Christian Publishing House Blog
Apologetic Defense of the faith, the Bible, and Christianity
Surveys the biblical manuscripts found in the caves around Qumran. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Judaean Desert has in many ways revolutionized the study of the Hebrew Scriptures as well as recent understanding of the Bible and canon.
MT “and the boy was a boy” LXX “and the boy was with them” VG “the boy was yet an infant” The ESV reads "And the child was young." (NASB, LEB, CSB similar) The UASV has "And the boy was a boy."
"Most Hebrew manuscripts have “he went into the city” in place of “she went into the city,” which is the reading supported by the Syr., Vg., and other Hebrew manuscripts." - Rick Brannan and Israel Loken.
There are many textual variants in the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament. What are textual variants? And how well do our modern translations inform their readers about these variants?
The Masoretic Text (MT) is or primary text and should be abandoned only when the weightiest evidence stands against it. Genesis 38:25 would be an example of this.
Papyrus Fouad 266 is a copy of the Pentateuch in the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible known as the Septuagint. It is a papyrus manuscript in scroll form. The manuscript has been assigned palaeographically to the second or the first-century B.C.E.
At the end of the second century, there were (at least) four competing Greek versions of the OT. Origen, one of the most important theologians in the Eastern church, was born in Alexandria, Egypt, and was active in the middle of the third century CE. Aware of differences between the Greek and Hebrew texts, he set out to bring order and understanding to the confusing array of competing textual witnesses and to produce an edition that would account for those variations.
The earliest MS evidence available for the OT text is also the most recently discovered. Since 1947 thousands of fragments of MSS, both biblical and nonbiblical, have come to light in the Dead Sea region.
The Masoretes were groups of Jewish scribe-scholars who worked between the 6th and 10th centuries CE, based primarily in early medieval Palestine in the cities of Tiberias and Jerusalem, as well as in Iraq.
The Masoretic Text[a] (MT or 𝕸) is the authoritative Hebrew and Aramaic text of the 24 books of Tanakh for Rabbinic Judaism.
It was primarily copied, edited and distributed by a group of Jews known as the Masoretes between the 7th and 10th centuries of the Common Era (CE). It is the text behind all of our Bible translations.
Respecting the text of the Hebrew Scriptures, scholar W. H. Green observed: “It may be safely said that no other work of antiquity has been so accurately transmitted.” (Archaeology and Bible History, by J. P. Free, 1964, p. 5) This statement is even more true today.