The Septuagint — Near Eastern History

0:37 Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast. I am Corey J. Mahler. And I'm still Wo. Today's Stone Choir is episode one hundred. This in many ways will be the culmination of everything that we've been doing for the last couple of years. This is the first of a four, probably five-part series on the Septuagint. And if you happen to have been sent this episode is the first one you should listen to, I'm gonna ask you to stop right here and go back and listen to the previous episode. Number ninety-nine that we did called the context window. The episode that we recorded a couple weeks ago at episode ninety-nine is effectively my introduction to this episode, wherein we lay out some of the premises for the approach that we're going to take as

1:27 we make this argument. And And while the content of that episode is not Septuagint specific, yet is very much specific to how we think, how we process things. And basically the point I make in that episode that Corey and I make is that we're going to cover so much ground here over the next few episodes as we explain what the Septuagint is and is not, what scripture is and is not, and what we as a church have been doing versus what we should have been doing. There's There's going to be so much ground that we cover that no one can possibly keep it all in your head. And that's not because anybody's stupid. I can't keep it all in my head. We've been working on this for sixteen months. I've probably spent close to a thousand hours, at least eight hundred

2:07 hours of study and preparation and Just getting ready to be able to explain this stuff. I don't say that to impress anyone, it's just that what we're going to present is a tiny condensed version of the amount of stuff that there is to say about these things. And so it's perfectly fine that you're not going to be able to keep it all straight as we're delivering it to you orally. The purpose of the last episode 99, what I'm going to reiterate here, is is one of the crucial things that you need to do as you're listening to this and the subsequent episodes on the Septuagint. As we're going along, as you're listening, every time you hear us say something that makes you mad or confused because you heard

2:49 something somewhere else, and we can't possibly be right because some other guy said something. That's fine. Please pause. I do sincerely mean this. Pause playback, get out a pen and paper or fire up notes or whatever on your computer, and jot down a note to yourself to remember exactly what bothers you. Whatever it is that we're not accounting for, whatever it is that we've just said that contradicts what you know to be absolutely true, write it down, and then to the best of your ability, put it out of your mind. I say both of these things in parallel because we don't want to brainwash you. We're not trying to trick anybody, but if you get wound up 10 minutes into the episode because you were positive that we have

3:30 to be wrong because of something that you heard some guy say once, or something that you studied a lot. And so we have to be wrong. Okay, that's fine. We can be wrong later. Write down the reasons that we're wrong and then let us make the rest of the argument. That's the only plea. Not for anyone to just believe what we say. I don't want you to believe what we say as we always tell people. If you believe anything, is don't just automatically believe what some idiot podcaster tells you. This stuff is history. The structure of these four episodes are going to be the first one is going to cover essentially from the time of Abraham. We'll see how far we get into the post-temple history. Probably do at least the first century.

4:12 We may get all the way through the creation of the Masoretic text itself. We'll split that up for time as things go. The second historical episode that we're going to be doing of the four is going to cover essentially wherever we stop in this one, probably somewhere around the creation of the Masoretic text, up through today. But most of it is going to be focused on the years from one thousand to fifteen, sixteen hundred AD. 'Cause that's the history that we think of when we're thinking about the church. Whether you're Roman Catholic or you're some flavor a Protestant, or you're Lutheran, you say you're not a Protestant, or you're some magical third thing. Or you're Eastern Orthodox, if you're still listening.

4:48 All of us have vested interests coming out of the second millennium. All these decisions that have been made, and we have books written down by men that we revere and that we've trusted, we're going to say some things that make it necessary to conclude that somewhere along the way, all those guys made one or more mistakes. And so you're going to get mad when we say something. I don't care who you are, you're going to get mad at something we say. Good. Write it down and then just to the best of your ability, put it out of your mind so that we can make the rest of the argument. And then once we're done making the argument, I want you to go back to your notes and see hopefully and one of two things will have happened in most cases for whatever you wrote down.

5:26 Either we'll have addressed your concerns directly by demonstrating what the error was where the confusion was, or we will have demonstrated the the thing that you were objecting to turns out not to even be relevant. In a lot of cases that's probably going to be the case as well. And then there'll be some things that you just flat out think were wrong or tart or whatever. That's fine. You'll have your notes, you're not going to freeze. We're gonna be going for uh probably at least twelve hours over the next few episodes. So you can't possibly fit that all in your mind. Please take notes when you get mad so that you don't have to stay mad to to hang on to whatever you objection you have. It's always really easy to cling to your point when you're

6:04 fired up about it. Get fired up momentarily and then write it down, set it aside, and let us cook. And then we're done. If it's garbage, you don't have to you can just send the plate back. That's fine. But if you get mad five minutes in, you're not going to hear anything we say, and it's going to be a waste of our time. And more importantly, to you, a waste of your time to have listened. The very simple, essential point that we're going to be laying out over these four episodes is this. The Septuagint, which is the Greek Old Testament, is the scripture of Jesus, it is the scripture of the apostles, it is the scripture of the early church. This is trivially demonstrable from history. It's not what most of us have been taught because we have

6:50 been raised in the effectively the 21st century mode of thought where everything has to come from and through the Jews. And so a lot of what we're going to be talking about is going to be withdrawing what we think we know about Christianity away from that frame. The first two episodes will be historical. The second two episodes, the third is going to be entirely about the Old Testament itself, showing the places where the Septuagint and what is typically called the Masoretic text, it's effectively the only Hebrew source that we have today. there's basically a single copy that's used as the basis for virtually every Bible. It's a thousand years old. That's one thousand, not three thousand. So we're going to devote an entire episode just contrasting what is

7:41 in the third and fourth century copies of the Greek Old Testament with the 10th century Hebrew Old Testament. We'll show all the examples, or not all. As we learn through this, it's not like there's just three or four proof texts that are Christological on nature where, yeah, something was changed. Maybe it was a little bit better. and even in the cases where virtually every Bible you've ever looked at is going to have been based on the Masoretic text on the Hebrew, they will still prefer the Septuagint rendering, which is to say they'll ignore what the Hebrew says and they'll use the Septuagint renderings in English because it's Christian. And the only way to make the Old Testament Christian in a

8:18 couple places is to ignore what's in the Hebrew Bible. That's in your Bibles today, and we'll show some of those examples. And then the fourth episode is going to be entirely about the New Testament, where we will demonstrate that virtually every quotation of the Old Testament of what Jesus and the apostles call scripture, what they call breathed out by God, is the Septuagint. Either it's in no way, shape, or form different than the Hebrew, or it is exclusively derived from the Greek Septuagint text and cannot possibly be a direct quotation of the Hebrew. And so in that fourth episode, we'll demonstrate clearly that our thesis statement is undeniably true. The Septuagint was the only Bible they had.

9:00 They hadn't written the New Testament yet. So whenever they talked about Scripture, they were exclusively talking about the Greek Old Testament. And so the basic point of all of this, all this time we're going to spend is that if the Septuagint was the Bible of Jesus and the Apostles and the early church, it must be the Bible of every Christian in every time and place. So we're going to go through the history to explain why we lost track of that. How did that cease to be? Because it's undeniably true that that's not the case anymore. Very few people believe that. And most people are already angry that we're even saying that because that's crazy. That's you know, Luther said this and Galvin said that and Pope

9:35 whatever said the other thing. That can't be true. So we're gonna lay out in this episode and the next one the history of how we got here. Because if you don't understand the history of the story of the creation of the Septuagint in a context where Hebrew had been exterminated by God, and then the abandonment of the Greek Septuagint by the church over the course of many centuries, you want to understand what happened in the second millennium when the Reformation era and the churches leading up to that, effectively Rome and the East, what were they doing that led to the point that when the Reformation came about, they just completely rejected the Septuagint and said, okay, we're Hebrew only from here on out.

10:19 That That was a radical change during the Reformation. And we're going to tackle that head on because that's going to anger everybody. So we have to deal with that pretty much in its own episode. The last point that I want to make that's crucial as you are listening to this. God has miraculously preserved his word throughout all time. This is true regardless of what Bible you have in your house. There's some Bible translations that are so bad they would make me weep, like they shouldn't exist. And yet, if that's the only Bible that you have in your house and it's for everyone you have access to, God will work through that even in its befuddled state to create and preserve faith. This is the miraculous nature of God's word.

11:04 God's word itself is efficacious. We've said in the past, particularly in the Reformation episode, we have a very remarkably ecumenical audience. We have Roman Catholics, all manner of Protestants, even a few Eastern Orthodox still sticking around. The one thing that all of our listeners have in common, despite all the historical deviations and in some cases radical doctrinal differences. The one thing anyone listening who's not a hate listener agrees with is that scripture is breathed out by God and Scripture judges whose doctrine is true and whose whose doctrine is false. And so when we have disagreements about doctrine, at least in principle, it's not going to be on the basis of I don't care

11:48 what God says, I'm gonna do what I want. Even if, you know, when we're arguing, we would say, well, that's effectively what you're doing. Most one of us is right about those doctrinal quibbles. One of the things I want to make clear about this Septuagint episode, everything that we're saying here would be true and necessary, even if the Greek and the Hebrew were identical. If the only thing that had happened was a perfect word-for-word translation from one language to another, that would be sufficient. We would still be bound by God to use the Greek because it's what Jesus and the apostles received and it's what the early church accepted. That's not the case. It's in fact much worse than that.

