek translation came from Hebrew, and the Dead Sea Scrolls have have yielded deuterocanoncial books in Hebrew.

[FormerLib]

What authority set the rule that they had to be in the Hebrew canon to be included in the canon of Scripture?

The Council at Jamnia attempted to remove Christian references in the Old Testament and declare the canon closed, but the Christian Church did not recognize their authority or their decisions (until certain sects accepted the Masoretic text some 1500 years later, that is)

[attiladhun2]

The Apostles never quote from the Apocrypha in order to establish doctrine. Furthermore, since the books in question did not survive in the original, there is no way a critical text of them can be reconstructed. Hence, it could not belong in the Canon, else God would have providentially preserved enough texts in the original to reconstruct a critical text. There is no "Second Canon" based on these spurious books.

[Titanites]

The Apostles never quote from the Apocrypha in order to establish doctrine.

What authority set this requirement? In any case, the requirement that the Apostles had to quote from a book in order to establish doctrine for it to be considered part of the OT is spurious. You do realize don't you, that there are books in the Protestant OT canon that were not quoted by the Apostles? To be consistent you must claim these do not belong.

Furthermore, since the books in question did not survive in the original, there is no way a critical text of them can be reconstructed.

What are you talking about? The Septuagint texts available are much older than the Masoretic text. Also, Dead Sea Scrolls in Hebrew match closer to the Septuagint than the Masoretic texts in many instances. So, your argument is fallacious.

Hence, it could not belong in the Canon, else God would have providentially preserved enough texts in the original to reconstruct a critical text.

The fact is that we do not have a copy of the Hebrew Canon which is not Masoretic. We have no copy of the Hebrew scripture that predates the ninth century. Where the Masoretic seems obscure or doubtful, we have no other Hebrew text to guide us. The only clues remaining as to earlier texts and traditions come from the fragments of scripture in the Dead Sea Scrolls and from early translations of the Hebrew canon into other languages, like the Septuagint. By your rule, since God has not providentially preserved to this day enough texts in the "original" to reconstruct a critical text, you better throw out your canon.

There is no "Second Canon" based on these spurious books.

What authority claims they’re spurious?

[Uncle Chip]

ping

[fortheDeclaration]

I told him that the Greek was a present plural passive participle

So what?

The Greek participle can be translated in many different ways.

No one is perishing, they are already dead in their sins when they are born.

No one is 'being saved' they are saved when they are born again.

The modern translations are wrong and the King James is right.

[fortheDeclaration]

Parts of the Septuagint were recovered from Qumran, so the Septuagint must date to 68 C.E. or before. The Septuagint, the Greek version of the Bible, is typically dated to have been translated in the third to second centuries B.C.E. Origen lived from 185-232 C.E. so, it is impossible that the Septuagint could have originated from him. What your link means to say is that Greek fragments of the Hebrew scriptures were found at Qumran, but these date to 132-135 AD. The only books that had probably been translated into Greek with any seriousness were the 5 books of the Law. Those 5 are what Josephus refers to as the "Septuagint". Do the fragments of the Greek Old Testament that came from the Dead Sea Scrolls match Origen's 5th Column of his Hexapla which he labels the LXX [Septuagint]. If not, then which is going to be called the LXX. So you have Josephus's Septuagint, then Origen's Septuagint, then Vaticanus B's Septuagint, Alexandrinus A's Septuagint, .... every Greek fragment from the Hebrew OT is a called a Septuagint. The Septuagint was supposed to be a specific authoritatively accurate translation that matched the Hebrew Text, but even Jerome could not find a Greek match for the Hebrew text in his day and he had access to Origen's library.

Amen to your post.

An B.C.Septuagint cannot be proven to have to ever existed.

What B.C. frgaments exist of a Greek Old Testament are from the Torah and are likely to have been Targums.

The English Septuagint we have today is from Origen.

[fortheDeclaration]

I know of none that exclusively binds itself to the Word of the Lord contained in the Masoretic Text.

The King James does.

