Textus Receptus / MT vs. Critical Text

[JohnHurt]

The Septuagint is a translation of the original Hebrew Text, and while it has been quoted by some New Testament authors, it has many errors, such as:

1. Septuagint:
Acts 15:(17) That the residue of men might seek after the Lord, and all the Gentiles, upon whom my name is called, saith the Lord, who doeth all these things.

Hebrew Text:
Amos 9:(12) That they may possess the remnant of Edom, and of all the heathen, which are called by my name, saith the LORD that doeth this.

Edom and Adam are nearly the same word. The context in Amos is about restoring Israel from the grip of Edom. Luke, the Greek writer, is apparently quoting from the Septuagint, as he may not understand Hebrew or have the Hebrew text.


2. Another example is Habakkuk 2:4:

(4) Behold, his soul which is lifted up is not upright in him: but the just shall live by his faith.

In the Septuagint, the last word in this verse is "pistis" which means "faith", but in the Hebrew text, the word is "'emuwnah", which means "faithfulness", steady, or truth, and not faith.

The correct translation is "the just shall live by being faithful."

Only in Hab 2:4 is the Hebrew word "'emuwnah" translated as "faith" in the KJV - to keep this in sync with the a fundamental doctrine taught by a very famous NT author who supported his "faith alone" doctrine with this error in the Septuagint.

A complete list of the words in the KJV translated from the Hebrew word 'emuwnah" are:

faith
Hab 2:4

faithful
Psa 119:86, Psa 119:138, Prov 28:20

faithfully
2 Ki 12:15, 2 Ki 22:7, 2 Chr 19:9, 2 Chr 31:12, 2 Chr 34:12

faithfulness
1 Sam 26:23, Psa 36:5, Psa 40:10, Psa 88:11, Psa 89:1, Psa 89:2, Psa 89:5, Psa 89:8, Psa 89:24, Psa 89:33, Psa 92:2, Psa 119:75, Psa 119:90, Psa 143:1, Isa 11:5, Isa 25:1, Lam 3:23, Hos 2:20

office
1 Chr 9:22, 1 Chr 9:26, 1 Chr 9:31, 2 Chr 31:15, 2 Chr 31:18

stability
Isa 33:6

steady
Exo 17:12

truly
Prov 12:22

truth
Deu 32:4, Psa 33:4, Psa 89:49, Psa 96:13, Psa 98:3, Psa 100:5, Psa 119:30, Prov 12:17, Isa 59:4, Jer 5:1, Jer 5:3, Jer 7:28, Jer 9:3

verily
Psa 37:3

So you can see there is a pattern here, and emuwnah does not mean "faith". The Hebrew text is correct, and the Septuagint is wrong.


3. A third notable place where the error of the Septuagint translation (and you won't like this at all...) is in Matthew 1:23:

(23) Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.

The word "virgin" in Matthew is "parthenos", which means a woman that has never known a man.

In Isaiah 7:14, in the Septuagint, the word "virgin" is also "parthenos".

But in the Hebrew text, it is 'almah, which means a "young woman". The word for "virgin" in Hebrew is bthuwlah, not almah.

And this is correct, as "Immanuel" is Isaiah's son, and the "young woman" is Isaiah's wife. (continue reading to Isaiah 8:8). Isaiah as two sons, and YHVH is telling Isaiah that before his son Immanuel can know good from evil (around 13 years old), the kings of Israel and Samaria won't be a problem to Judah.

This misuse of Isaiah 7:14 from the Septuagint is why the Ebionites, and the modern "Hebrew Roots" people do not accept the virgin birth, or even the first two chapters of Matthew as being valid.

I am still studying this, I am just passing on their arguments, such as...

The genealogy in Matt 1 does not line up with the genealogy of Luke 3 - at all. Christ comes from David's son Solomon's line in Matt 1:7, but Luke 3;31 said that Christ came from David's son Nathan. The last of the "14 generations" in Matthew 1:17 is only 13, and they average 45 years per generation, which is nearly impossible. Also, Jeconiah is cursed from ever having a son to sit on the throne of Israel in Jeremiah 22:24-30, yet he is the ancestor of Christ in Matt 1:12, which means that with this ancestor, Christ can never sit on the throne of David, as predicted in Acts 2:30, Psalms 132:11

And Christ has to be of the seed of David. If Joseph was not the actual father of Christ, then Christ is not David's son, and 2nd Samuel 7:12 and many other prophecies are incorrect.

