Sources for the Old Testament

Then what was the point of your hit-and-run "you don't have the ability to understand these complex issues" post?
I'm echoing how complex the insistence on "scriptures" is, particularly apart from the church. It proves the Orthodox point, basically. The more you study it the more you realize how open the framework can be if you don't have the Church to guide you, like it guided the Ethiopian eunuch who as earnest, reading out loud.

The problem with human beings and "religion" in general is that most people devolved to simpleton understanding so as to get rid of the complexities of life. They'd rather have a manageable box for God and a manuscript that just tells you what to do (Islam, nation of Islam, protestants rejecting "traditions") is far more palatable. The grand desire for people to justify themselves is in this, as well as those who want "security" of "salvation" etc. These are all far more ego related than anyone wants to admit, and are actually base/natural man inclinations for any human - they are in many ways a worldly survival tactic. Interesting thing to think about.
 
They'd rather have a manageable box for God and a manuscript that just tells you what to do (Islam, nation of Islam, protestants rejecting "traditions") is far more palatable. The grand desire for people to justify themselves is in this, as well as those who want "security" of "salvation" etc.
We were talking about liberal theories about the Scriptures that would discredit the Christian doctrine of God. You don't need to join the Orthodox church to see that they have no substantive evidence for their claims. You seem to be more interested in thinly-veiled Prot bashing. As for people wanting security or assurance of salvation, I'll give you points for being honest that the Orthodox church can't and won't offer that to people.
 
As for people wanting security or assurance of salvation,
We don't have to go on and on about this, but do you think it's "assured"? Or one can know even levels of this? It seems like an illogical point, but we've talked a bit on it.
We were talking about liberal theories about the Scriptures that would discredit the Christian doctrine of God.
What was the most outstanding to you that "discredits" God?
 
What was the most outstanding to you that "discredits" God?
The idea that Elohim and Yahweh refer to separate deities and the Scriptures were retroactively edited by the Yahwists to syncretize them into one deity. The assertion is that monotheism is a further development in the religion.
 
The assertion is that monotheism is a further development in the religion.
Ok. Do you recognize that 2nd temple jews and people of the ancient world did have a framework for many "gods" it's just that only one is over all the others (He defeats them, the others are actually demons, etc).
 
Ok. Do you recognize that 2nd temple jews and people of the ancient world did have a framework for many "gods" it's just that only one is over all the others (He defeats them, the others are actually demons, etc).
Yes, I've read the New Testament. This doesn't have anything to do with YHWH vs Elohim as separate deities.
 
The idea that Elohim and Yahweh refer to separate deities and the Scriptures were retroactively edited by the Yahwists to syncretize them into one deity. The assertion is that monotheism is a further development in the religion.
I don’t think they saw Yahweh and Elohim as separate deities, but it refers to source materials when they refer to the Elohimist, Yahwist, and Priestly source materials. The idea of Jehovah (a mispelling of Yahweh) and Elohim being two gods sounds more like a Mormon view. I think it was the three groups (E, Y, P) had different theologies, but they believed in the same deity.
 
I don’t think they saw Yahweh and Elohim as separate deities, but it refers to source materials when they refer to the Elohimist, Yahwist, and Priestly source materials. The idea of Jehovah (a mispelling of Yahweh) and Elohim being two gods sounds more like a Mormon view. I think it was the three groups (E, Y, P) had different theologies, but they believed in the same deity.
It depends on who's version of the JEDP Theory you're going with.

There are proponents who do say that they were indeed separate deities: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Early_History_of_God

This article is a good answer for why the JEDP Theory should be rejected entirely: https://www.gotquestions.org/JEDP-theory.html

Bottom line, there is no external evidence for it. There is no manuscript evidence that these were separate deities, it does not come up in Jewish or Christian history. It's really nothing more than reading too much into God having multiple names.
 
It's really nothing more than reading too much into God having multiple names.

Pretty eloquently put. Although, primary sources are inevitably going to be scarce for a document as old as an Old Testament, so, a great deal of speculation - "reading too much into X" - is perhaps inevitable. And if it was just artistic or academic speculation... but we're experiencing politically charged speculation, with atheists trying to "disprove God" and Jews/Muslims trying to find "evidence" against Trinitarian understanding, since it does not conform to their own principles of "strong monotheism".
 
