techstepgenr8tion wrote:
AngelRho wrote:
StuffedMarshmallow wrote:
I think part of the reason it may be so confusing is it has been translated from language to language over a long period of time.
Actually, that's not quite accurate. Most often then Bible has not been translated "from language to language." There are quite a number of ancient manuscripts out there from the original Hebrew, and the oldest surviving copies of individual books from the New Testament (in Greek) date back as early as the 100s. Most translations that I'm aware of didn't follow some labyrinthine progression from Hebrew-Greek-Latin-German-English-modern English. The most reliable translations are from the oldest known manuscripts directly into modern language.
Didn't the Dead Sea Scrolls or some other cache of documents yield a copy of a lot of the Old Testament books from 2nd century BC? I remember it being noted that they had a copy of Isaiah from that period, held it up against the current, and it checked out so close that they didn't need to update or append the newer versions.
Bingo. I mean, there are always going to be SOME variants--which prompts me to ask why the variations were written (agenda driven? An ancient heretical cult?). But for the most part the Old Testament remains the best attested ancient text.
There's evidence, of course, of different versions of Hebrew texts in use even in the 1st century based on New Testament writings. Those versions, I'm assuming possibly a Hebrew-Greek translation LIKE the LXX but perhaps not the LXX we have, seem to have disappeared over time, and we're very fortunate that the Masoretic and LXX were copied as meticulously as they were prior to modern printing methods.
18 Dec 2013, 6:39 am