The Ebionites (an early Christian sect) claimed that the first two chapters of Matthew had been added and that Yahshua became the "Christ" or the anointed one at His baptism, where YHVY said "Thou are my beloved Son, this day have I begotten thee". The Hebrew Roots and others believe that the words "this day have I begotten thee" were removed from the Matt 3:17 by Jerome to conform the Bible to the Nicaean Creed and uphold the Trinity. I will show proof from "Early Christian Writings" that this verse was altered in another thread.

But the Septuagint is not the "word of God" anymore than the KJV or NIV. It is a translation of an original text. And for anyone that claims to have studied "at the feet of Gamaliel" yet uses the Septuagint for his doctrines, that is laughable. The Jewish Rabbis - even today - discount the Septuagint for the many errors it contains.

[Josh]

Jesus seemed perfectly happy to quote the Septuagint in the Bible. If it was good enough for him, it’s good enough for me.

[Neto]

The Septuagint is a translation of the original Hebrew Text, and while it has been quoted by some New Testament authors, it has many errors, such as:
....
2. Another example is Habakkuk 2:4:

(4) Behold, his soul which is lifted up is not upright in him: but the just shall live by his faith.

In the Septuagint, the last word in this verse is "pistis" which means "faith", but in the Hebrew text, the word is "'emuwnah", which means "faithfulness", steady, or truth, and not faith.

The correct translation is "the just shall live by being faithful."

....

I'm more familiar with this particular textual question than some of the others you mention here, so I'll only comment on this one.

This Habakkuk reference might also be translated as "The just shall live by His faithfulness." That is, the 'faithfulness' mentioned is that of God Himself, not the person. (Not that a person's faith is not important, but this interpretation is favored by a number of commentators. And, incidentally, I think it is reflected in Paul's insistence that "salvation is by the grace of God, through the faith of the person." I understand this difference in terms of, first, emphasis on the fact that it is God who saves; and secondly, God does not carry out this primary purpose of his against the will of the person. It is also God who gives the ability to respond in faith - this is an often neglected side of "free-will".)

[Bootstrap]

The Septuagint is a translation of the original Hebrew Text,

What Hebrew text are you using? I assume it is the Westminster Leningrad Codex, from around 1,000 AD?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leningrad_Codex

Neither is "the original Hebrew text". The Septuagint is much older than these. For some books, we now have manuscripts that are almost a thousand years earlier, e.g. the Great Isaiah Scroll from the Dead Sea Scrolls:

http://dss.collections.imj.org.il/isaiah

Now that we have a lot of older Hebrew texts, textual criticism has become a real discipline for the Hebrew Bible - they have a lot of sources to compare. That wasn't true before the Dead Sea Scrolls. Scholarship really hasn't caught up with that yet.

But I think we should compare the Septuagint to the earlier scrolls, compare the earliest scrolls to each other, etc. This was not even possible until transcriptions of the older manuscripts were made available for computer analysis.

[JohnHurt]

The Septuagint is a translation of the original Hebrew Text,

What Hebrew text are you using? I assume it is the Westminster Leningrad Codex, from around 1,000 AD?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leningrad_Codex

Neither is "the original Hebrew text". The Septuagint is much older than these. For some books, we now have manuscripts that are almost a thousand years earlier, e.g. the Great Isaiah Scroll from the Dead Sea Scrolls:

http://dss.collections.imj.org.il/isaiah

Now that we have a lot of older Hebrew texts, textual criticism has become a real discipline for the Hebrew Bible - they have a lot of sources to compare. That wasn't true before the Dead Sea Scrolls. Scholarship really hasn't caught up with that yet.

But I think we should compare the Septuagint to the earlier scrolls, compare the earliest scrolls to each other, etc. This was not even possible until transcriptions of the older manuscripts were made available for computer analysis.