[fortheDeclaration]

The Authorized King James Bible has been, and continues to be, the God honored, most accurate, and best English translation of the inspired, inerrant, infallible, and preserved original language words of God. The New Testament of the KJV, though beautiful Elizabethan English, was prepared using a Greek text that was known at the time to be an inferior text, having been assembled from late manuscripts. In some cases the "Greek" was a back-translation from the Vulgate into Greek (thus carrying into the text certain marginal comments made in the Latin that were never in the Greek text to begin with). Calling his product the "received text" was an advertising blurb used its preparer to give it authenticity as he rushed against others to get his into print ahead of theirs.

It was the Received Text of the Protestant Reformation, based on the Erasmus text and moving through to Beza.

It was used by Tyndale, and the Geneva and found its English perfection in the King James 1611.

The texts that were used were the correct ones and the Nestle-Alland readings have had to concede on many of them, going back to TR readings.

[fortheDeclaration]

And what does Erasmus have to do with the King James which mostly followed Beza's 4th edition which came some 80 years later?

Moreover, Erasmus had access to every important manuscript in existance including 'B' which he rejected outright.

If you want to talk about corruption, talk about the critical text readings of 'B' and 'Aleph' which disagree with each other in over 3,000 places in the Gospels alone!

[fortheDeclaration]

However, Codex B did not come from Origen’s Hexapla as you claim.

He never claimed any such thing.

He stated that the Septuagint was in 'B', in the Old Testament, and that it came from Origen's 5th column.

The Dead Sea Scrolls. Also, Hebrew manuscripts found at Qumran more closely follow the Septuagint we have now than they do the Masoretic texts.

That is untrue, most of the Dead Sea Scrolls support the Masoretic text.

And there is disagreement between the scholars on those that don't on why they don't.

[fortheDeclaration]

3. THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS AND THE OLD TESTAMENT TEXT

The discovery of the first Dead Sea Scroll, Isaiah A, was generally regarded by scholars as a victory for the Masoretic (Traditional) Hebrew text of the Old Testament. M. Burrows (1948) wrote as follows: ''The text of Isaiah in this manuscript is practically complete. With the exception of a few words lost where the edge of a column has been torn off and the relatively unimportant omissions to be noted below, the whole book is here, and it is substantially the book preserved in the Masoretic text. Differing notably in orthography and somewhat in morphology, it agrees with the Masoretic text to a remarkable degree in wording. Herein lies its chief importance, supporting the fidelity of the Masoretic tradition." And according to Albright (1955), the second Isaiah -scroll (Isaiah B) agrees even more closely with the Masoretic text.

- Page 35 -

But the discovery in 1952 of Cave 4 with its vast store of manuscripts has altered the picture considerably. It became apparent that the Proto-Masoretic text of the Isaiah scrolls was not the only type of Old Testament text that had been preserved at Qumran. In the manuscripts from Cave 4 many other text types have been distinguished. In a recent article F. M. Cross (1964) presents some of the conclusions which he has drawn from his Qumran studies. He believes that three distinct ancient texts of Samuel can be identified, namely, (1) an Egyptian text represented by the Septuagint, (2) a Palestinian text represented by manuscript 4Q from Cave 4, and (3) a Proto-Masoretic text represented by a Greek text of Samuel also from Cave 4. And in the Pentateuch also Cross divides the text into the Egyptian, Palestinian, and Proto-Masoretic varieties.

[picture: Is iii. 16-20 from the Dead Sea Scroll (A) showing alterations to the divine Name (from adonay to Yaweh in line 3 and from Yahweh to adonay in line 4).]
[picture: Dead Sea Fragments of Exodus. Phoenician Script]


Albright (1955) and Burrows, (1958) agree with Cross in regard to his threefold division of the Old Testament documents, a conclusion which Cross presented in an earlier article (1956). But unless those two scholars have reconsidered their positions, they differ from Cross in their estimate of the age of the Proto-Masoretic and the relationship of this text to the Egyptian and Palestinian texts.