12:25 But we're not looking at this from the perspective of picking and choosing which text we prefer That's a danger that we all have. And in just a minute, we're going to define what a translation is and is not for the purposes of this argument. But we are not saying, oh, well, I like this Greek version better, so I think that's a better Bible. Our argument for the Greek is explicitly and strictly limited to the historical context. And the New Testament itself attests to what we are saying. The New Testament attests and proves that the Septuagint is the Bible of Jesus and the Apostles. And history proves that the early church never thought otherwise. Until the fourth century, the late fourth century, it was never even

13:08 a question that anyone would look anywhere else. So that's going to be a big part of the historical revelation today. That's not a revelation in the sense that it's new information. It's just it's things most people haven't heard. But it's all history when we are giving our opinions about stuff, it's gonna be very clear it's our opinion. We're dealing almost exclusively in facts here. But your Bible is not going to meet some of the tests that we're laying out. That's okay. I don't have any Septuagint based Bibles in my house. I'm not the least bit worried about it. When I read the Bible, including when I read the Old Testament, if I'm just reading, I'll just read. Lately I tend to read the Septuagint more online, mostly out of

13:47 curiosity to see if I'm gonna pick up on differences, but also it's just God's word. As I said, and I want to reiterate this. I don't want anyone to get angry at their Bibles and say my Bible's crap because it's not the Septuagint. God willing, in a few years we're going to have a new translation. By we, I mean the church, I mean Christianity at large. There's nothing be a stone choir translation of anything. In part because so many people hate us. It'd be completely tainted and everyone would think we're trying to create some form of cult. That's something that James White and some others are very adamantly pushing now to defame us. So for that reason, even though there wouldn't be anything wrong with

14:25 us being involved, we would not. I think if we do a fifth episode of this, it's going to specifically lay out what we think the rules need to be for a faithful Greek only translation of scripture. Because it's clear that we need a new one. If for no other reason, incidentally, than one of the earliest episodes that we did on paywalling God, we made the point that a copyright encumbered Bible is wicked per se. You cannot paywall God and say, you have to give me money before I'll give you God's word in a language you can speak. Translations today are just that. It's translated in the vernacular so that you can understand it. So we simply need a new proper normal English, I don't say modern because that's such a tainted word, but a book that is

15:08 free from anachronisms and strange words that no one knows, something you can hand to any fluent English reader, and they can read it just without any help, without any oral tradition whatsoever. It's gonna be a big part of this story. That doesn't exist today. The out of copyright Bibles, all of them have some issues, even apart from the fact that they're not based on the Septuagint, with the exception of Brenton's that has his archaic language. Brenton's is basically the King James except based on the Septuagint mostly. So there are no good Septuagint options either. There's nothing be a link in the show notes to say, well, here's the exact Bible you need to buy and it's gonna solve all these problems.

15:46 The Bible that we would say yes, this is one we would recommend anyone doesn't exist yet. In the second episode of listener feedback that we did some time ago now, we spent the first hour talking about our approach to what Bible should I read? And none of that advice has changed, except that we'll be saying, you know, hopefully in a few years there's going to be a Septeruit-based Bible with both the Old and New Testaments retranslated from all the Greek, that will not have the problems that exist in many of the modern translations. But that's not going to be a stone choir project. Someone also have to take that on. Hopefully with our blessing, I would love to see something we would actually be happy with.

16:26 But I think that by the end of this series, great many of you are going to realize that that needs to exist. And yet it doesn't exist today and that's okay. If you die, God forbid or God willing, God permitting, before a new Septuagint translation exists, you're gonna go to heaven with a version you have that's based on the Masoretic text. Keep saying that as we go throughout this, because none of this should undermine our faith in what we have, but we should yearn for that which God intended to transmit to us. And if there's a better version, we're gonna be talking about versions here. We have to be very careful. None of this is about pursuing what fickle tastes people have. As I said, it's not about trying to find some version that

17:12 I like better or that you would prefer because it makes some point that you want to make. I frequently find that when I want to make points from the Old Testament, when I go to the Septuagint, probably in about a third of cases, the point that I thought I could make just kind of vanishes. It's not some huge point, but some small theological point that I thought was going to be there. I just find it's not there. I find something else. And that's not a cause for concern. It's just the fact that okay, we're dealing with something different. Over the next few weeks we're going to be talking about why the Septuagint is different from any other translation you've ever heard of, why the early church first used it and then later abandoned

17:52 it, and then by the Reformation, why did we completely reject it? What was the basis for those decisions? And one last point that I want to reiterate from the previous episode: when we say that these men in history made mistakes, we are not calling them stupid, we are not calling them faithless. As I said in that episode, they were smart guys. They were incredibly good at what they were doing. They were trying to be faithful. Overwhelmingly. I wasn't gonna devote his life to translation and all these things unless he truly cares. Even if we have disagreements about doctrine, I can't fault the faithfulness, especially for those men like Tyndale who went to their deaths fighting for this stuff.

18:32 They were not fools, they were not faithless. What we're going to lay out, and the reason for the episode that we did recently on the context window is that if early on in this story of the Septuagint, there was a decision that went one way instead of the other in the church. And that decision has knock on effects a thousand years later. Those men who are subject to the knock on effects are going to go in a different direction. And that's precisely what we see as we look through the entire history, when we start looking at Christian engagement and then disengagement with the Septuagint, what we see is long planted decisions, very seemingly minor decisions that later on had profound effects.

19:12 But at the time it didn't like a big deal. And yet it's only in the fullness of time that you realize, wow, that one small detail that was, you know, a thousand, fifteen hundred years before some other detail, actually made all the difference. Because when the guy who was trying to do his very best made his decision and he didn't question that given from however long ago, his decision was influenced by that. And that's what all this is about. What are our influences? Are they going to be the scripture that Jesus quoted or are they going to be something else? So when we use the word translation in this context, we want to make sure that you understand specifically what it is we mean by translation, what a translation is.

19:56 Undoubtedly, most of you listening, probably all of you listening, have books on your shelves that are translations from some other language. Whatever it happens to be. I have a number on my shelves, I have some diglots, which is multiple languages, one being a translation of the other. That is a different thing from what we mean when we say that the Septuagint is a translation. This is for a number of reasons. One we are going to contend as the church has long believed, that the Septuagint is inspired. There is a difference between an inspired translation and a mere translation. I have, for instance, a translation of Gata on my shelves. That's not inspired. It may very well be accurate, and it is indeed accurate.

20:48 It is true to the underlying, the original German text, but it is not the same as being inspired. When we are dealing with the Septuagint, what we are dealing with is a translation of God's Word that is inspired by God. It is entirely faithful. It is God's Word. That is ultimately the point that we're making. The Septuagint is the Old Testament. In fact, we will be making the point the Masoretic is not. And so that's what we mean when we say translation, because there is an older text to which we no longer have access, that God used at some point in the past to help with the transmission of his word notably not just that written text, the oral tradition that accompanied it was also necessary.

21:40 I'll get into that more in a minute here. But that existed in the past. We do not have it. It no longer exists. God caused his word to be translated into the Greek, and that is what he has preserved. That is his word. He promised to preserve his word and he did so, but he did so in the Greek. A few preliminary points before we get into the history proper just to frame things and give you a sort of foundation upon which to build the rest of the content in these episodes, particularly the first two. There are a number of different systems that you can use for writing a language. We are speaking English. We are accustomed to an alphabet in which we use letters. The The letters do not really have any meaning.

22:30 They are symbols that represent things when they are connected to each other, except for obviously in the instance of words that comprise one letter or comprised of one letter, A, I, things like that. That's not the case for all languages. So for instance, you have Chinese, in which the character actually means a word or it means a concept. The same thing is true for Japanese, although Japanese also has symbols that represent syllables instead of concepts. We're talking about logograms and syllabograms. Hebrew uses what is called an objod. An objod, unlike our alphabet or certain other systems of writing, is a writing system that writes down only consonants. The vowels are not included. Now that may not seem that important until you start thinking about

23:28 how much of our language is comprised of vowels. This varies across languages. English is 40-ish percent vowel, German is slightly less than that, some languages are significantly more, Hawaiian for instance. Hebrew is somewhere between thirty and forty percent vowel. Now that of course is modern Hebrew, which is close enough for our purposes when talking about consonants and vowels notably not when talking about mutual intelligibility, but when talking about consonant versus vowel ratio, it's close enough. If you take away 30 to 40 percent of a language, how comprehensible does that language remain? The answer is not very The answer is certainly not sufficient for the Word of God, from which nothing will be lost.

24:24 God promised that it will be preserved. Having an abjad is not sufficient for preservation, without the oral tradition that accompanied it with Old Testament Israel. You see, it is the oral tradition that God used to fulfil his promise of the preservation of his word, because he had the priests. He spoke directly with the people of Israel. It was preserved not just according to the portion of it that was written, because not all of it was written, again, no vowels. It was preserved because the oral tradition came alongside it and helped to preserve it. You can think of it in modern terms perhaps as the written portion being a sort of shorthand, or cliff notes perhaps, not quite cliffnotes, but it gives you the basic idea.

25:14 And then the oral tradition is what gives you the fullness of it. If you have an inspired oral tradition, if you have a priestly caste instituted and preserved by God, that can communicate directly with God, that's possible, that's something that can be done. God can certainly do that, and that it's exactly what we see in the Old Testament. But God destroyed the temple and destroyed the priestly caste, destroyed Old Testament Israel, did not preserve the Old Testament in some written form, some new form of Hebrew that actually writes down the vowels, as we will come to see the Masoretes did, but that is developed long after this period. And so how did God preserve his word? Because you have this giant gap in terms of the inspired Hebrew

26:07 to which we no longer have access, the written plus the oral tradition, and the creation of the Masoretic text. Well the way that God preserved it is by having it translated into Greek, which does in fact write down its vowels, does in fact have a fully written form of the language. Ancient Hebrew and some forms of Arabic do not have a truly written form of the language because they don't write down the whole language. You have to know what is written in order to understand what is written. There are some obvious shortcomings there. You could look at by way of contrast, the father language, as it were, the ultimate father language of the Shemitic languages, which would be Akkadian, is the oldest Shemitic language of which we're aware.