The Septuagint was translated from a copy of the "Tanakh", or Hebrew Bible that was available in the 3rd century BC. There were supposedly 70 or 72 translators, each tasked with different books to translate.

The source documents that were used to translate the Septuagint are as follows:

"Your guess is as good as mine".

None of these source documents exist today. You can look at the Dead Sea Scrolls, but there are differences between the DSS the Sept, and because the Sept is a translation without a known source document, we cannot prove or say the Dead Sea Scrolls are related to the Hebrew source documents used for the Sept translation. We don't know.

One argument I have against the reliability of the Septuagint is that it is a translation from Hebrew to Greek, while the Masoretic and other Hebrew texts are intended to be a "letter by letter" copy. I would consider letter by letter to be more reliable than a translation. The Sept translation could easily be flawed by someone that may not have had a perfect ability to understand both Hebrew and Greek. The beauty of our English Bible is that Wickliffe and Tyndale were often capture the "intent" of the words written in Greek and Hebrew, and put that same "intent" into the English language.

I would think it would be impossible to find 72 translators to work together on this project, with all 72 having the same ability as Wickliffe and Tyndale. There are probably some "B+" and even some "C-" students doing the Septuagint translation as "best they could" that were added to this monumental task.

All we know about them is that there were supposedly 6 people from each of the 12 tribes to make 72 translators - each given a different part to translate. So Isaiah could be perfect, and Habakkuk could have problems.

It would make more sense to get 10 of the best translators in the ancient world and let them check each other's work. A large group of 72 people, working alone without a solid "communication plan" between the working groups- is the path to bedlam. 10 Translators is probably too much, but might work.

Six translators from each of the 12 tribes? What about Dan? Did Ptolemy go to Denmark and get 6 Hebrew to Greek translators from the Danish tribes there?

What about all of the 10 lost tribes? The story of the Septuagint is that even the 10 "lost" tribes had to "cough up" 60 translators for this project. Did Ptolemy have to go to Assyria or Media/Persia to find these lost tribes, or chase the 10 Lost Tribes across the pass of Dariel through the Caucasus Mountains and into Russia and ask them to translate Hebrew to Greek? Did the 10 Lost Tribes even know Hebrew at this point? Or Greek?

This story of "6 from each tribe" does not add up. But the story does "sound good" until you think about it. But it is bogus.

We also need to consider that the Septuagint is a "government sanctioned" translation, with all of the risks that it can bring to reliability.

I understand that if you use the chronology in Genesis to calculate the date of creation, you come out with 4004 BC with the Masoretic text, and 5,120 BC with the Septuagint.

If I were trying to compare the Old Testament texts with a computer, I would drop the Septuagint, and compare the Masoretic Text to the DSS. Doing any kind of comparison with a flawed translation is a waste of time. And the computer can't match the Greek to the Hebrew, regardless.

[JohnHurt]

The Septuagint is a translation of the original Hebrew Text, and while it has been quoted by some New Testament authors, it has many errors, such as:
....
2. Another example is Habakkuk 2:4:

(4) Behold, his soul which is lifted up is not upright in him: but the just shall live by his faith.

In the Septuagint, the last word in this verse is "pistis" which means "faith", but in the Hebrew text, the word is "'emuwnah", which means "faithfulness", steady, or truth, and not faith.

The correct translation is "the just shall live by being faithful."

....

I'm more familiar with this particular textual question than some of the others you mention here, so I'll only comment on this one.

This Habakkuk reference might also be translated as "The just shall live by His faithfulness." That is, the 'faithfulness' mentioned is that of God Himself, not the person. (Not that a person's faith is not important, but this interpretation is favored by a number of commentators. And, incidentally, I think it is reflected in Paul's insistence that "salvation is by the grace of God, through the faith of the person." I understand this difference in terms of, first, emphasis on the fact that it is God who saves; and secondly, God does not carry out this primary purpose of his against the will of the person. It is also God who gives the ability to respond in faith - this is an often neglected side of "free-will".)

The "just" shall live by being faithful. If you read all of Hab 2:4, is a comparison of an ungodly man to a godly and just man:

(4) Behold, his soul which is lifted up is not upright in him: but the just shall live by his faith. (faithfulness)

Habakkuk is saying that you are "just" because of what you do, and compares that to someone that is proud that does whatever he wants - see the following verses in Habakkuk.

