Part 1:
One of the greatest Biblical scholars of the last century was the late Professor David Flusser of Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He spent his lifetime studying the Synoptic Gospels. As a result he gained an intimate knowledge of the life and times of his Jewish brother Yeshua (Jesus).
As part of his scholarship he became very familiar with not only the Gospels relationship to the Tanakh (that is, the Hebrew Bible, called the ‘Old Testament’ by Christians), but with the writings of Jewish scholars from the ‘inter-testamental’ period (approximately 500 BCE to 50 CE) and the many documents found in the Qumran caves between 1947 & 1956 (known as the Dead Sea Scrolls).
Flusser and his many ‘disciples’; scholars such as Robert Lindsey, David Bivin, Roy Blizzard have written many papers and books highlighting that the New Testatment (NT) is full of semitic syntax, vocabulary, idioms, and thought patterns.
They argue most pervasively, and with much evidence that:
- Hebrew was the primary spoken and written medium of the majority of the Jews in Israel during the time of Yeshua;
- Yeshua therefore did most if not all of his teaching in Hebrew;
- That the original accounts of Jesus' life were composed in Hebrew (as one might conclude anyway from early church history);
- That the Greek gospels which have come down to us represent a third or fourth stage in the written transmission of accounts of the life of Yeshua;
- That Luke was the first gospel written, not Mark;
- That the key to understanding many of the difficult or even apparently unintelligible passages in the Gospels is to be found, not primarily in a better understanding of Greek, but in retroversion to and translation of the Hebrew behind the Greek (made possible by the often transparently literalistic translation methods of the Greek translators).
From all of these factors, Professor Flusser became convinced that the majority of the NT, and especially the Gospels, were first written in Hebrew and when quoting from the Tanach, they did not quote from the Septuagint (which is the generally accepted wisdom of today), but from Hebrew scrolls.
Given that the Hebrew Bible was first written in Hebrew, well before the Septuagint (LXX) translation of the Pentateuch was begun in the 3rd century BCE; that the authors of the NT were Hebrew with the exception of Luke (a prosleytized Gentile); that they primarily spoke Hebrew, and specifically used Hebrew in the Temple and synagogues; it seems highly probable that in composing a Hebrew NT, a Hebrew commentary on the life and times of a Hebrew ‘annointed one’ (Messiah Yeshua), that they would quote from Hebrew scriptures not Greek translations thereof.
Before going into some of the details and supporting evidence for this claim, let us examine one of the great many examples that clearly led Flusser and his ‘disciples’ to this conclusion.
Consider Luke 4:16-19
“And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up. And as was his custom, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and he stood up to read. And the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written,
‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.’”[1]
The evidence is now well established that Hebrew scrolls would have been read in the synagogues in Yeshua's day and that Hebrew was still the commonly spoken language (esp. in regard to biblical matters).
Thus, when Yeshua read from Isaiah 61, he would clearly have read something very similar to the Isaiah scroll found at Qumran[2]. This scroll is quite incredible. It is a complete scroll of Isaiah and is now the oldest version of Isaiah in existence (dated at around 100 BCE). When scholars studied this Hebrew scroll they found it to be virtually identical to the next oldest in existence, the Masoretic Hebrew Isaiah scroll from around 700 - 1000 CE.
Thus, we can confidently consider that Yeshua’s quote would have been identical or very near to identical to the Great Isaiah scroll of Qumran and the Masoretic Isaiah of 700 CE.
Below is an English literal translation of the Great Isaiah scroll chapter 61:1-2:
“The spirit of the LORD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, and to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives, and release from darkness for the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favour, …”[3]
Almost all NT translations though appear though to quote from the LXX here and instead have something very similar to the ESV:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.
The Septuagint in English (Sir Lancelot C.L. Brenton 1851) has:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me; he has sent me to preach glad tidings to the poor, to heal the broken in heart, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind; to declare the acceptable year of the Lord,”
Luke was a proselyte and follower of Yeshua. If, as Flusser argues so effectively (especially in his book, ‘Jesus’), Luke first wrote in Hebrew then he would have quoted Isaiah 61 correctly, and not used the LXX!
Given that almost every version we have today of Luke appears to use either a LXX version[4] or parts therefore mixed with some other early manuscripts we may not be able to ascertain, this is very strong evidence for the deliberate introduction of the LXX base to the NT.
Which leads us to argue that:
The Septuagint (LXX) was not the primary translation or version of the TaNaK (OT) quoted in the New Testament.
But it gets worse:
There are many examples where there is strong evidence that the LXX has been altered over the last 2000 years to conform to popular translations of the NT.
One such glaring example is Romans 3: 13-18. This passage has a great many problems as outlined in some depth in an article by Frank Selch, ‘The Enigma of Romans 3’[5]. Frank is able to show quite conclusively that the verses of Romans 3:13-18 were written back into the LXX in the early Christian centuries.
Thus we are confronted with the very challenging discovery that:
The Septuagint has been seriously tainted even to the point of redaction (re-editing) so as to agree with many NT mis-translations (i.e. translations that agreed with neither the Hebrew versions of the Tanakh or the earlier versions of the LXX.)
What follows is an attempt to expand upon this argument and provide convincing evidence of its veracity, as well as analysing the impact of this apparently deliberate distortion and mis-appropriation of scripture.
Once established, it is then important to see what doctrinal beliefs have been introduced and supported by this faulty understanding and application, as well as what alternative articles of faith should instead be acknowledged and promoted. These questions and issues we would argue are very serious and foundational to both our individual and corporate lives and to the momentous events of the approaching ‘last days’.
To be continued …..
[1] Yeshua read from Isaiah 61
[2] Known now as the Great Isaiah Scroll.
[3] The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible by Martin Abegg Jr., Peter Flint & Eugene Ulrich (1999) p 372
[4] Firstly, the evidence has surfaced that the Septuagint has been edited over the last 1700+ years so as to match the translations into Greek of the NT and so appear to support this contention (the original Septuagint – a Greek translation of the Torah only, the 5 books of Moses, was written by Hellenistic Jewish scholars somewhere between 280 and 164 BCE).
[5] Unpublished August 2011
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