A Better Bible

I've recently switched to this, the Orthodox Bible, as my preferred study Bible. I still love the King James and prefer its wording in most places, especially for liturgical and devotional purposes. But I have come across some very interesting (to me, at least) knowledge which convinced me that this, the canon of the Scriptures which has been continuously in use since the time of the Fathers, is the authoritative version. Or, to be more precise, the texts which underlie it are the authoritative version.

When the Church of England under King James I set about to translate the Scriptures into English so that they would be accessible to everyone, they decided not to use the Roman Catholic Vulgate, partially because of their anti-Catholic sentiments and partially for valid questions of textual reliability. For the New Testament, they went to the Eastern Orthodox and used the textus receptus, or received text in Greek, meaning that version which had been passed down directly from generation to generation of the church, in the language in which it was originally written. Among other reasons, this was seen as the preferred text because they believed that God had preserved it, providentially and through the agency of the Orthodox Churches, intact without error.

But for the Old Testament, rather than using the Orthodox (also called the Byzantine) text, following the same logic as they had with the New, they thought it would be a better idea to go to the Hebrew version still in use by the Jews. On the surface, this seems valid. But there is a problem.

Very early in the Christian period, that is, in the early part of the 100s AD, the Church Father Justin Martyr set about collecting as many manuscripts as he could find of the Scriptures, and comparing them. He collected both the Greek translation of the Old Testament, known as the Septuagint, and the Hebrew version then in use in non-Christian Jewish synagogues. And what he found was that, during the years between the Resurrection of Christ and his own time, about a century later, there had been a widespread and systematic alteration of both the canon and the text of the Old Testament by the Jewish rabbis, all very clearly focused on eliminating or obscuring anything that could be pointed to as Messianic prophecy which had been fulfilled in Jesus. He reports stories and rumors that all copies of any older versions, either Greek or Hebrew, in possession of the Jews had been intentionally burned.

It is very important to note that the Septuagint was NOT a Christian translation of the Old Testament: it was 100% Jewish, made about two centuries before Christ by seventy learned Jewish Rabbis. The history of its origin is that Ptolemy, king of Egypt, wanted the Hebrew Scriptures for his library at Alexandria, but they only existed in Hebrew, which only the Jews could read. So he commissioned these seventy orthodox Jewish scholars who knew both Hebrew and Greek, to come to Alexandria, isolated each of them in a hut or cell in the desert with a copy of the Torah, without any contact with the other sixty-nine, and told them to translate. When they were done, all seventy translations matched each other exactly, word for word.

This Greek translation, the Septuagint (meaning "seventy," for the scholars) was the one from which Jesus and the Apostles quoted in the New Testament, and was the one in common use among all Jewish synagogues throughout the Greek-speaking world, roughly the entire former empire of Alexander the Great, at the time of Jesus. It was also the canonical version of the Old Testament for the early church, and the one from which all the Church Fathers quoted. But, as previously stated, it had been rapidly supplanted in the decades after Christ in Jewish communities throughout the world. And it was on that second and later version of the Jewish canon that the Hebrew Old Testament (known as the Masoretic text) which the Reformers reverted to in the 15th and 16th centuries was based. The oldest copy in existence of that Masoretic text is from about the 10th century AD. Whereas the oldest complete manuscript of the Septuagint dates to the 4th century AD, and there are partial manuscripts as old as the 1st century BC. 

Now, all that said, there has been an ongoing debate for centuries about which is actually the correct and more reliable version of the Old Testament and, to be fair, valid arguments can be made on both sides. Most scholars between the Reformation and the 20th century held a general assumption that the Septuagint was textually inferior, and had been corrupted through the ages, despite its greater antiquity, whereas the Masoretic had been very carefully preserved by the very reverent Jewish rabbis: as evidence of this they cited that all the copies of the Masoretic version were virtually identical, across time and space. That was, however, before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Because when the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were hidden in that cave around the time of Christ, were compared to the two competing versions of the Old Testament, it was found that they matched the Septuagint and not the Masoretic, in places where they differed. Furthermore, they confirmed that the Septuagint had been based on an older (presumably the original) Hebrew version, just as the tradition had reported--portions of that version were found intact among the scrolls.

What that means, to me at least, is that Justin and the other Fathers were probably correct: the Hebrew text in use among Jewish communities probably was intentionally changed to try and refute the claims of Jesus's followers that he was the Messiah. And that, therefore, the original, correct, and authoritative version of the Old Testament is the Septuagint, as the Orthodox have said all along, just as the original, correct, and authoritative version of the New Testament is the Byzantine, or Received Text. 

For instance: where Isaiah reads "Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel," the Masoretic text changes it to "Behold, a young woman shall conceive." Which really doesn't even make any sense: how is that a sign from the Lord himself? There's nothing miraculous in a young woman conceiving through the usual means.

But that leads to another important point, and one which bears directly on what I believe about the authority of Scripture. Perhaps you're saying to yourself, "Wait...doesn't the King James say virgin?" Yes, it does. That's because the translators, as have every group of translators since, took the various texts, Septuagint included, and selected the reading which they thought best at the time of translation. Do you see the problem there? Or problems, actually. The first being, that whoever is doing the selecting and translating is going to be informed by his own theological assumptions and prejudices. In fact, this actually was an issue during the Reformation: this is one of the main reasons the Reformers decided to leave the Apocrypha out of the Bible. And Martin Luther wanted to go further: there were certain books even of the New Testament that he wanted to eliminate, because they weakened his arguments for his new theology. You can still see this in traditional German Bibles today (the Martin Luther Ubersetzung is the German equivalent of the English King James) those books Luther wanted left out are grouped at the back of the New Testament, rather than in their traditional place.

Secondly is this: Either the Scriptures are divinely-inspired and authoritative, or they are not. If they are not, then they are no more reliable and important than any other ancient book of wisdom, say The Theogeny, The Avestas, or the I Ching. And as such, they are and should be subject to rational critical examination and analysis. But if they are divinely inspired and authoritative, then they are above all human criticism. In other words, if they are the Words of God, then we must judge ourselves right or wrong by them, and not them by our own judgment. And one would assume, that if God took all the care to give us the Scriptures, that he would take equal care to preserve them, and not let them be corrupted. Men, of course, have free will, and obviously corrupted versions do exist. But a loving, involved God would make sure that somewhere, there is always the true version available for those who wish to find it. And that is exactly what he has apparently done.