Flipping the "his" to "His" and making it the faithfulness of God - that also defeats the arguments of "saved by your own faith".

And there needs to be a mention of "God" somewhere in this passage to be able to flip the "his" about a man into a "His" about God.

One place that you could flip the "his" to "His" is Genesis 15:6

(6) And he believed in the LORD; and he counted it to Him (God) for righteousness.

That is, Abraham believed in promise that God had made to Abraham - that Abraham should have an heir of his own seed, and so he counted this promise of God to the righteousness of God.

Abraham did not always believe God about this promise, as in the case of the birth of Isaac, where he laughed and proposed that two old people could not possibly have a son. Gen 17:17 - yet God still kept His promise to Abraham on this matter. So God was true, even when Abraham had no faith - on this very same promise. This also destroys "faith alone".

So it is not the faith of Abraham as the reason that God keeps His promises. It is God's righteousness that He keeps His promises. That God has kept every one of His promises is to be counted to the righteousness of God, not man.

This is another verse that has been twisted to create a "faith alone" doctrine that is totally at odds with the Doctrines of Obedience that Christ and YHVH taught. Even James 2 is against this doctrine, a doctrine that was proposed by a single witness. Yet, in the mouth of 2-3 witnesses (Christ, YHVH, James), let this matter be established, and let us hope that the world will not continue to believe and follow this single witness to their own destruction.

[Bootstrap]

The Septuagint was translated from a copy of the "Tanakh", or Hebrew Bible that was available in the 3rd century BC. There were supposedly 70 or 72 translators, each tasked with different books to translate.

The source documents that were used to translate the Septuagint are as follows:

"Your guess is as good as mine".

Same as the Westminster Leningrad Codex. What textual tradition did it come from? And why do Hebrew editions of the Old Testament differ so much?

For the New Testament, we know a lot about this. For the Hebrew Bible, we know less. Whether Greek or Hebrew.

None of these source documents exist today. You can look at the Dead Sea Scrolls, but there are differences between the DSS the Sept, and because the Sept is a translation without a known source document, we cannot prove or say the Dead Sea Scrolls are related to the Hebrew source documents used for the Sept translation. We don't know.

Same for the Westminster Leningrad Codex, the Hebrew bible that most of us know.

One argument I have against the reliability of the Septuagint is that it is a translation from Hebrew to Greek, while the Masoretic and other Hebrew texts are intended to be a "letter by letter" copy. I would consider letter by letter to be more reliable than a translation.

Except that the Westminster Leningrad Codex is most certainly not a letter-by-letter copy of any known ancient Hebrew text. And it comes from 1,000 AD, which is rather late for an authoritative OT text.

If there is any ancient text that corresponds to the Hebrew text we use these days, it has been lost.

[JohnHurt]

If there is any ancient text that corresponds to the Hebrew text we use these days, it has been lost.

Probably by design. Diocletian tried to destroy every Bible text under Roman control.

One advantage the Jews had with maintaining copies of OT scripture, is that there was no centralized Jewish entity that could destroy all of the manuscripts throughout the world, and then republish them with alterations.

The opposite is true with NT Christian writings. The Easter Letter of Athanasius in 367 AD laid out the 27 books of the NT Canon, kept some books that "could be read", and banned all other books on pain of death. This created the Nag Hammadi library cache, that gave us the Gospel of Thomas, otherwise banned and lost forever.

And with a centralized authority, the Catholic church could make additions to the text with impunity, like the later Johannine Comma. Many of the earlier Catholic alterations - are just accepted as "correct" now, there are no other manuscripts for comparison that the Catholic church did not control - except for the writings of the church fathers that referenced these verses in their pristine form - some of these may have escaped censorship.

So I would have more trust for the Westminster Leningrad Codex for the OT writings, as a copy of the OT texts has always been outside the grasp of the Catholic church, and the Jews have been scattered throughout the world with their independent copies of the Tanakh - which makes alterations of the OT text harder to accomplish.

But the NT text is different.