If I recall the opinion of a Bible translator I recently read the Dead Sea Scrolls are evidence of the Septuagint being more widely used.
Considering that Greek was the lingua franca of the time, it is highly likely that the Septuagint was more widespread. Most of the New Testament citations of the Old Testament are from the Septuagint. The operative word there is 'most'. The Apostles would sometimes cite the Hebrew Old Testament as well.

I believe that the Apostles cited from the Septuagint primarily to better communicate to the churches, which were majority gentile converts. I believe the Apostles themselves were raised on the Hebrew.

Not sure how the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves would be evidence that the Septuagint was more widely used. What I do know is that copies of the Septuagint were found in the same Qumran Caves as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

At the scholarly level, preference is given to the Hebrew over the Septuagint because the Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew and because the Dead Sea Scrolls are the oldest copies of the Old Testament. The Masoretic Text, though not perfect, is considered to be a very well preserved copy of the Old Testament and is still the starting point for Old Testament Textual Criticism.

The Septuagint was translated by Alexandrian Jews who had largely forgotten how to speak Hebrew and became hellenized. Some fundamentalist Jews had a disdain for the Septuagint over this. As for the center of the Jewish religion, the Second Temple, the Hebrew Old Testament was more prevalent. This is not insignificant, since the Jews living in Israel would make a trip to the Temple once a year for Yom Kippurim.

I sometimes read the Septuagint when reading the Old Testament. I believe I found a section in Revelation that alludes to the Septuagint's version of Zechariah. It can be very interesting to see the connections if you are familiar with both.
 
The Apostles would sometimes cite the Hebrew Old Testament as well.
Where?
The Masoretic Text, though not perfect, is considered to be a very well preserved copy of the Old Testament and is still the starting point for Old Testament Textual Criticism.
As I mentioned before, it changed. This is in accordance with Christian doctrine and proof that the Masoretic Text was (intentionally) corrupted, which is why they changed it - to make obvious messianic references null and void (proven by Qumran). Isaiah is this way and the psalms as well. That's why it's so weird for a Christian to act like the Masoretic Text is legit.
 
As I mentioned before, it changed. This is in accordance with Christian doctrine and proof that the Masoretic Text was (intentionally) corrupted, which is why they changed it - to make obvious messianic references null and void (proven by Qumran). Isaiah is this way and the psalms as well. That's why it's so weird for a Christian to act like the Masoretic Text is legit.
You've already been corrected on this in the other thread and are still pushing fake news. That's what's weird.

Certain fundamentalist Baptists take a King James Only approach. Historically, Catholics took a Latin Vulgate Only approach (although they grew out of it). Now we have Orthobros going Septuagint Only, which is what Blade Runner is arguing for here.

Here is the prophecy of the Virgin Birth in Isaiah. Show me where this text was "intentionally corrupted" sir:


You guys really need to start checking your sources.
 
You've already been corrected on this in the other thread and are still pushing fake news. That's what's weird.

Certain fundamentalist Baptists take a King James Only approach. Historically, Catholics took a Latin Vulgate Only approach (although they grew out of it). Now we have Orthobros going Septuagint Only, which is what Blade Runner is arguing for here.

Here is the prophecy of the Virgin Birth in Isaiah. Show me where this text was "intentionally corrupted" sir:


You guys really need to start checking your sources.

The Septuagint predates them, the Christian understanding has ALWAYS been the perpetual virginity of Mary, it is also tranlsated as virgin there. What in the world point do you think you are making? The Jews make the claim that the woman referred to is not a virgin, contradicting Christian doctrine.

What's more, Psalm 22 has a change in the text, which is about the Lord our God being pierced in his side, not "like a Lion" another proven forgery.

It is known. You are siding with the pharisaical/rabbinical jews, and for the Christian, this is anathema.
 
The Septuagint predates them
False. The Dead Sea Scrolls are the oldest copy of the Old Testament, not just in the original language, but period. Trying to get revisionists like yourself to recognize that the Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew and not Greek is like pulling teeth.

the Christian understanding has ALWAYS been the perpetual virginity of Mary
Also false. That Mary was a virgin when she birthed Jesus is true. The man-made doctrine of her being a perpetual virgin is a later innovation by the cult of Mary which first comes up in non-canonical Gnostic texts like the Protoevangelium of James.

