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

JOEL 2 GENERATION PODCAST

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.