One tool for discovery of the original NT texts is found here:
https://earlychristianwritings.com/e-catena/

In Matthew 3:17:
https://earlychristianwritings.com/e-ca ... thew3.html
we can find one reference in the Dialogue of Justin that does have "This day have I begotten thee" as part of this verse quotation.

For the Johannine Comma in 1st John 5:7-8:
https://earlychristianwritings.com/e-catena/1john5.html
You can see several of the early quotes without the addition.

[Bootstrap]

If there is any ancient text that corresponds to the Hebrew text we use these days, it has been lost.

Probably by design. Diocletian tried to destroy every Bible text under Roman control.

One advantage the Jews had with maintaining copies of OT scripture, is that there was no centralized Jewish entity that could destroy all of the manuscripts throughout the world, and then republish them with alterations.

I don't think that's what happened, though. Without a centralized authority, you get texts that differ from each other. And that's what we have. Different versions of the Hebrew Bible exist, some of them almost a thousand years later than the version you prefer, written in Hebrew. The Dead Sea Scrolls contain multiple scrolls that have different readings for the same text.

I think the situation is actually quite similar to the New Testament except for one thing: until the last century, we simply didn't have the older Hebrew manuscripts that we have now.

So I would have more trust for the Westminster Leningrad Codex for the OT writings, as a copy of the OT texts has always been outside the grasp of the Catholic church, and the Jews have been scattered throughout the world with their independent copies of the Tanakh - which makes alterations of the OT text harder to accomplish.

None of the texts I'm talking about were in the hands of the Catholic Church.

But the NT text is different.

One tool for discovery of the original NT texts is found here:
https://earlychristianwritings.com/e-catena/

That's a tool for looking at what at the writings of church fathers who quote Scripture. If you want a tool that shows the early New Testament manuscripts we have, I think this one is useful:

https://www.greekcntr.org/collation/index.htm

[JohnHurt]

I don't think that's what happened, though. Without a centralized authority, you get texts that differ from each other. And that's what we have. Different versions of the Hebrew Bible exist, some of them almost a thousand years later than the version you prefer, written in Hebrew. The Dead Sea Scrolls contain multiple scrolls that have different readings for the same text.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_H ... anuscripts

I am hoping that the differences in the OT texts are just scribal errors, or adding the glosses or marginal notes into the text - that make these versions different. If you know of any fundamental differences in these texts - that can change how we understand a doctrine, that would be interesting. Modern Judaism is the religion of the Pharisee - as the Essenes and Sadducees died out, best I understand. So did the Pharisee alter all of the OT texts to benefit their religion? That would be interesting.

If there is no motive for alteration, then we may see a single word misspelled. But if there is a real motive to alter the OT texts, then an entire verse may disappear, or be added.

The NT texts are different.

To support the doctrine of the Trinity, the Catholic church made many alterations to our Bible.

None of the texts I'm talking about were in the hands of the Catholic Church.

Yes, thankfully, at least the OT texts were somewhat outside their grip.

That's a tool for looking at what at the writings of church fathers who quote Scripture. If you want a tool that shows the early New Testament manuscripts we have, I think this one is useful:

https://www.greekcntr.org/collation/index.htm

That is a very helpful tool. Looking at 1 John 5:7-8 with this tool, some of the manuscripts are empty (and unaltered), while others are complete and have the later additions. I found the same with Matt 19:17 - another verse that has been altered to support the Trinity doctrine. Matt 19:17 has some manuscripts with much less information, others with additions - to support the Trinity doctrine in my opinion.

So that tool you have provided can help us to find the verses that were altered, or that have obvious additions.

But what we can't find out from this tool are the verses that were completely obliterated. One example is Matthew 3:17.

Using this tool:
https://earlychristianwritings.com/e-catena/
https://earlychristianwritings.com/e-ca ... thew3.html
The dialogue of Justin contains the additional phrase "This day have I begotten thee". Justin did not just "make this up". It was in the original manuscripts, but removed, for a reason:

This phrase conflicts with the "Eternal Son Doctrine" in the Nicaean creed, and was removed by Jerome shortly after 382 AD.

There was a debate between Augustine and Bishop Faustus in 382 AD. Faustus used this verse against Augustine by stating that Christ was begotten and not made before His appearance on earth. The result was that "This day have I begotten Thee" was removed from Matt 3:17 and Luke 3:22.