Albright holds that the Proto-Masoretic text was developed in Babylon during the days of the captivity and ''then brought back to Palestine by the returning exiles during the late sixth and fifth centuries BC." The other two texts were derived from this Proto-Masoretic text. Burrows also believes in the superiority of the Proto-Masoretic text. "The Proto-Masoretic text," he says, "existed at Qumran and elsewhere along with the divergent texts, on the whole it is fair to say that it was the trunk and they were the branches that spring out of it. The greatest contribution of the Dead Sea Scrolls to textual criticism is still their demonstration of this fact." Cross, on the other hand, denies that the Proto-Masoretic text was the ancestor of the other two. He believes that it was ''the local text of Babylon which emerged in the fourth to second centuries BC." According to Cross, the Proto-Masoretic text did not arrive in Palestine until comparatively late.

- Page 36 -

G. R. Driver (1965) disagrees with the interpretation which Albright, Burrows, Cross and other scholars have placed upon the Dead Sea Scrolls. Denying that these documents date from pre-Christian times, he relates them instead to the Jewish Revolt against Rome in AD 66 - 73, thus making them roughly contemporary with the New Testament. He believes that the Righteous Teacher mentioned in the Scrolls was Manaemus (Menahem), a leader in the Revolt and perhaps a son of the rebel Judas mentioned in Acts 5:37. Hence, in Driver's opinion, the Dead Sea Scrolls were written in the first and early second centuries AD, a theory which, if true, greatly alters the significance of these Scrolls both for history and for textual criticism.

Thus we see that, despite the new discoveries, our confidence in the trustworthiness of the Old Testament text must rest on some more solid foundation than the opinions of naturalistic scholars. For as the current Qumran studies demonstrate, these scholars disagree with one another. What one scholar grants another takes away. Instead of depending on such inconstant allies, Bible-believing Christians should develop their own type of Old Testament textual criticism, a textual criticism which takes its stand on the promises of Christ and views the evidence in the light of these promises.

With this summary by Edward F. Hills on the Dead Sea Scrolls, we conclude our survey of the Old Testament manuscripts and Versions. We end just where we began that the foundation of the study on how we got our Bible is the promise of God to preserve His word. It is tragic that so-called textual criticism has been left in the hands of those who proceed with their research totally oblivious to this promise. And worse, many who claim to be fundamentalists take the same naturalistic approach to the transmission of the Holy Scriptures.

Yes, the battle between God and Satan has raged over His Holy Word; there have been many pretenders; some streams of textual transmissions have become seriously corrupted. But, in carefully pondering the facts and evidence as given above, the student can clearly see that God has been faithful to His promise; the Old Testament has been preserved through the Masoretic Hebrew Text.

"Not one jot or tittle has passed away"

http://www.biblebelievers.net/BibleVersions/kjcforv2.htm#X

[Uncle Chip]

But the discovery in 1952 of Cave 4 with its vast store of manuscripts has altered the picture considerably. It became apparent that the Proto-Masoretic text of the Isaiah scrolls was not the only type of Old Testament text that had been preserved at Qumran. In the manuscripts from Cave 4 many other text types have been distinguished. In a recent article F. M. Cross (1964) presents some of the conclusions which he has drawn from his Qumran studies. He believes that three distinct ancient texts of Samuel can be identified, namely, (1) an Egyptian text represented by the Septuagint, (2) a Palestinian text represented by manuscript 4Q from Cave 4, and (3) a Proto-Masoretic text represented by a Greek text of Samuel also from Cave 4. And in the Pentateuch also Cross divides the text into the Egyptian, Palestinian, and Proto-Masoretic varieties.

I read someplace and I wish I could find it that many scholars believe that Cave 4 was the place where defective and flawed manuscripts had been dumped. They had not been placed in jars for preservation but appeared to have been unceremoniously buried there.

[fortheDeclaration]

I read someplace and I wish I could find it that many scholars believe that Cave 4 was the place where defective and flawed manuscripts had been dumped. They had not been placed in jars for preservation but appeared to have been unceremoniously buried there.

Now, that would make sense, considering that Aleph was going to be burnt as trash when it was 'discovered' as well.