You are siding with the pharisaical/rabbinical jews, and for the Christian, this is anathema.
I'm not going to fall into your Jew/Christian false dialectic. When you promote easily refutable points in favor of your doggedly fundamentalist position, you make Christians as a whole look bad.

Thankfully, none of your anathemas are backed up by Scripture.
 
I haven't found the text, I may not be recalling correctly.
But I learned about a recent Septuagint translation funded by the (secular) Spanish government. Reading the prologue it seems they follow the Urtext theory

Beyond the translation of the Pentateuch, in books like Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Job, or Proverbs, the differences are even greater. It can be observed that the Jewish community was not unaware of these differences between the Hebrew Bible of Jerusalem and the Greek Bible of Alexandria, and that problems arose, hyperbolically speaking, from the day after the translation. From the Greek fragments of Qumran and other pre-Christian papyri, we know that very early on there were attempts to correct the Greek to improve the translation, adapting it to the ongoing Hebrew text. Papyrus Fouad 266 (1st century BC), which contains fragments of Greek Genesis, and Papyrus Rylands 458 (first half of the 2nd century BC, meaning only a century after the translation of the Pentateuch), with fragments of Greek Deuteronomy, already present a revised text.
The most important evidence of this correction process towards the Hebrew text is found in the Greek fragments of the Twelve Prophets (50 BC- 50 AD) discovered in 1952 in Nahal Hever (near Qumran), published and interpreted by D. Barthélemy in the influential monograph Les Devanciers d'Aquila (Leiden 1963). These fragments confirmed that later Jewish translators, Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion, had been preceded by a process of revisions of the Greek Bible to adapt it to the proto-Masoretic consonantal Hebrew text that the rabbis would define as the standard text at the end of the 1st century AD. The revisions of the Septuagint did not only go in this direction; in parallel, the text was also subjected to a revision to improve the literary style and eliminate the Semitisms inherent in the Greek translation, which were foreign to the ears of Greek speakers. (...)

However, the discoveries at Qumran starting in 1948 and their subsequent publication at the end of the 20th century have brought about a revolution in the history of the biblical text. In Qumran, fragments of the Greek Bible have been found in caves 4 and 7. But what has been most surprising are the discoveries of Hebrew texts, such as those of Samuel (4QSama,b,c) and some of Jeremiah (4QJerb,d), which coincide or are closer to the base text used by the Greek translators than to the proto-Masoretic text. These data have contributed to re-evaluating the Septuagint text and to giving a huge boost to studies of the Greek version. Indeed, it has been shown that the differences between the Greek and Hebrew texts could not simply be attributed to the incompetence of the translators or the translation techniques they employed; in many cases, they were translating from a Hebrew text different from the standardized one, which has only been partially recovered by chance among the Qumran documents. Thus, the problem of the plural and distinct Bibles is no longer limited to the differences between the Hebrew and Greek Bibles, but this pluralism extends back to the primitive stage of the Hebrew text in the three centuries preceding the turn of the era. The Septuagint constitutes a first-rate instrument for understanding this textual pluralism and therefore occupies, along with Qumran, the forefront of the debate on the history of the biblical text today(...)

But it was not the texts themselves that divided Jews and Christians, for, as has been said, Christianity is the only religion born with a book in its cradle, the Hebrew Bible translated into Greek or the Old Testament. From a historical perspective, it is surprising that Jews and Christians, using the same texts, arrived at such different results that crystallized into two distinct religions: normative Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity. The key to deciphering this enigma lies not so much in the texts they handled as in the different interpretations or readings they made of them. The authors of the New Testament began to interpret the Hebrew Bible, especially the Psalms and the Prophets, in light of the events (life, death, and resurrection) of Jesus of Nazareth. The Septuagint served as an intermediary and in most cases was the key to the new Christian interpretation. The mosaic of Septuagint citations and especially its multiple echoes influenced the drafting of the New Testament writings. The differing hermeneutics of the texts led to the bifurcation of paths, to the first Judeo-Christian polemics, and ultimately to the rupture between the two religions. The Septuagint would also be the Bible of the early Christians and the Church Fathers and would contribute decisively to shaping the theological language of Christian thought(...)