The debate between Augustine and Bishop Faustus can be found in Schaff's "Augustin: The Writings Against the Manicheans and Against the Donatists".

You can see it here, at the bottom of page 533: https://ccel.org/ccel/s/schaff/npnf104/ ... pnf104.pdf

The argument of Faustus against the Eternal Son doctrine is referring to "This day have I begotten thee" that was subsequently deleted from Matthew 3:17 and Luke 3:22. Here it is, with Faustus speaking:

2. I will, for the present, suppose that this person was right in saying that the son of
David was born of Mary. It still remains true, that in this whole passage of the generation
no mention is made of the Son of God till we come to the baptism; so that it is an injurious
misrepresentation on your part to speak of this writer as making the Son of God the inmate
of a womb. The writer, indeed, seems to cry out against such an idea, and in the very title
of his book to clear himself of such blasphemy, asserting that the person whose birth he
describes is the son of David, not the Son of God. And if you attend to the writer’s meaning
and purpose, you will see that what he wishes us to believe of Jesus the Son of God is not so
much that He was born of Mary, as that He became the Son of God by baptism at the river
Jordan. He tells us that the person of whom he spoke at the outset as the son of David was
baptized by John, and became the Son of God on this particular occasion, when about thirty
years old, according to Luke, when also the voice was heard saying to Him, "Thou art my
Son; this day have I begotten Thee."975 It appears from this, that what was born, as is supposed, of Mary thirty years before, was not the Son of God, but what was afterwards made
so by baptism at Jordan, that is, the new man, the same as in us when we were converted

from Gentile error, and believe in God. This doctrine may or may not agree with what you
call the Catholic faith; at all events, it is what Matthew says, if Matthew is the real author.
The words, Thou art my Son, this day I have begotten Thee, or, This is my beloved Son, in
whom I am well pleased, do not occur in connection with the story of Mary’s motherhood,
but with the putting away of sin at Jordan. This is what is written; and if you believe this
doctrine, you must be called a Matthæan, for you will no longer be a Catholic. The Catholic
doctrine is well known; and it is as unlike Matthew’s representations as it is unlike the truth.
In the words of your creed, you declare that you believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God,
who was born of the Virgin Mary. According to you, therefore, the Son of God comes from
Mary; according to Matthew, from the Jordan; while we believe Him to come from God.
Thus the doctrine of Matthew, if we are right in assigning the authorship to him, is as different
from yours as from ours; only we acknowledge that he is more cautious than you in ascribing
the being born of a woman to the son of David, and not to the Son of God. As for you, your
only alternative is to deny that those statements were made, as they appear to be, by Matthew,
or to allow that you have abandoned the faith of the apostles.

Yes, deny that those statements were made, and so Augustine and Jerome removed the offending "This day have I begotten Thee" from Matthew and Luke, but somehow overlooked Hebrews.

Hebrews 1:(5) For unto which of the angels said he at any time, Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee?

Barnabas, who wrote Hebrews, is making the case that no other person other than Christ was ever spoken to by YHVH in front of witnesses in this manner, as was the case at the time of the Baptism of Jesus.

If we rely on just Psalms 2:7, it is not evident (as much) that Jesus is the Messiah, only that these words from YHVH were about the Messiah.

But when it was spoken by YHVH at His Baptism, "This is my Beloved Son. This day have I begotten Thee", then Hebrews 5:5 also makes sense:

Hebrews 5:(5) So also Christ glorified not himself to be made an high priest; but he that said unto him, Thou art my Son, to day have I begotten thee.

This is when Christ was glorified, and made into a High Priest, at His Baptism, and not as His birth.

The Hebrew Roots people that deny the Virgin Birth (and hold that the 1st 2 chapters of Matthew were added around 120 AD) claim these verse segments in Matt 3:17 and Luke 3:22 were deleted, and so they use the unaltered verses in Matt and Luke one of their foundation arguments - that Jesus became the Christ at his Baptism, and not His birth.

And whatever we think about that, the verses in Matt and Luke were altered. "This day have I begotten Thee" was definitely removed.