26:58 It was written in cuneiform, which uses logograms and syllabograms the same as modern Japanese, for instance. And so the entirety of that language is written in a way that you can read it and understand it, assuming that you know ancient Akkadian, which chances are you probably don't, very few men do. But essentially what we have is descended from this other Shemitic languages that use a degenerated form of writing that does not write down the fullness of the language. This leads into an important point that virtually everyone misses when reading the Old Testament because it's simply not taught when it when it very well should be, if you were to take a modern so-called Hebrew Bible and hand it to Adam, he would not be able

27:48 to read it. He didn't speak Hebrew. Hebrew did not exist yet. If you were to hand it to Job, he would not be able to read it. The script didn't exist yet, and that form of Hebrew didn't exist yet. If you were to hand it to Abram, or Abraham, whichever name you want to use, he would not be able to read it, because he did not speak Hebrew. It did not exist yet. In fact, he was from Ur of the Chaldeans, which spoke a version of Akkadian, so that he knew. He eventually came to know some version of perhaps Proto Hebrew, a Canaanite language when he was sojourning But he did not speak the Hebrew so-called that we use today in the Masoretic text. And in fact, the alphabet, as we have pointed out, that is

28:40 used for modern Hebrew, is in fact Aramaic, it is in fact Babylonian, it is not Hebrew, it is a different alphabet. So if you took what we are told is the Old Testament in Hebrew, and handed it to these men who supposedly should be able to understand this, as it is taught in so many churches, not one of them would know what you had handed them. It would be as incomprehensible to them as handing Chinese would be to me, I don't know how to read any Chinese. Not any, some very tiny amount. It would be essentially incomprehensible to me. That is the same thing you would be doing with these men in the Old Testament. Because think about what we know of the relatively short story, as it were, in Genesis about the Tower of Babel.

29:29 They had one language in the same words. You don't see this division into language families, one of which is shemitic, coming from Akkadian essentially. You don't see that happening until God comes down and confuses their language and disperses them. Hebrew doesn't exist before then, not even in a proto-form. Neither incidentally do any of the other languages that we speak today. I know that I've joked that the original language was something related to German, but it's not, because we see Proto-Indo-European or whatever the ancestor language was occurring here at the Tower of Babel. And so it's important to bear these things in mind as we go through the history of the Hebrew language and the transmission of

30:16 Scripture. Because if you don't have these in mind, you're going to have a false sense of what actually happens in the Old Testament, of what God tells us about the history of all mankind. Because of course the Old Testament is not just about Old Testament Israel. It's not just about the Jews. Because incidentally, the men I mentioned weren't Jews. Adam was not a Jew. Abram was not a Jew. Job was not a Jew. Noah was not a Jew. This is the history of mankind that is contained in the Old Testament. And if we narrow this focus down to Old Testament Israel, then we miss the reality, the fullness of what God is telling us, and we're going to come away with false interpretations, which is part of what led into the ability of Satan to take this

31:09 construct that we call Hebrew and shoehorn it into the church and push out the Greek, and basically replace the word of God with a counterfeit. Now again, as Woe said in his introduction, and as I'm going to emphasize here, and we will repeat a number of times: by the grace of God, He preserved His Word even through the Masoretic text. It is not perfect, of course, because the one that actually was preserved by God in the way that he promised is the Greek. But he did not allow the Masoretes to tamper with his word to the point where it is so corrupted it is no longer the word of God. There is such a thing as an imperfect translation. An imperfect translation is not necessarily useless. It's not even necessarily harmful.

32:07 You can be a Christian, you can have a true and living faith that believes in the true things of God by having the Masoretic text as your Old Testament, translated obviously into a language you understand. Most of My Bibles have the Masoretic text as the underlying text of the Old Testament. Not all. I have several Septuagint on my shelves. I have the Lexum, I have the Brenton, I have various other documents. But for those who listen to the Daily Devotions podcast, for instance, you'll note that I am still reading from the ESV. Despite the research we've done, despite all the things we've read, despite the arguments we're going to make in these episodes, I am still reading from a translation of scripture that has the Masoretic text underlying

32:55 it as the Old Testament. I don't think that reading translations done from the Masoretic text is a bad thing because you are still reading the Word of God in translation. What we are arguing is that the preserved Word of God, the divinely inspired translation of Scripture that is accessible to the church today, and upon which the church, the New Testament Church in the New Testament era, was founded. The text that it used to grow and spread the Word of God, that text is the Septuagint, it is the Greek. It is not the Hebrew, because at this point the Hebrew didn't even exist, which is the history that we will be going through for the balance of this episode. I just like to briefly hearken back to the apostasy episode we did

33:48 January twenty twenty four. One of the things that we talked about at length was King Josiah. In I think 2 Kings 22, it describes the discovery of scripture in the temple. They had not only misplaced it, but they forgot it existed. And this had been the case for long enough that there was demon worship going on inside God's temple and all around. And King Josiah was a part of it. And when they found Scripture and they brought it to him, and he heard it, he tore his cloaks, and he was horrified. He repented immediately, because he believed in God, even though scripture was gone. Because some of the word we don't know what was preserved orally. We don't know what was preserved tradition wise.

34:35 There was obviously not enough preserved of Christianity for King Josiah not to know better than to be worshiping demons. And yet when he realized that that's what he'd been doing, he was instantly cut to the quick. And so this is a circumstance in scripture, in both the Masoretic and the Septuagint, they'd say basically the same thing about this story. God for a time permitted scripture to be lost among his people because they were faithless. They were so faithless, not only did they misplace the Bible, they forgot it existed. They weren't looking for it. It wasn't lost like you lose your keys. That's the analogy I make in the apostasy episode. It was so lost that they didn't know that it was gone.

35:16 We're in much better shape today, because although we've lost the Greek Old Testament that Jesus used, what we're using is pretty close. And so on one hand, like we're threading a needle here that's incredibly difficult. On one hand, we have to emphasize that faithfulness to God's word is paramount. And in a few years, God willing when there is a faithful translation exclusively of Greek, I will change my tune and say this is what we should be using. Not because it's new and shiny, but because it's old and faithful. That should be the bar for any translation in any era. But until such time we're gonna do the best we can, even knowing that it's imperfect. And it's one of these cases where it's almost impossible to discuss things

36:07 in terms of degrees of sinfulness, because what do you even say? What do you say when you realize, as I have and as Corey has, and as you will, that we've been using a text that is not actually exactly what God breathed out. It's not what Jesus used. And so in those episodes where we deal specifically with the text, we'll make that case in at length, especially in the fourth episode. We're not saving him for any particular reason other than we're working through this in chronological order. But it's just crucial to emphasize how disruptive the idea of all of this is. That's why I'm glad that this turned out to be our 100th episode. This is a huge deal. We're not just talking about a translation.

36:49 But at the same time, we also have the deal with the status quo ante. Right now, all my Bibles are based on something that I think should never have existed in the first place. I'm not going to burn all my Bibles today, I'm not going to curse them and hate them, and you shouldn't either. God has worked through the word even when men have messed with it. Just as in Josiah's day God worked through whatever it was the priests were preaching. It couldn't have been that great, but there was still something about the true God, such that God recognized Josiah's faithfulness And preserved him and blessed his reign. And it didn't fall apart again until he died and his son took over. So I hope that this isn't received as a mixed message.

37:30 It's just really complicated. And that was also part of the reason we did episode ninety nine talking about trying to take all this in. It's gonna seem if you're just cherry picking that we're talking out of both sides of our mouth. Because how can the Septuagint matter if Corey's still reading from the ESV. Isn't that hypocritical? We're gonna try to make the case is no it's not. But the crucial point is that we have several thousand years of wrong decisions to unwind, and until such time as those decisions have been unwound, we're going to be stuck in a position where we don't have everything perfect. This is essentially the state that Luther was in at the beginning of the Reformation. When he actually read the original Greek, Galatians, and Romans, he realized

38:15 something that he hadn't seen previously, and he repented just as Josiah repented. And then when he told other guys, hey, look what I found, they're tried to kill him. They threw him out of the church, they excommunicated him. It was a huge deal. It was far more disruptive than he had intended, because he just wanted to say, hey, God says this, we should do this. It turned out that was not permissible in the Roman Catholic Church at that time. And the Reformation was born out of their resistance to God's word. And that was even done with him using the Masoretic. The second episode we talk about history, Luther got all this stuff wrong too. Am I saying he's stupid and unfaithful? Absolutely not.

38:56 But if he made one mistake that we're gonna get to at the end of this episode, probably, that's the shooting match. I've said before I was a libertarian for 20 years. I never examined the priors that led me to be a libertarian. I had the blessing of others who were Christians and I trusted their judgment. And I could sort of rationalize it by ignoring the parts that were godless. It was only when I took a fresh and critical look, just setting all the economics and everything else aside and said, Okay, is this moral? Then I couldn't be libertarian anymore. So I repented of something I'd done for decades adamantly. I spent a lot of time and money and energy on that. But my repentance wasn't a radical change of me as a human

39:41 being. I just realized that I'd made one mistake twenty years ago about a small question. And when I finally got that question right, it changed everything downstream. Didn't change who I was, but in order to be faithful to God, I realized I had to set something aside. We did an episode on repentance. That's what repentance is. It's not just feeling sorry. It's when you realize that you've made a mistake at some point in the past, when you've sinned at some point in the past. You look at that and you're disgusted and you reject it and say, that's not me. That's what Josiah did, that's what Luther did, and it's what we're doing with this. But until such time as everything is fixed and we have a

40:17 great Septuagint-based Old Testament Bible that we can recommend, it is what it is. We're stuck in a situation where we have to muddle through. So, like I said at the beginning, our recommendation to you for right now is the same as it was in the lesser feedback episode. If you want to make some fiddly specific point about a passage, you should go back and look at a Septuagint translation. Because it's gonna differ. Like for now, you can look at the Masoretic based translations too, compare them side by side. Maybe they're basically the same. Sometimes they are. Sometimes it's they're indistinguishable. Sometimes they're wildly different. So just look. But that's it. It's not to undermine faith or confidence in the Bible you have.

