The Dead Sea Scrolls could help you out. They confirm what was in the original manuscripts.
Good try Steve. The Dead Sea Scrolls did contain the book of Isaiah which had not been changed except for 3 letters. However, it also contained other books....
Before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest known manuscripts of the Old Testament dated from 895 A.D., a fact that raised significant questions about the integrity of the Masoretic text. Since tradition assigned the authorship of some Old Testament books to writers who lived as long ago as the 15th century B.C., faith in Bible inerrancy required one to believe that uninspired scribes had somehow copied these books for more than 2,000 years without infusing significant error into the texts. That being too much for some to accept, the inerrancy doctrine lost a lot of followers. Liberal minded Christians began to think of the Bible as a sacred book whose ideas had been divinely inspired but not necessarily the very words, not even the words in the long defunct "original autographs" that inerrancy spokesmen like to talk about.
With the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, believers in the inerrancy doctrine thought they had found cause to rejoice. In Cave One at Qumran was found a manuscript of the book of Isaiah containing all 66 chapters except for only a few words that were missing where edges of the scroll had crumbled. Although many spelling variations were found in the text, the content of the Qumran scroll was found to be remarkably parallel to the Masoretic text of 895 A. D. Translators of the Revised Standard Version in 1952 found only 13 textual differences in the manuscript that they considered important enough to affect their translation of Isaiah. When scholars dated the manuscript at circa 100 B.C., Bible fundamentalists believed they had found in the Qumran text of Isaiah indisputable proof that through the long, silent centuries Jewish scribes had been scrupulously faithful in transmitting their sacred books. After all, if a thousand years had brought no significant changes to the text of Isaiah, couldn't we believe that the same was true of the other Old Testament books?
This would make an impressive argument were it not for subsequent discoveries that were made at Qumran, which Bible inerrantists have been very reluctant to talk about. In commenting on these other discoveries, Joseph A. Fitzmyer, professor emeritus of New Testament at The Catholic University of America, dashed cold water onto the hopes of those who had hastily concluded too much from the Qumran text of Isaiah:
In Cave 4, 157 fragmentary biblical texts were retrieved, among which is every book of the Hebrew canon, save Esther (and Nehemiah, which at that time was considered as one book with Ezra). Eventually, these Cave 4 fragments revealed a different story about the copying and transmission of Old Testament writings. In some cases, especially 1-2 Samuel, Jeremiah, and Exodus, the fragments brought to light forms or recensions of biblical books that differed from the medieval Masoretic tradition. For instance, one text turned out to be a shorter Hebrew form of Jeremiah, previously known only in its Greek version in the Septuagint. It now seems that the fuller form of Masoretic tradition represents a Palestinian rewording of the book. Another from Cave 4, written in paleo-Hebrew script and dated from the early second century B.C., contains the repetitious expanded form of Exodus previously known only in Samaritan writings, ("The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Bible: After Forty Years," America, October 31, 1987, p. 302, emphasis added).
This "different story" told by the discoveries in Cave Four at Qumran is a story that Bible inerrantists have been conspicuously silent about, probably because it puts to rest all notions of scrupulously meticulous ancient scribes who counted all the letters in the copies they made to be sure that no mistakes had occurred. The Cave Four discoveries tell us that mistakes were not only made but that textual changes were also made with probable deliberation.
A single article can't review all parts of the "different story" told by the Cave Four discoveries, but an analysis of the Jeremiah manuscript will be sufficient to refute the claim that we can be reasonably sure the present day text of the Bible is essentially the same as what was in the "original autographs." Scholars had long known before the Cave Four discoveries at Qumran that the Masoretic text of Jeremiah differed substantially from the Greek version found in the Septuagint. Some sections of the Masoretic text were missing entirely from the Septuagint, and other sections were organized differently. Jeremiah 27:19-22; 33:14-26; 39:3-14; and 48: 45-47 are sections in the Masoretic and various English texts that were not in the Septuagint version. The organizational restructuring is too complex to discuss in detail, but some thirty changes in organization have been identified in the Septuagint version. Chapter 25:15-38 of the Masoretic text appears as chapter 32 in the Septuagint, 27:1-19 is chapter 34, 33:1-14 is chapter 40, and so on through more than thirty other changes in organization.
To explain the problem posed by these variations in the Septuagint version of Jeremiah, proponents of the inerrancy doctrine once attributed the deviations from the Masoretic text to poor translation, but after the discoveries in Cave Four, this "explanation" became hard, if not impossible, to defend. Work on the Septuagint version began in Alexandria around 285 B.C., and the Jeremiah manuscript found at Qumran, like the Isaiah scroll, was dated in the early second century B. C. Since the Qumran text of Jeremiah was parallel in content and organization to the Septuagint version, here was tangible evidence that at one time, for at least two centuries, a shorter, differently arranged version of the book existed. Hence, variations from the Masoretic text in the Septuagint version of Jeremiah resulted not from careless translation but from a radically different Hebrew text that the translators had before them. More interested in scholarship than the defense of pet theories, Fitzmyer said this about the Cave Four discoveries:
Such ancient recensional forms of Old Testament books bear witness to an unsuspected textual diversity that once existed; these texts merit far greater study and attention than they have been accorded till now. Thus, the differences in the Septuagint are no longer considered the result of a poor or endentious attempt to translate the Hebrew into the Greek; rather they testify to a different pre-Christian form of the Hebrew text, (Ibid., p. 302, emphasis added).
Because of the damage these facts inflict on the inerrancy doctrine, Bible fundamentalists will, of course, resist the obvious conclusion that they lead to, but until the inerrantists can produce a Masoretic copy of Jeremiah that antedates the Septuagint, they will find it hard to defend their claim that the Bible text we now have is essentially the same as what was written in the "original autographs."
Steve, there's more. Much more.
Peace be unto You,
Norris |
