לתשובת המינים

Textually Problematic

Christian apologists speak very highly about the integrity of the Hebrew Scriptures textual transmission:

The original Bible manuscripts (called autographs) were written on material such as papyrus, which deteriorated quickly. Consequently, scribes were needed to copy and recopy the Old Testament books letter by letter. These copyists knew they were duplicating God’s Word, so they went to incredible lengths to prevent error from creeping into their work. The whole process of recopying the Bible was controlled by strict religious rituals, and the scribes carefully counted every line, word, syllable, and letter to ensure accuracy. As a result of their diligence, the Old Testament in our Bible today is virtually identical to the autographs. Bible scholars have demonstrated this by comparing ancient copies of the Bible with more recent copies. For example, prior to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts in 1947, the oldest existing (extant) Old Testament manuscript was the Masoretic Text, dated around A.D. 900. But the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, fragments of almost every book in the Old Testament were found, many of them dating back to around 150 B.C. a thousand years earlier. One of the most important manuscript discoveries was two copies of Isaiah. So far they are the oldest known copies of any complete book of the Bible. What did textual critics discover when they compared the Dead Sea manuscripts of Isaiah with the Isaiah preserved in the Masoretic Text dated a thousand years later? Old Testament scholar Gleason Archer provides the answer: “Even though the two copies of Isaiah discovered in Qumran Cave 1 near the Dead Sea in 1947 were a thousand years earlier than the oldest dated manuscript previously known (A.D. 980), they proved to be word for word identical with our standard Hebrew Bible in more than 95% of the text. The 5 percent of variation consisted chiefly of obvious slips of the pin and variations in spelling.”¹

While typically insisting that there are no significant variations between Hebrew Manuscripts (a position I’m inclined to agree with) their tune changes somewhat when it comes to certain “Messianic Prophecies” (or certain quotations of the T’nakh in the Christian Bible) apologists will appeal to variant readings found in the Septuagint (LXX, an early Greek translation), the Targums (Jewish translations into Aramaic), or now the Dead Sea Scrolls. While the variations may be minor in content, they take on great significance for Christians since their “Messianic Prophecies” are dependant upon those variants (though I would argue in many or most cases their point is not established even with the variations).

I am not a textual critic and it is beyond the scope of our discussion to go into the details of textual criticism. It suffices to say that I believe that the integrity of the mainstream transmission of the Hebrew Bible, represented by the Masoretic text, is to be preferred over textual traditions that may be early but whose fidelity in transmission hasn’t been likewise attested to. Nevertheless, I think that most would agree that it makes little sense to establish significant doctrines or concepts on textual variants which are otherwise unsourced.

¹ Defending Your Faith, page 35.