40:59 It's to say when we look at the history of things, we find that God wiped out the Hebrew, as Corey was talking about, and left the church exclusively with Greek. When we look at that early period, our conclusion to this whole thing is that we must repent and go back to that. Not because it's old, because it predates any influence from the people who killed Christ. Recording this episode immediately after Easter. It was originally gonna be dropping the week of Easter. We decided it would be too disruptive and we didn't be disrespectful to Holy Week. Not that there's anything wrong with this episode, but there's a time and a place to focus on other things. So So in this first week of Easter, we're going to be

41:42 talking about something that is in a way a rebirth of something that we've lost for b nearly two thousand years. That doesn't mean that it's gimmicky. It's something that no one ever thought to question or to doubt. It just sort of faded, principally because language changed. For a time Greek was the lingua franca of the Roman Empire, and then later on Latin became the lingua franca. When that happened, they had to translate into Latin, and that was when this really got set in motion. But it still took another seven or eight hundred years before things really got off the rails. So the history we present today is gonna tell that story. I already situated the ancient Hebrew language to some degree as being from the Shemitic family

42:31 of languages, being related to Akkadian, indeed related to Arabic in some ways. And essentially that is where the story of Hebrew starts. We don't get what we would call ancient or biblical Hebrew until essentially the time of the conquest of Canaan. And an important point is to bear in mind that Hebrew is a a Canaanite language. It is not unrelated to the Canaanites, it is not from somewhere foreign, it is in fact a Canaanite language, and so for instance, Job, being an Edomite, would also have spoken a Canaanite language. Perhaps they would have been to some degree mutually intelligible, we don't necessarily know that. But they were related, perhaps like Dutch or German, maybe a little more distant than that, but somewhere in that vicinity.

43:27 Notably this does mean that most likely Moses when he originally wrote the original monographs of the first five books of Scripture, the Pentateuch, notably we name it after the Greek, those would have been written in a Proto-Hebrew, because what would become Biblical Hebrew really develops into that language around the time of the unified kingdom. So that's to say David and Solomon. That's where you get that sort of solidified into what we would call biblical Hebrew. This is similar to perhaps the development that we have seen in the English language, because we of course are speaking modern English right now. There is such a thing as Middle English, and it is related very closely to modern English, but it is difficult to read

44:19 for a modern English speaker, unless you have spent some time learning it, because it is essentially almost a foreign language. So even within a single language you can have that sort of development Over a period of centuries or in the case we're talking about now, thousands of years, there is development of a language. But insofar as the Hebrew language, the ancient Hebrew language is concerned, which is what we typically mean when we say Hebrew, until we get into the modern era, start dealing with the Mazoretes and then the resurrection so called of Hebrew in the nineteen hundreds in the twentieth century, because modern Hebrew is essentially a distinct language, it is a different thing, related deliberately because it is a constructed language, but

45:05 distinct from ancient Hebrew, distinct from biblical Hebrew. So bear in mind, there's not that continuity there that people would like to try to claim. They are different things. But insofar as Hebrew is concerned, we see its usage during the period of the conquest of Canaan, leading up to the unified monarchy under David and then Solomon, we see it in use in the northern kingdom and in the southern kingdom until the exiles. And the exiles take place at different times. You have the Assyrian exile, which is of course the northern kingdom, the Kingdom of Israel, that is in seven twenty two BC, and you have the Babylonian exile which takes place later, that is in five hundred eighty six BC, that is of the southern kingdom of

45:57 Judah. This is really when you see the true downfall, the diminishment, and the eventual erasure of the Hebrew language. Now, of course, languages don't typically die overnight. That's not how things work. How a language typically dies is it becomes diminished through replacement. Usually this takes place because some other language, a foreign language, comes from elsewhere, starts to gain usage in the region and then eventually becomes predominant, which is indeed what happens with regard to Hebrew. The case of the Assyrian vs the Babylonian exile these are different, and the reason for that is that the Assyrians and the Babylonians did not deal with their conquered peoples in the same way.

46:48 The Assyrians wanted to make sure their conquered peoples could never rise up again and challenge them. So what they did, we've described this in previous episodes, but I'll describe it again, they would take peoples from the conquered territory and move them to other parts of the empire, and they would take peoples from other parts of the empire and move them into the conquered territory, and then encourage them to intermix, to intermarry, because that would destroy the distinctness of that conquered people, and then they would not rise up, they would not rebel. This actually works very well. That's not to say it's a good thing, it's certainly wicked, it's immoral, but it does work. And so as part of this, they essentially erased Hebrew, because the

47:32 language of the Assyrians was indeed not Hebrew. Early on it would have been Akkadian, but eventually that was replaced by Aramaic. And so that is why you see Aramaic spoken in this area in the centuries leading up to the time of Christ, and in fact still spoken in the time of Christ. It was one of the languages of the region, not the only language, because they also spoke Greek, which we'll be getting to the history of why Greek was also in this region, but you have Aramaic in this region. The same thing happens, in a slightly different way, with the Babylonian exile. The Babylonians did not seek to completely destroy their conquered peoples, and so they ruled them in a different way. They would take some peoples from the territory and take them to

48:19 Babylon. Basically, you're sort of holding them as not quite hostages, but at the same time sort of hostages. This was a very common practice all over the world. Typically what you would do is you would take the sons of nobility and hold them in your palace. You would train them to be functionaries of the Empire, but at the same time it was an implicit threat against those in the conquered territory. The threat is kind of obvious, it doesn't need to be explained. But the Babylonian Empire used Aramaic, and so Aramaic started to make inroads in the conquered territories, because it was the language of empire. This is the same thing that we see taking place with every empire. It's one of the reasons, in fact, that English is so

49:01 widespread, and there are those who are listening to this in English, in parts of the world where English is not the native language, is not the first language. It is because of history, it is because of the British Empire, and it is because of the cultural hegemony of the United States. A discussion for another time, but this sort of development of the mixture of languages in a region and which language is dominant at a given time, it develops because of politics, essentially. There's a cultural component, but it is largely politics. It is which power is preeminent, which empire is transcendent at a given time, because the language or language is, because some empires use multiple, used by the empire, it's obviously going to have influence.

49:52 It's going to have a pull because you want to understand the decrees of the imperial seat, for instance, you want to understand the literature of that empire, and people are going to use it for commerce, for instance. This is one of the reasons that Greek grew so rapidly in the region after certain conquests we'll get into that. It was commerce. But the same thing is true here. And notably, it is not just during the conquest that you see Aramaic popping up in this area. Because in fact, Aramaic already existed in, for instance, the Southern Kingdom, before the Babylonian conquest. You can find this in Scripture. You can for instance find it in Isaiah thirty six. Please speak to your servants in Aramaic, for we understand it.

50:42 Do not speak to us in the language of Judah within the hearing of the people who are on the wall. Here you see that those who are part of the court already understand Aramaic, and this is in fact not quite 200, 150 or so years before the Babylonian exile. Already you have the learned class in the Southern Kingdom speaking Aramaic, at least understanding Aramaic and being able to converse in it. Now, of course, at this point historically, the Northern Kingdom had already been taken into captivity, taken into exile, essentially destroyed, or in the process of being destroyed. By the Assyrians. And so you see Aramaic spreading partly into the southern kingdom via the northern kingdom because the northern kingdom was already being influenced by

51:32 the language of the empire that had conquered them. But as I said, this is essentially the beginning of the end for Hebrew. And in the case of Hebrew, which is the case for a number of languages, but specifically Hebrew is our concern here, how you see this decay taking place, this replacement, is that the language of the everyday becomes something other than Hebrew, generally Aramaic and then later on Greek, but Hebrew sticks around for a while as the language of liturgy. In some cases there's a little bit of it used as the language of government, but even there it starts to get replaced because if you're dealing with an empire you speak their language. So it gets replaced by Aramaic as the language of government.

52:21 But it is retained to some degree as the language of religious usage. And so that is where you can see some snippets of Hebrew, as it were, being retained long after Hebrew is no longer in use. It is a dead language by the time of Christ. It has been a dead language for a while. By the time it is revived in the twentieth century, it has been dead for over two thousand years. This is distinct from some of you will be thinking of Latin. Latin does not die in the same way that Hebrew does, because there has never been a point, really, since the rise of Latin, where we have not had those who knew Latin. We have always had Latin speakers even when we had far more obviously those who could read and

53:14 write Latin, because usually it's not used as a spoken language except as a language of liturgy, notably historically. Hebrew dies much more thoroughly than Latin. God is rendering his judgment on Hebrew and on the wicked Old Testament nation of Israel, when he destroys Hebrew. It is part of the fulfillment of prophecy. It is the destruction of that wicked nation for their apostasy. It's one of the reasons that modern Hebrew was revived in order to try to ignore those prophecies, to try to ignore God's fulfillment of them. Particularly because if you look at the way in which they were fulfilled, not least of all in AD seventy when Jerusalem is again destroyed. That is God putting his seal on Christ,

54:09 on Christ's ministry, on what Christ said during his time on earth, because of course he prophesied that this would take place. And it's also the final note, the end of Old Testament Israel is the destruction of the temple in eighty seven. seventy Hebrews already gone. Their culture is basically replaced by foreigners. In the case of the Northern Kingdom, they have been literally physically replaced by foreigners, they become the Samaritans. Now they're cousins to the people they once were. The destruction of the temple is that final note on it. But we can't lose sight of the fact that God destroyed the Hebrew language. It is part of the fulfillment of the prophecies in Scripture, and it is part of His judgment on that nation.

54:59 But He preserved His Word in the Greek, because that is what fulfills His promise not to let his word disappear from the earth. He has promised that he will preserve it. It doesn't mean you can't lose it in a wall for a time, but it does mean that it will be preserved. In our case, it is preserved in Greek, which is a proper, true, and full written language, and so we can simply pick it up, assuming you learn Greek, and read it. That is not the case again, as was the point was made earlier, as with Hebrew, because with Hebrew you cannot simply pick up the written form, the objad, and understand it. Not fully. Because you don't have that required divinely inspired oral tradition that comes alongside it to interpret what portion of it you have written.

