In practical terms, the lesson for us is; let's get away from this mythical notion
that we have to have one specific text, and that one text is more important,
more sacred than all of the other texts of the Bible.
No, it's not.
What we know as the Masoretic Text really comes from about 100 AD.
So that's after the Second Temple period. There's no one Masoretic Text.
What happened in 100 AD. Again, I actually did this in a Q&A,
I think after the first session, we had a question where I had to get into this.
Around 100 AD the Jewish community had some hard decisions to make.
The early church had begun,
and the Christians which was, I mean, they had a lot of Gentiles in there.
They used the Septuagint because everybody could read it. It was in Greek.
And some of the readings of the Septuagint, some of them, were very conducive
to what Jesus had taught or points of Christian theology.
They provided good launching points of argumentation
against the Jewish rejection of Jesus as Messiah.
So the Septuagint became a really powerful witnessing tool, if you want to call it that.
And so the Jewish community thought, “you know what we need to do?
We need to circle the wagons here. We need to produce,
in our little group here, our Jewish community here in Jerusalem,
we need to produce one Hebrew Bible
that we will devote ourselves to copying from here to eternity,
and that will become our Bible.
We are going to outlaw the use of the Septuagint in our communities.
If a text, a Hebrew text reflects what the Septuagint has,
it is going to be rejected and dismissed."
That might sound sinister, but look, they're trying to preserve their faith.
Okay, this is what they're doing.
So this is kind of a normal thing that you would do.
They also throw the Two Powers teaching in there, which we haven't gotten to yet.
But if you follow my content or have read Unseen Realm already, you know what that is;
that God as man in the Old Testament
and how that prepares people for the message of Jesus is God as man.
That used to be part of Jewish theology.
Two Yahwehs; one invisible and transcendent, the other one visible as a man
in the Old Testament.
So they simultaneously rejected the Septuagint,
created their own version of the Masoretic Text,
or that will become known as the Masoretic Text
They created their own version of the Hebrew Bible,
which became known as the Masoretic Text because the Masoretes (the scribes),
would copy that from now on.
And they declared the Two Powers idea to be heresy.
They actually declared part of their own theology to be off-limits and heretical.
So this all happened at about the same time
and the result of that effort is what we know is the Masoretic Text.
So the one that has the 1000 AD date on it
is in the line of copies from that decision in 100 AD.
Now, a good number of Dead Sea Scrolls align with that, which is not a surprise.
But they don't all align completely.
When the rabbis made this decision in 100 AD
there were people around the world, in the Jewish community that said,
“well, I'm not doing that. I kind of like the Bible I have.
You know, I like this reading over here, that now this bunch of rabbis in Jerusalem
says we can't say that anymore. I like this, the way this verse is."
And they kept using it.
They kept using it in their synagogues. They didn't all just sort of throw out their scrolls
and say, "Okay, well, as soon as you got one copy, we can go back to business here."
And we know this is true because of scholars, and I have Aptowitzer's name here.
Aptowitzer was a German scholar who studied quotations of the Hebrew Bible
by the rabbis in their preaching,
a lot of that stuff was preserved, it was written down.
And so he went through that material looking for
wherever they quoted their Old Testament.
And then he wanted to know; does what they're quoting
match the 100 AD official Masoretic Text or not?
And a lot of times it didn't.
So it showed that there were other 99.9% Masoretic texts out there
that nobody was in lockstep here.
So there is no one text that comes like from the days of David,
all the way up to... that is a myth. Okay? It's a demonstrable myth.
And frankly you don't need it because when Jesus and the apostles
are going around preaching, they quote from Hebrew Bible,
about a quarter of the time,
and the rest of the time they from the Septuagint.
A few times they probably just translate out of their head.
But it all carries the weight of the Word of God.
They're tethering, what they teach to the Word of God.
And they don't care to stop and say, “oh wait, I better get this quotation right
so that it aligns with this one text preserved for all...”
No, nobody's thinking that because it's not real.
You know, you can witness to someone today, and quote them John 3:16,
and it may not be exactly like the one in the Bible in your lap,
but you know what? It's the Word of God, and God's going to use it.
So we need to dispense with this mythological thinking
that we have about the transmission of the Bible.
And just say, “look, all of these things, all these English translations,
all these ancient translations, they were the Word of God.
That's how they were cited, that's the way they carried.
It reflected the teaching and the mind of God that we have in Scripture.
There is no need to get every quotation right
or to quote from one specific edition.
No need at all. You know, if Jesus didn't care, why should you? Honestly.
So Aptowitzer, this is just a quote from an article about his work;
"there's still evidence of numerous variants to the Masoretic text (MT),
including variants which are preserved in rabbinic literature.
Viktor Aptowitzer collected variants of the biblical books of Samuel, Joshua and Judges
from the Midrashim and Talmudim,
and he mentions D. Andrew Teeter's study in Scribal Laws
lays a solid foundation for further studies on rabbinic variants in Hebrew Scripts."
There's still people doing this. Aptowitzer's work is actually I think, in four volumes,
is the footnote, you probably can't even see it on the screen, but I put it in there.
It's in German, but four volumes, he collected four volumes worth of variants,
you know, from these biblical books. Now, that's a lot of material.
And I know Andrew Teeter. Yeah, he teaches at Harvard Divinity School now.
And again, he's continued in this work.
You know, and with all due respect,
this is the kind of thing that scholars like to think about and read about.
In practical terms, the lesson for us is; let's get away from this mythical notion
that we have to have one specific text, and that one text is more important,
more sacred than all of the other texts of the Bible.
No, it's not.
And that, again, is an important thing to realize that even in antiquity,
they didn't think this way.