Episode 153: Contending for the Original (Urtext) Hebrew Old Testament

There is arguably no greater story in Biblical and Church History
that the collection, translations, canonization, and preservation
(or as you shall see the attempts to corrupt the text) of the Old
Testament Scriptures.

Everyone is the product of a "Tradition" and we will look at some
of them.

The main question that is looked at is why there are differences
between the Masoretic Text (MT) and the Septuagint (LXX) of the
Old Testament. The New Testament writers quote the LXX 80-90% of
the time and most often their quotations do NOT match what we
find in our Old Testaments. Why is that? How did the MT and the
LXX become different?

What about the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) - which contained mostly
Hebrew and some Aramaic Old Testament scrolls and fragments? They
are more than 1000 years OLDER than the extant MT manuscripts we
possess (from around 1000AD).

What you will learn is that the rabbis "attempted" to
corrupt/change/alter the Hebrew Bible by tampering with Messianic
prophecies that clearly pointed to Jesus as their Messiah. The
timing of His coming, the nature and scope of His Mission, and
even His very identity.

But thank to God's sovereignty and to the work of Textual
Criticism, we can know what the Original Old Testament Hebrew
Scriptures contained!

God preserved His Word and often did so in an unusual manner. To
think a translation into another language (i.e. the Greek
Septuagint from nearly 300 years BEFORE Christ) reveals the
original Hebrew better than the MT Hebrew text that was only
canonized around AD100 (400 years later). To think that God would
use the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls (from 1947 to 2017) to
in many cases confirm that it was the LXX that reflected the
Hebrew original Tanakh better than the existing Hebrew
Tanakh.

This evidence flies in the face of what many of us were taught in
our seminaries and Bible colleges. I for one was told that the
Masoretic Text (MT) that my Old Testament was based upon (I was
using the NASB) was meticulously preserved and copied. The memo I
got was that I could "trust" my Old Testament and that because it
was translated from the MT, it was as closer to the original
Hebrew than any other textual tradition could provide.

This is simply a MYTH. The Septuagint and the Dead Sea Scrolls
end up "correcting" the MT text in many places where the actual
text of the Hebrew was modified by Rabbi Akiba and others between
AD90-AD110 - close to 100 years AFTER Christ. To think we would
trust unbelieving rabbis who rejected Jesus as their Messiah who
were doing all they could to stop the growing Christian movement!
And in this podcast, I provide a number of actual examples of
where they altered and changed their Hebrew Bible from its
original.

Thankfully, God has preserved for us the Old Testament. And for
the first time in history, a critical text of the Hebrew Old
Testament is being worked on. It is called The Hebrew Bible: A
Critical Edition (HBCE) which so far only has the book of
Proverbs completed. We have had a critical text of our Greek New
Testament now for more than 150 years. By comparing ALL of the
extant Greek manuscripts, it has been estimated that we can know
we have the text of the original New Testament to an accuracy of
99.5%. A critical text of the Old Testament will accomplish the
same thing. Thankfully today, we have many Old Testament
translations - like the ESV and NET that incorporate the LXX and
the DSS and when they "correct" the MT, they will render the
English accordingly.