55:50 That was destroyed once and for all, with the destruction of the temple, it is gone. And so even if you had that Hebrew, you would not be able to use it as a divinely inspired text, because you are missing the absolutely necessary, divinely inspired and maintained oral tradition that you need to interpret it. So even if we found the old Hebrew, which we won't, it's gone. We're not going to find scrolls somewhere in a cave. But even if we did, say in the hypothetical world in which that happens, we find some new cave somewhere near the Dead Sea that has a really old form of Hebrew, a full, complete version of the Hebrew. In ancient Hebrew, in biblical Hebrew, it would still not be the divinely inspired word of God, because he rendered his judgment on the

56:46 temple, he rendered his judgment on the Old Testament nation of Israel, and destroyed their oral tradition. And so the Hebrew is not the divinely inspired Word of God, the Greek is, because God replaced the Hebrew with the Greek so that his word would be transmitted forward in a way that could not be lost in the same way as the Hebrew, and as a fulfillment of Noah's prophecy with regard to Japheth dwelling in the tents of Shem, because this is what we see with the destruction of Hebrew and the movement toward Greek is God fulfilling that prophecy of Noah. We see him taking the word of God to the nations, and the way that he does that is with the Greek. But in order to look at that we have to look at

57:33 how Greek came to be, the dominant language, in this region. Because it was Aramaic that replaced Hebrew and a number of Canaanite languages in the region, but after that it was Greek that replaced Aramaic. I just want to emphasize the complete judgment and destruction under which Israel fell leading up to Christ's birth. Because when you look at it, I mean, just reading the Old Testament, you see prophet after prophet, sent by God to warn these people, to condemn these people, to lament their faithlessness. And you see exactly what he permitted to be done to them. And the prophecies in Daniel are key for laying out the completeness of this destruction. It begins in Babylon, where they lose their land, they lose their

58:28 rulers, there are no more Jewish kings. They are ruled by foreigners, they're sent everywhere, their land is no longer their own. And then, as Corey just detailed, then they lose their alphabet. Even if they were still speaking some form of proto-Hebrew, they switched over to the Aramaic script to preserve the ancient Hebrew language that they had for scriptural purposes. But everything else, like the alphabet was gone. And then over time, they lost the language entirely. So they had the scripture prior to Greek. In some cases it was it may have been preserved in Hebrew, it may have been translated into Aramaic. Whatever happened, they had nothing left of their own. There was no going concern for the Hebrew language, except liturgically.

59:18 And what replaced it is what Daniel prophesied. The prophecies detailed the kingdom of Babylon and then Media and Persia, and then the Hellenistic kingdoms, which after Alexander the Great's death split into four as Daniel prophesied, and that is how we end up in the situation where the Septuagint is necessary. And what's interesting when looking at the moment when the Septuagint was first created, it was not an Israelite who said, hey, we should do this. It wasn't a Hebrew, it wasn't a Jew. It was Ptolemy II Philadelphus, who was one of the Greek rulers of Egypt. And this is one of those cases where if you're a twenty first century idiot and you hear Egypt, you think, oh wow, that's African. Those Egyptians are just like all the other pharaohs.

1:00:09 They're these dark brown people just like you see today. No. Tell me II was Greek. He was descended from one of the generals of Alexander the Great. When the kingdom, the Hellenistic Kingdom was broken up, that's what happened, as Daniel prophesied. So year Ptolemy, which was hearkening back to a previous Egyptian ruler, but he was a Greek king. He was a Greek king in Egypt, which was a Greek kingdom. Egypt was one of the Greek kingdoms, and that didn't go away until the death of Cleopatra a few hundred years later So this is a time where the land is long gone, the kings are long gone. But for a time they had the alphabet and they had the language, then they lost the alphabet to Babylonian Aramaic, and then they

1:00:52 lost the language entirely. And although it was Ptolemy II who decreed that the probably initially just the first five books were translated into Greek, eventually everything was translated into Greek. And that became what we know as the Septuagint today. So we'll talk a little bit about the moment of its translation. But one of the things I want to emphasize is we go through the particular The particular details, because you've probably heard bits and pieces before. Some of you have probably heard of the letter of Aristius, which is where the name Septuagint comes from, or LXX, which is Roman numerals, ironically, for 70. So seventy and 72 are used interchangeably. These Middle Eastern people were kind of sloppy about numbers.

1:01:38 It drives me insane. But when we find these sort of inconsistencies, it's not because there's a lie, but it's because they handle numbers differently sometimes. I would personally never speak that imprecisely, but it was normal. So the seventy-two translators that are detailed in the letter of Aristius as having been sent by the Jews to Ptolemy II to translate their scripture into Greek at the king's request. The letter records that this happened and records it as being miraculous. What is important about the letter is not that it makes the claims, but that it's actually a contemporaneous record of anything happening. It's miraculous that we even have a written record that old that records any events happening.

1:02:25 Even like the letter of Aristius is not inspired. There were political motivations surrounding it. One of the key points that you need to remember about the letter of Aristius, because whenever you talk to someone who doesn't know what we've said here, and you talk to them about the translation of the Septuagint and the reception of the Septuagint by the early church, by Jesus, by the Apostles. Anyone who argues against what we're saying here is going to try to pinch and hole on this letter. This letter to Aristius that makes the claim that there were 72 rabbis who translated the scripture and all their translations matched. It was received as a miracle, everyone celebrated, and that became at

1:03:07 least the first five books of what later became the complete subdugent. That is not why we care. There will be people who will lie and say that that's the entire basis. Some ancient fiction, some forgery of a letter is the only reason to talk about the septuagent at all. Jesus and the apostles in the early church received the Septuagint. The fact that just like we have Josephus, who was not a Christian, but he was a contemporaneous witness in the first century AD, we have a contemporaneous witness a couple hundred years earlier, at least a hundred or so years earlier, attesting to the fact that these events had taken place. We're not getting the notion that the Septuagint is inspired by God

1:03:48 because Aristius recorded it. But what they record was not what correct to Jesus into quoting the Septuagint. So please track with me. Jesus, the apostles, quote the Septuagint throughout scripture. That's going to be the fourth episode of this series. We're not going to get into all those details today because it fills an entire episode of how much of the Septuagint is quoted by Jesus and the apostles. For you to pigeonhole on the letter of Aristius and say, well, it's an apocryphal letter, it's a forgery, blah, blah, blah. That argument hinges on Jesus having been tricked by this letter, that Paul was tricked, that Peter was tricked, that they were somehow misled. I we should have been using Hebrew all along, but we didn't

1:04:34 because we were tricked by this letter that said it was inspired. That's so backwards that when you examine the facts of the matter, I I don't know how anyone could possibly say that and not either burst out laughing or burst into flames because it's so fundamentally dishonest. We're dropping a lot of names in moments in time that you can go look up for yourself. So we'll have some show notes, but this is really a very much a you need to go assemble these facts for yourself thing. When you read the letter of Aristius, you're gonna find varying it claims about it, but they're going to be trying to get you to believe that we're only talking about it because of that letter. I don't care about the letter.

1:05:16 The only reason that we bring up the letter of Aristius, which otherwise would be trivia, is because people are going to say these silly things. Jesus and the apostles believed that it was scripture. They said it was scripture. You can forget the Old Testament entirely for the sake of this momentary argument. The New Testament itself, in Second Timothy, that book only quotes a Septuagint when it says that all scripture is breathed out by God. Paul was talking about the Septuagint when he made that claim. And crucibly, the quotes in the New Testament of the Septuagint are not just of the first five books. When they treat the Greek scripture as scripture as God breathed, they treat every book that they quote.

1:05:57 They almost exclusively quote Greek, it's from everywhere. It's not just the first five books. And they treat it as though it's inspired. That is the basis of our argument for saying it's inspired. Because I believe the New Testament, I must believe the Greek Old Testament. There's no way around it. In this context, the letter of Aristius is trivia. It's neat that there's this contemporaneous witness, but it's not the basis of anything. It's neat, it's interesting, it doesn't matter, but it's sitting there is a way for people to get their heads twisted because all of Christian history, right up through Reddit in the twenty first century, is about people mocking and belittling and trying to needle at whatever small

1:06:41 detail they can find to undermine people's faith. That's why at the beginning we emphasize this is not about undermining faith, this is about bolstering it. You don't need to lose heart that the Bible that you've read in the past is based on the Masoretic. You should rejoice that the version that Jesus and the apostles use is still preserved today, only in Greek, but we can get it into English. That's something that'll be, as we said, that'll happen somewhere else in the future, but it's entirely doable. It literally just takes someone deciding, yeah, this is an important thing to do. We never should have abandoned it, but here we are. Don't let anybody bog you down on the details of the second

1:07:18 and third century BC, where these moments of change happened. No, the Hebrew was exterminated by God's hand and by his permission, and in essence by his prophecy, leaving the Jews with what? They still had the word in Greek exclusively, and they had their traditions. They still had the temple, which as Cory spoiled, gets destroyed not long after. In eighty seventy when the temple was destroyed, that was the end of this period. But But from Jesus' birth for the entire first century, the only scripture they used was Greek. And that's one of the crucial lies that everyone doesn't understand today. The reason that almost all the New Testament quotations are of Greek is that that was the Bible. It wasn't a fluke.

1:08:07 Matthew was not written in Hebrew and then translated into Greek. Matthew quotes the Septuagint. All the books do. And there are a couple places where they do exclusively quote a Hebrew forelog or previous version, a prototype. That's fine. You know what? They as Corey said, Latin for a long time, even in some cases up to this day, is preserved as a liturgical language. It's entirely believable that in fact we know for a fact that Hebrew was preserved as a liturgical language in the temple and in the synagogues. We also know that they had people translating into Aramaic and Greek right there to explain it because people couldn't understand most of it. My personal hypothesis, and this is speculation, but I think it makes

1:08:52 perfect sense when in the fourth episode we show you how few quotations exclusively match the Hebrew, my hypothesis is that it makes sense that those quotations would have been in common liturgical use, such as when they were quoted in Greek of a Hebrew version, it's something that would have been familiar to many of the people at that day. So it would have been perfectly reasonable for Paul and the other authors to quote the Septuagint there as well. It doesn't harm our point that they don't, because there was liturgical use. Liturgy is the last thing to go. That's tradition. It's why today post Vatican II, the Latin Rite churches are fighting a rearguard action against the Vatican itself.