In the centuries preceding the turn of the era, a list of authorized books existed. The most cited, both in the Qumran community and in the New Testament, are the Pentateuch, Psalms, and Isaiah, but the Qumran community probably also admitted the books of Enoch and Jubilees, meaning a broader list than that admitted in the Hebrew canon of Judaism. In Qumran, a textual pluralism also coexisted, i.e., Hebrew texts different from the proto-Masoretic text that would be standardized at the end of the 1st century CE by the rabbis. In this era, the boundaries between biblical and parabiblical texts were not yet defined, and some of the books that would later be accepted as authoritative and included in the canon fluctuated. This is why publications such as The Qumran Bible or new editions and translations into modern languages of the Apocryphal and Pseudepigraphic Writings of the Old Testament, also called Intertestamental Writings, have recently been appearing. All these publications expand our knowledge of Second Temple Judaism, the literary framework in which it developed, and illuminate the climate of cultural effervescence around the turn of the era in which both normative Judaism and Christianity were born. Within this literary and socio-religious horizon, the Greek translation of the Bible must be situated as a bridge between the plural Hebrew Bible of Qumran and the writings of the New Testament and early Christians.
 
False. The Dead Sea Scrolls are the oldest copy of the Old Testament, not just in the original language, but period. Trying to get revisionists like yourself to recognize that the Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew and not Greek is like pulling teeth.
Your video brought up the Masoretic, Isaiah, and Septuagint texts. The Septuagint predates those, that was the point. Every point I have made here, which you've tried to rebut (Septuagint is correct and the jews changed the masoretic text) is true. You also didn't counter the fact that they changed Psalm 22, because that is also a slam dunk that they lied about the texts, and that's a messianic prophecy confirming Christ, which makes me wonder if you can even be honest since that's the point of Christianity.
Also false. That Mary was a virgin when she birthed Jesus is true. The man-made doctrine of her being a perpetual virgin is a later innovation by the cult of Mary which first comes up in non-canonical Gnostic texts like the Protoevangelium of James.
What's the basis for you claiming this? Nothing. Of course, I have one, which is the point. Including the fact that every single early christian community has this, and always has had this, opinion. Shamoun talks about this and it was (one of the reasons) why he no longer believes the bad teachings of Calvinism.
I'm not going to fall into your Jew/Christian false dialectic. When you promote easily refutable points in favor of your doggedly fundamentalist position, you make Christians as a whole look bad.
You support lying jews who changed texts and claim to be a Christian. This is beyond bizarre.
 
@Blade Runner There is a difference between making a claim and substantiating a claim. Just because you claim something does not mean it's true. When you make a claim, you are supposed to substantiate it with evidence. If you refuse to substantiate your claims with evidence, in this case because you can't, then you are not worth interacting with because you are wasting people's time. If you are debating someone and refuse to interact with their evidence by handwaving their evidence away with more unsubstantiated claims, then do not expect people to take you seriously. People will realize you do not arrive at your conclusions through logic. This is clear in the Bitcoin thread, other threads, and now here.

You've made a string of false claims, haven't backed them up with any evidence, just rhetoric. Why should I continue to provide you evidence when you refuse to provide any? Instead, you come at me with buzzwords like weird, bizarre, like a liberal trying to shame me into believing falsehood. It's not going to work.

What's the basis for claiming this? Nothing.
Show me anywhere in the first century where any Christian writer referred to Mary as Aiparthenos, whether in the Bible or outside the Bible. Prove to me that the first documented reference to Mary as Aiparthenos was not in the Protoevangelium of James. If not, then the charge stands. If "every single early Christian community believed this," as you claim, then it should be easy to provide this evidence.

The Septuagint predates those, that was the point.
Prove it. The Hebrew Old Testament is far older than the Septuagint by virtue of the Septuagint being a translation of Hebrew copies. Show me the evidence that the complete copies of the Septuagint that we use are older than the Dead Sea Scrolls. If you try to shift the goal post by saying that fragments of the Septuagint are older, then provide evidence that they are older than the oldest Hebrew Old Testament fragments that we have. You won't be able to, but humor us by trying.

You also didn't counter the fact that they changed Psalm 22, because that is also a slam dunk that they lied about the texts, and that's a messianic prophecy confirming Christ, which makes me wonder if you can even be honest since that's the point of Christianity.
I'm not going to interact with your claims until you've interacted with my evidence. When you've done your due diligence, I will happily address this claim as well.
 
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