Reliable Transmission of the Old Testament(Mainstream Apologetics)

Reliable Transmission of the Old Testament

Claim ID: BIB-IS13

Claim: Reliable Transmission of the Old Testament

Summary: The veracity of the Old Testament is found in the skillful and meticulous care of the Scribes, Masoretes and Essenes, verified by the Dead Sea Scrolls. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls provided scholars with Old Testament texts that predated 69 AD, the date the scrolls were hidden.

Description: The Old Testament was written from BC 1400-400. It was written in Hebrew and Aramaic and passed down from generation to generation of Jewish people, who from the time of their writing, accepted them as the authentic and inspired Word of God.

During the time of the Old Testament, the responsibility of copying the texts of the Old Testament was given to scribes. The Jewish scribes knew they were not handling just any set of writings. They approached their work with the diligence and passion of an important calling.

There were rules for copying the texts of Scripture and they knew they were handling the words of God himself as they were copying. The work of the scribes and the Masoretes who succeeded them ensured that the Old Testament texts were preserved to perfection. The Jewish scribes and Masoretes were some of the best educated and highest paid people. They continued their work up until the time of Jesus and continued even after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD until around 1000 AD.

The veracity of the Old Testament is found in the skillful and meticulous care of the Scribes, Masoretes and Essenes, verified by the Dead Sea Scrolls. The integrity of the Old Testament was established primarily by the fidelity of the transmission process.

The reliable transmission of the Old Testament is evidenced by the following facts:

Jewish Scribe and Masoretic Methodologies were Unerring - The methodologies used by the scribes and Masoretes contained the necessary checks and balances to ensure that the Old Testament was copied accurately [BIB-EV06]. They were reverent and careful in their duties. Those who worked with the text had a sense of its divine origin and treated it with the utmost respect.
Death Sea Scrolls Demonstrate Proficiency of the Scribes' Methodology - The Dead Sea Scrolls are powerful evidence of how accurately the Bible was transmitted. The Dead Sea Scrolls were hidden in caves in 69 AD and written sometime earlier (e.g. Book of Isaiah). This predates the oldest Masoretic copy of the Old Testament written in 1000 AD by a thousand or more years! This demonstrates the proficiency of the scribes' methodology [HIS-EV49].
Greek Septuagint Demonstrates Proficiency of Scribes' Methodology - Scholars are in general agreement that the Septuagint provides a reasonably accurate record of the Masoretic text accounting for the semantic nuances of translation from Hebrew to Greek [BIB-EV92].

When the Masoretic copies of the Old Testament are compared with the Dead Sea Scrolls, scholars found that the 5% variations in text are due primarily to orthographic errors. These errors were likely introduced prior to the production of the Masoretic Text of 600 AD.

"Even though the two copies of Isaiah discovered in Qumran Cave 1 near the Dead Sea in 1947 were a thousand years earlier than the oldest dated manuscript previously known (980 AD), they proved to be word-for-word identical with our standard Hebrew Bible in more than 95 percent of the text. The 5 percent variation consisted chiefly of obvious slips of the pen and variations in spelling."
Gleason Archer, Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties (Zondervan, 1982, 2001)

"The Qumran Biblical documents cover the whole Hebrew Bible with the exception of the book of Esther, and are about one thousand years older than the most ancient codices previously extant. With this newly discovered material at their disposal, experts concerned with the study of the text and transmission of the scriptures are now able to achieve far greater accuracy in their deductions and can trace the process by which the text of the Bible obtained its final shape. Moreover, they are in position to prove that it has remained virtually unchanged for the last two thousand years."
cited by Missler, Chuck., The Bible: An Extraterrestrial Message (Coeur d'Alene, ID: Koinonia House Inc.) 1996. p 9.

The timeline of Old Testament autographs and manuscripts is presented in Figure 1. This timeline compares the periods for which the Jewish scribes and Masoretes copied Old Testament texts.

Click on Image to Enlarge
Figure 1:
Old Testament Manuscript Timeline

Figure 1 also depicts in ORANGE the comparison of the oldest extant Masoretic Text (1000 AD) with the text of the Dead Sea Scrolls (69 AD), and the Masoretic Text with the oldest extant Septuagint (400 AD). Because of the proficiency of both the Jewish methodologies (69-600 AD) and Masoretic methodologies (600-1000 AD), we assume that the same proficiencies were used by earlier Jewish scribes from the time of the original autographs (BC 1400-400) until the time of the Dead Sea (69 AD).

Resources:

Bible Query from NT Manuscripts (REF-QRY01)

New Testament Manuscripts (REF-RFS01)