1:09:34 They're trying to take away Latin. Now, as a Lutheran, I think that that matter was settled during the Reformation. I think that right here is we're looking at the loss of Hebrew and the replacement with Greek. And it is replacement. I think that that's an example that God is fine with it. God wants the language of the people in church to be the vernacular. Crucially, the Greek that was used in the New Testament is not the much more sophisticated Attic Greek. It's Koine Greek. It's kind of effectively hillbilly Greek, sort of. It's kind of like French Canadians. The version of French that they speak, French speakers die when they hear it. They think it's awful. It's a derivation, but it's still from the same family.

1:10:18 It's closely related, but it's dumbed down. Because it was lingua franca. Just as previously under Babylon, under their rule, Aramaic was the lingua franca of a great empire, it was slowly went away and was replaced by Greek, and that slowly went away as was replaced by Latin. And today's Cory point out, English is kind of the lingua franca. Anyone in the world who wants to participate in commerce, English is probably the first language they're gonna look at, unless they just want to trade with a neighbor next door. But even sometimes English might be their only common language. So there's nothing weird about that happening. And the fact that God permitted it to happen to Hebrew is a crucial point.

1:10:57 He didn't preserve it. He did not preserve Hebrew. And when we get to the first and second century AD, we find that no one thought otherwise. Jesus and the apostles and the early church were not using Hebrew. And crucially, even if you don't believe our claims that are demonstrable from scripture and from history that Hebrew was dead except for a bit of liturgical use. There's absolutely no command in Scripture to stop using the Greek that they themselves were using to go back to some older version. When we see Hebrew start to be pushed is only after the second temple is destroyed. When the temple is destroyed again, by God's hand, by his permission, that is the beginning of the period where the Jews who at

1:11:42 this point are the murderers of Christ. They're no longer God's people. They have rejected God entirely, as scripture makes abundantly clear. We did an episode last year called The Required Confession, where we went through an exhaustive detail all the places where the New Testament directly says that the Jews murdered Christ. As we're recording this, it's right after Easter where those homilies were being shared and as always there's so called controversy around saying what the Bible says about the Jews murdering Christ. It is a fact, just as it is a fact that my sins and your sins killed Christ. All those things are in Scripture. And the most important thing is that my sins killed Christ, as

1:12:24 did yours. That's the most important thing. But when the whole world says you can't say that the Jews murdered Christ, then we have a problem. Because Scripture also says that. So in the required confession episode, we detail precisely what a dire situation we're in today, in this century, in this year, and next year it'll be even worse, where laws are being passed saying you can't say the Jews murdered Christ. When When the Jews murdered Christ and then God destroyed the temple and left that place forever, all this was wiped away. And they had no Hebrew left. They had nothing. And the church went on as though it never existed. In effect, not that it hadn't existed historically, but there was nothing

1:13:07 received from the moment that the Septuagint initially was translated in Egypt and then it went back to the Jews and it was spread elsewhere because they were thrilled. When it got back to the men who sent those precious scrolls off to be translated, because it all occurred in one place initially, they were thrilled with it. They were thankful. And it was a big deal because even in around two fifty BC, Greek was sufficiently dominant, and Aramaic was starting to fade away, and Hebrew was mostly gone, even liturgically, that they needed it in Greek. It was a benefit to them that this had happened. And then two and three centuries later, it was paramount. The gospel could not have spread without Roman roads and Greek scripture.

1:13:54 That's the reason it was able to spread so far and so fast. If it had been sequestered in Hebrew, it never would have gone anywhere. God knew what he was doing here. God did not simply destroy Hebrew as a language in those people to prove a point, although it was his wrath and it was his justice, but crucially moving it into the vernacular of the day which was Greek, and then later later became Latin, was necessary for spreading the gospel to the nations, just as God had prophesied and just as he commanded. As we've said before in other episodes, this is not a history podcast. And so we are not going to be exhaustive in terms of this happened on this date, and this man was born this year and died this year, and all of those things that you would

1:14:43 expect from a history podcast or a history class or a history book. What we are doing is something different. We are laying out the overarching narrative, explaining why the why these things took place, what the consequences of these things are, and matters related to those things. And so it will fall to other men. In many cases, the work has already been done. Many books exist, but it will fall to other men to write the exhaustive histories of these things. That's not what we're attempting to do. We have zero interest in doing that Because quite frankly, it would not be a proper use of our time, and it would not be a proper use of your time when you are listening to this particular podcast.

1:15:31 You are not coming here for just a rote history lesson However, that being said, some of the history is entirely necessary to know. That's why I gave dates for the Assyrian exile, the Babylonian exile, the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. There are certain things you have to know, certain waypoints, in order to orient yourself within time, how these things played out in time. One of the more important time periods, not specific year, although we could give a specific year, say for the death of Alexander the Great, to spoil what I'm saying next, as it were, is of course the Macedonian conquests, which is to say the conquests of Alexander the Great. That plays one of the most important roles in all of this

1:16:24 history, because unlike basically anyone who came before him, one of the explicit goals of Alexander the Great was to spread Greek culture. Previous empires typically conquered foreign peoples and simply ruled them. Sometimes you would have a subsidiary ruler that would basically maintain the nation as it had been before the conquest, but now paying tithes to the conquering empire. Essentially they didn't really try to change the conquered peoples culturally, anything like that, except for of course the Assyrians did it in order to destroy them to make them easier to rule. But what Alexander did is he set up Greek colonies. He took Greek traders, he took Greek speakers, Greek citizens, and he

1:17:17 placed them in cities along the route of his conquest in order to spread Greek culture, in order to build up his empire as a Greek empire. Now with many different nations, many different races inside of that empire, but he wanted them all to have the same Greek culture. And he was very successful. of course he died young, and so some of that success that could have been did not occur because of his untimely or timely, depending how you look at it historically, death, but his empire upon his death was divided up among his generals, his diodoki as they are called. For our purposes they are not all relevant, because some of them ruled regions that aren't particularly relevant to what we are discussing here.

1:18:05 There are, however, two dynasties that are particularly relevant. These, of course, would be the Ptolemaic Kingdom previously mentioned, which is to say Greek Egypt, and also the Seleucid Empire, which ruled essentially in the region of Palestine, not exactly Palestine, because there was some fighting between these two empires, these two kingdoms, over the region of Palestine. We'll just call it Palestine for the general region of Old Testament Israel. But these are the two powers in that region. Now notably, these are two Greek kingdoms, squabbling over various borders and such, but there's no fight over whether or not Greek will be predominant here. It's not a Greek speaking empire and an Aramaic speaking empire fighting

1:19:03 over which culture will be dominant, it's which Greek group will dominate. And so Greek is in fact predominant in the entire region. These two kingdoms or empires, whatever you want to call them, they call themselves both at different times, are relevant because obviously they have the power in the region, but it is also the Ptolemaic kingdom, as was previously mentioned by Woe, the king of that kingdom, who causes Scripture to be translated into the Greek. Now of course it was ultimately God who caused this to happen to fulfill his promises with regard to preserving his Preserving his word, but it was in fact a Greek speaking king of Egypt who had the Old Testament in two eighty two BC translated into Greek.

1:19:52 And the way that he did this is that he sent a letter to the temple in Jerusalem, obtained copies of the Old Testament, as they were held in the Hebrew at the time in the temple, and also the seventy-two scholars in order to have this translated, because you need those who can actually read the language, both languages notably, because they had to obviously know the original language and the target language, both Hebrew and Greek. They were taken to the capital, unsurprisingly named Alexandria, and then they proceeded to do the translation work. The initial translation, as Wo said, was of the Pentateuch, the first five books, but then over a number of years after that, because the original initial translation work was completed quite quickly.

1:20:42 But then the translation of the rest of the Old Testament took some number of years after that. But this translation was completed, and then it was received by everyone as the Word of God. This is what was used in synagogues because bear in mind, again, they no longer used Hebrew. An Aramaic was giving way to Greek because Alexander had conquered the region and built up Greek culture, and as some historians and others have described this, this was the fastest spread of a culture and the deepest entrenchment of a culture in all of human history. Nothing else compares to it. This entire area was Hellenized. In fact, it is Hellenized to the point where many of the people, who were not in fact genetically, not ethnically Greek, were still

1:21:34 called Hellen. They were called Greeks because they were so thoroughly acculturated, they were so thoroughly Greek culturally. We see this in the pages of scripture. We see the woman whom we are told is a Syrophoenician, which is indeed not a Greek Not a Greek, but she is called a Hellene, because she is both of those things. She is a Syrophoenician racially, but she is a Greek culturally, because of this conquest by Alexander and then the empires that flowed from his empire when he died. But to return to the point that I was making before that aside, the Greek was received in part, as Woe was saying, because the people spoke Greek, and so having a Greek version of the Old Testament to use in the synagogues was of great benefit.

1:22:27 It is the equivalent in that day and age of what we had with the Reformation making the text of Scripture available to the common man, because the common German didn't read Latin at that point. Obviously the educated class still did, Luther knew Latin, Luther knew Greek, and so did various other professors and those who were priests or monks. The educated upper class knew these languages, but the common man did not. The same thing is true at this time. There was some tiny group of priests mostly in Jerusalem who still knew Hebrew. There were some people who knew Aramaic, but Greek was the lingua franca, and so you had this translation into the Greek that made Scripture available to the common man again.

1:23:18 Because if you heard the scripture read in the synagogue in Greek, you could understand it. The same thing as when we switched from reading it in Latin, which most men did not understand, to reading it in German or English or French, suddenly the common man can understand Scripture again. This is a huge change, this is vitally important. God wants His Word to be accessible in the common language, because He wants us to study his word. Now that doesn't mean that we're being inconsistent as we've made comments in the past that universal literacy is perhaps not necessarily ideal. Because do bear in mind, scripture was meant to be read aloud. Much of Scripture. It is written in such a way that it is best when

1:24:05 read aloud. In fact, there are comments in Scripture saying that blessed is the man who reads it aloud and blessed is the man who listens, because it is meant to be read. And so there's nothing wrong with having some portion of your population unable to read it who can still hear it. And in fact it does help if it is read in the language you actually understand. Just hearing it, you you don't get points for that. If you hear scripture read in a language that you do not understand, it's not benefiting you. Because it is the understanding that benefits. And so And so having this change of the Old Testament into Greek, which is of course God's plan, as we will make that case more in future episodes than this one, but it is also

1:24:51 of huge benefit to anyone who took the Word of God to be the Word of God because now they can actually hear and understand it again. It is no longer being read in a language that is a foreign language. Just Just because a language is the historical language of your people, does not mean it is not a foreign language to you. There was a point in my life where I did not know German. German was a foreign language to me. I'm German by blood. My family, all the way back, except for the percentage that is Scottish, is German. I don't speak Scots, incidentally. That's the language of my ancestors. I don't know it, it's a foreign language. For the Jewish people at this time historically, Hebrew was a foreign

1:25:38 language. It was a language they did not know, because some of them knew Aramaic, and most of them knew Greek, because that was the language of empire, it was the language of the entire region. And so as Wo mentioned, you have a number of things that all come together as if by miracle, at the same time to see this explosion of Christianity, the spread of Christianity, mostly into Europe, but eventually to the entirety of the world carried by European explorers and colonizers. But all of these things take place at the same time and are a necessary part of it, and so one of them is that Greek becomes the lingua franca because scripture is written in Greek. If people don't understand Greek, it is going to be much more

1:26:29 difficult to transmit the actual faith to them because you're going to have to translate it first. That's one of the challenges that we encountered during the period of colonization. We had to translate Scripture into the local languages or teach those locals a European language before we could teach them the faith. Because again, it doesn't benefit you if you listen but do not understand. You have to understand what is being said. But in addition to the Greek language, one of the other essentially necessary parts of this equation is the Roman Empire. Because the Roman Empire builds out infrastructure in order to have a much more organized system of trade and cultural exchange than what was

1:27:16 there under the Greeks? The Greeks were more disjointed, the Romans were more organized. And so you see the Romans go to war with the Seleucids, and with others as well, obviously they eventually conquer Egypt as well. But you see Rome conquering this territory, and that is why, of course, Christ stands before Pontius Pilate. He's not standing before the Seleucid Empire. He's not standing before King Ptolemy. He's standing before Roman Pontius Pilate. But with the conquest of the region by Rome, incidentally, one of the things that Rome acquires through this conquest of not just the region of Palestine, but all of the formerly Greek territories is that Rome starts using Greek. Because Koina Greek becomes the language of everyday life in the Roman

1:28:13 Empire. Now Latin is still the language of the government and high culture and things like that, but Greek is used in everyday life. It is the language of trade, it is the language of just living your life in the Roman Empire. There are some areas where some people would still know a little bit of Aramaic, or whatever the local language is, but Greek was the language you used as a Roman imperial citizen in this period. And so now we have the stage set for what happens in the New Testament. Because now we have a common language, we have a common government, we have a structure that can be used to spread the Christian faith. This is all God working out working out in time the things that he promised, he is setting the stage for rebuilding a

1:29:06 true Christendom, for rebuilding the Christian church. Because it's almost gone from the world at this point. There really are not very many believers. God is fulfilling what He promised in so many places in the Old Testament, through all of these things that if you just look at it through a purely secular lens, it looks like a very strange history. Now partly of course it's because this area is a confluence, it's a meeting of empires, just geographically speaking. But God selected it partly for that reason. These are the necessary preconditions in order to have the Christian faith spread as rapidly and as far as it does. And one of the absolutely essential parts of that was that translation

1:29:53 into Greek. And you see that happening in the intertestamental period, and you see it happening under conditions where Greek is already the dominant language, because that is part of what facilitated that adoption. If Greek had just been some secondary or tertiary language in some empire, some irrelevant language that's used by a certain percentage percentage of people, it would not have spread as quickly, it would not have been adopted as quickly. Because bear in mind, when you have the letters from the apostles, when you have the letters of Paul that start circulating in the early church, well the synagogues all already have copies of the Old Testament in Greek. They can look at what was written of the New Testament in

1:30:39 Greek and compare it to what is written in the Old Testament in Greek. Because what is written in those letters is in fact citing what is written in those documents they already had on hand, because they had the Septuagint, because it's the Word of God, and they received it as the Word of God. Before we move on to sort of the next part of the history, there is one sort of historical tidbit, we'll call it, that is that is necessary to note, because undoubtedly there will be those who will bring it up, and so it is worth mentioning. We've mentioned it in previous episodes, particularly the series on the Jews, but you have the Maccabean Revolt. And the part of that that is relevant for this particular episode,

1:31:26 for this series of episodes, is that they do indeed attempt unsuccessfully, but they attempt to resurrect and start using the Hebrew language again. Now it should tell you something, that they have to try to resurrect it. Because you don't have to resurrect a language that is still in active use. And so, for instance, in the cave of letters so-called, you will find some things that are written in Hebrew. However, the overwhelming majority of what was found there is not Hebrew. Hebrew accounts for only a tiny minority of what was found from this period of the Maccabean Revolt. And my favorite quote from all of the documents in that collection is there is one scroll written in Greek that says, This is written

1:32:20 in Greek because we could not find a way to write it in Hebrew. So even the Maccabees, who were attempting in sort of a LARPy fashion in some ways, but who were attempting to bring back the Hebrew language and re-establish an old testament kingdom of Israel, could not could not even manage to write their own letters in Hebrew because they didn't know it and neither did anyone else. By this point, by the time you have Rome as the authority in this region, Hebrew is dead. Even the upper classes and the priestly caste, those who would have known Hebrew had retained it the longest would have retained it the longest, no longer knew it. That is the end of the Hebrew language. It is dead and it will be gone for essentially two thousand

1:33:15 years, which we will get into later. The language of the people, the language of the empire, and the language of scripture, they're all Greek. The language is Greek. It is no longer some other language, because that language is dead and gone. God rendered his judgment on the Hebrew language through this process. If God had wanted to preserve his word in Hebrew, he would have preserved the documents in Hebrew. We don't find that. He would have preserved the oral tradition that was necessary to interpret those documents, we don't find that. He would have preserved the language itself, we don't find that. The history of this is so abundantly clear that the only way you can possibly come to a false conclusion on it is to

1:34:11 be unaware of the history, or to be so biased in favor of believing that the Old Testament has to be Hebrew, which the church never believed. that you come to the conclusion at odds with all of the evidence, at odds with the weight of the evidence of what your forefathers in the faith actually believed. Because the Christian Church was built on Greek, the Christian forefathers in the faith believed the Greek was the Word of God, and even the Jews of this time believed the Greek was the Word of God. They received it in all of their synagogues. The only reason they started to object to it is because they realized it was spreading Christianity. This should call to mind something that came up in a previous

1:34:59 episode. At one point, rabbinic interpretation of the Old Testament had what they called the second power in heaven. They read the Old Testament and they recognized there are very clear instances where there are two persons described, there are two persons, two deities, to speak somewhat inaccurately, but I'll clarify in a second, who are involved in what is happening. They didn't necessarily know how to handle that, and so they spoke of this second power in heaven. Of course, we as Christians know what is going on. This is the triune God. We're dealing with the person of the Father and the Person of the Son, one deity, one essence, but three persons. The Jews didn't happen to notice the Holy Spirit by and large,

1:35:48 but they noticed there's this second person. They only stopped using that interpretation and started covering it up and trying to erase any sort of indication they'd ever done this when it became obvious that well, this is exactly what the Christians are saying, because it was facilitating conversion to Christianity. Because the Christians were saying, you know that second person in heaven, that second power in heaven? That's Jesus, who died and rose again. Well they did the same thing with the Greek. The Greek was completely fine with them, until it turned out that using Greek starts to make Christians. And that's why they tried to bring back the Hebrew. Because they didn't want to make Christians.

1:36:32 And so we should be very wary when this sort of thing happens. Satan is a lion who prowls about seeking whom he may devour, and he is entirely willing to use whatever tool is at hand. If it happens to be a language that died and was resurrected, so be it. If it happens to be a version of supposedly a translation of scripture that was held in the hand of apostates out in the desert for some unknown period of time and then present it whole to Christians? Of course I mean the Masoretic text. He's willing to do that too. We should not discount the beliefs of our forefathers in the faith. And our forefathers in the faith all believed. The Septuagint is the Word of God. Not just that it is a translation as we typically think of

1:37:18 that word today. That's not how they thought of it. They thought of it as a divinely inspired translation, as the actual literal word of God preserved by God down through the ages, in this case in the Greek language, in order to facilitate the growth of the Church God knows exactly what he's doing, and if we look at history, sometimes it's clear what he is doing and why. In the case of the Septuagint, it's very obvious why. Because Greek was the language that facilitated the growth of the church. Hebrew would not have done so. So Corey mentioned the Maccabean Revolt, and just to put a date on that, that was between about a hundred and sixty seven and forty. years before Christ's birth. So yeah, that's century and a half, two centuries before Jesus is

1:38:10 born is walking around. Your pastor's probably told he was speaking Hebrew and everyone is speaking Hebrew. They wrote the letter saying we can't even find anybody to write this in Hebrew. And this is not shocking if you know the the Deuterocanonical or the Apocryphal books, depending on your perspective, written after Malachi and before Matthew were all written in Greek. Malachi about four thirty BC was the last thing that we have written in Hebrew. Everything after that from the Jews was written in Greek. And they continued to write and record books. And a point that I didn't make at the beginning that is a crucial part of this. When we are talking about the legitimacy of the Septuagint as a

1:38:54 textual source, this conversation is completely separate from the question of canon. So there are three codices of scripture from about the fourth century that contain they're entirely Greek and they contain both the Old and the New Testament. Codex is basically an early version of a book. So it looks like a book. It's got a binding, it's got sheets, writing on both sides. Those are called on seals or on seals. I prefer unseal because it's gross looking word if you don't pronounce it that way. But it's pronounced either way. Those examples from the fourth century AD are the oldest examples of the entirely Greek Bible that we have. So it's Old and New Testament. It's not just the Septuagint, but it includes that, but it's also

1:39:41 the New Testament. One of the fights that occurred at the time of the Reformation and is going to occur again, and I don't take a position on it either way, is whether these dedo-canonical or apocryphal books that were written in Greek between Malachi and Matthew, whether any of them should be received as scripture. It's a separate question from which source we use. I hope that's easy to understand. We are not saying that everything that was written in Greek is Scripture. We are saying that we only receive as Scripture that which was written in Greek. That's a subset of everything written in Scripture. So when you look at the Reformation era arguments that we'll be getting to in the next episode, against the Deuterocan or the Apocrypha,

1:40:32 much of their thinking is predicated on an argument that we're going to get to in a minute, which amounts to they weren't written in Hebrew, so they can be inspired. That's pretty much the whole argument. Like as far as Luther and Gerhard and a number of others were concerned, that's the whole shooting match. If it wasn't written in Hebrew, it can't have been prophetically inspired by God. I I don't think that's a reasonable argument, but that was the route that they went. And it's important, and we'll deal with this in detail during the next episode. When they were having that fight, they were principally fighting against doctrines like purgatory and indulgences, where the proof texts that Rome was using

1:41:12 were exclusively from in prayers for the dead, they're exclusively from the Deuterocana or the Apocrypha. And so the reformers killed two birds with one stone by saying, we don't think that's scripture anyway, because it wasn't written in Hebrew. And also we reject this because we believe it's false doctrine that conflicts the rest of what's in scripture. Those are two separate questions. And it's entirely possible to say that we don't disregard it because it's not written in Hebrew, and to say we must disregard it as Scripture because it conflicts with the rest of Scripture. So So we are not taking a position on whether the entire table of contents at any of those Greek unseals from the fourth

1:41:51 century is the entire inspired word of God. We're just saying that whatever we're looking at, whatever canon we're going to use, we should only be drawing from Greek sources. So some people are gonna just refuse to hear us and think, oh, you you want 73 books and you want the prayers for the dead and no, I'm still a Lutheran. I don't want that stuff because I don't believe it's in accord with scripture. But the separate fight that we're not even going to get into, we're going to talk about the historical thing, but we're not picking a fight here. I think that those are open questions, and frankly, they were open questions in Luther's day. There was no Western canon of scripture until Trent and Trent in

1:42:34 fifteen forty six declared the canon of scripture to include the Duder Canon, specifically against the Protestant Reformers. So when Luther initially questioned those, he wasn't doing anything that was out of order. That had been a question that the church had been debating for 1400 years or so. Which books are scripture? Is an important question. We're not taking sides, we're not adding anything, we're not subscribing to doctrines that I would plainly reject on the basis of the rest of Scripture. It's a separate question whether every Greek book that's in those unseals is scripture. I think probably not, but I think some of them we probably don't have a reason to reject what the early church thought.

1:43:19 It's a separate question. We're not taking a position. And if you agree with us about the Greek, you can stick to your sixty six books. So if on the far side of all of these discussions, many of which are not have not happened yet and won't for some time, you still end up with sixty six books in your Bible and they're all based on Greek, I say great. that's exactly where we need to get. And if there are other books that should have been received as scripture when we don't take post-temple destruction Jewish arguments against them as fact, which is what happened in the Reformation. If we end up with other books, I don't care. It's a possibility. We're saying that the door is open as it always has been,

1:44:01 but we're not picking a side. And we won't. I've read them and some of them I'm like, I don't know. And others like it seems fine. I'm not the one to make those decisions. And frankly, you aren't either. None of us are. Collectively as a church, we will have to take a look with fresh eyes, and asking exactly the same questions been asked since the first and second century. So just be aware that you are not subscribing to the Roman Catholic Bible by saying I prefer the Septuagint, or more properly, I believe the Septuagint is the only inspired word of God. It's not a question of canon, it's a question of textual source. It's two separable subjects, and we're only touching one of 'em. But when you look at the Dudo Canon was only written in

1:44:45 Greek. And so when we make the claim that in the first century AD, that Jesus and the apostles were speaking Greek and maybe a little bit of Aramaic, that there no one was running around speaking Hebrew, we're not departing from anything except for what history plainly proves. As I said earlier, it's likely that there was some Hebrew use, actual Hebrew oral tradition in the liturgy that may have been familiar to them. Maybe they could spit some words back, just like most people probably know a little bit of Latin. Even, you know, in the Lutheran churches, there are bits and pieces of Latin that is preserved as the names for things like the Nunctabidas. That's something that everybody more or less knows what it means,

1:45:27 even though it's an alien language to us. These things happen in the liturgy, and it's fine. It's fine to preserve tradition that way. What's not fine to do is say, oh, I found three bits of Hebrew in the entire New Testament. That means they were all speaking Hebrew, which is basically where we ended up. That's what we're being told in the twenty-first century by our teachers. It's plainly false and crucially, what it does is it invites post temple Christ killers back to the conversation with Christians, which is where this episode is gonna end up. That is not a place that the church should ever have gone. Men went there for seemingly good reasons, but they disobeyed Christ when they did it.

1:46:07 And so that's where we're gonna finish up here today. So as I said, we're gonna do the fourth episode of this series entirely on the reception of the Septuagint in the New Testament. And then the third episode will just be the Old Testament differences between the Masoretic, which we'll talk about in a minute It and the Septuagint. So as a result, we're not going to specifically talk about what Jesus and the apostles were doing at that time beyond just to state the obvious fact that they were speaking Greek, they were preaching and teaching in Greek. They were quoting Greek. Greek was their language. That should be good enough for us. That's a 30-second episode. But subsequent to the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the deaths of

1:46:54 all the apostles, the church was born in the wake of that. That was the beginning of the church, effectively at Pentecost. During the first, second, and third centuries, there were a couple moments in the fourth century in particular. There were a couple small moments that at the time mostly seemed academic in nature. And what they did, even though they were very small changes at the time, they laid foundations for the reason we're doing this entire series. They laid the foundations for the rejection of the Septuagint, even though that wasn't their intention. The The first of those men was Origen, who before about 240 AD wrote what is called his hexapla. It was a large compendium with six columns of six different versions

1:47:49 of the Old Testament. There was one in Hebrew, there was a Greek direct transliteration of that Hebrew, word character for character, word for word. And then there were four different Greek translations of the Hebrew. And he was doing this side by side again around 240 AD, specifically because there were a number of different copies of the Septuagint floating around And he just wanted to sort it out. The exact same sort of textual critical problems that we have today, where, you know, problem in the sense that one manuscript doesn't match another manuscript. Let's figure out why they're not the same. Was there a copyist error? Was someone trying to change something? Was it a marginal addition that crept in?

1:48:32 These things happen when you're hand copying things. And we're not talking about computer files that can be duplicated perfectly. Men had to sit there and write this stuff on longhand. It was incredibly arduous and expensive. It took a lot of care and skill. It took a lot of time and money, too. So Origin's task was that was self-appointed was I just want to straighten this out, I want to figure out what's going on, which of these Greek texts is the best. And he opened the door to consulting the Hebrew, which in effect hadn't been done previously, with one exception. Prior to origin, around two hundred forty AD, there was a man named Theodosian, who was not a Jew by race, but he converted into Judaism after the ascension of Christ, somewhere around 50 AD.

1:49:24 He became Christian and he at some point translated another another copy of the existing Hebrew text that he could get his hands on into Greek. So he basically made his own personal Septuagint. And this is called Theodosians. And it doesn't exist today, but there are bits and pieces floating around. What's interesting about him is which makes him more than trivia, Theodosian's version of the book of Daniel ended up in those unseals that I talked about. By Origins Day, for reasons that we don't actually know, pretty much everyone in the early church had rejected the Septuagint version, which is called the Old Greek or the OG version for Theodosians. So we have here is the original Septuagint translated from Hebrew into

1:50:17 Greek before the birth of Christ. After Christ is murdered by the Jews and is raised from the dead, after the church is born at Pentecost, Theodosian comes along, makes a fresh translation. It's speculated that he may have been a Gnostic before he became a Jew, but he converted into Judaism As they were celebrating killing Christ. And so I want to reiterate something that Corey said, I think probably in the Hebrews Israelites and Jews episode. There is a prayer of the Jews that originated right at the time of the destruction of the second temple. It's called the Brakat Hamanim. I'm just going to read you a portion of it against heretics. This is a prayer that was prayed multiple times a day by

1:51:00 every faithful Jew at the time that this man became a Jew. The prayer that these Jews and they continued until this day in some form pray, for the apostates, let there be no hope, and uproot the kingdom of arrogance speedily and in our days, may the Nazarenes and their sectarians perish as in a moment. Let them be blotted out of the book of life and not be written together with the righteous. Your praised, O Satan, who subdues the arrogant. Now the only word of this I've changed is Lord to Satan, because they wrote this after having murdered Christ. It is Christian doctrine that every Jew from that point on could only possibly be praying to Satan. And part of the reason that they made this change and they

1:51:44 made this liturgical practice in the temple and in their synagogues, because prior to the destruction of the temple, Christians, including Jewish converts to Christianity, were still meeting in the synagogues. They were gathering with those who had not yet accepted the word of God and the message of Christ and the gospel, as had been explicated from their own scriptures, but Christians and Jews were still meeting together because they were Jews ethnically, racially, who had converted to Christianity. But they're also going to the synagogue. This is recorded in the New Testament itself. And then also in the New Testament it's testified that eventually they started driving them out of the synagogues.

1:52:22 This prayer, when it was concocted at the destruction of the Second Temple, ensured the Christians would be driven from the synagogues, because God just destroyed the temple. They couldn't have their sacrifices anymore. They couldn't do any of the temple worship. But they still gathered in synagogues, which was legal for them. They created this prayer that blasphemes God. When they say may the Nazarenes and the sectarians perish in a moment, what they're saying is may all the Christians die as soon as possible. And they prayed this multiple times a day. So Theodosian prayed this multiple times a day, and then he went to work translating from Hebrew into Greek. And for whatever reason that was accepted as the Daniel that's used

1:53:05 even in the very earliest complete copies of an unseal that is entirely Greek. We do have the OG Daniel, and it's substantially different, which is interesting because Daniel is one of the only books in the Old Testament that's not entirely written in Hebrew, even by their own records. A portion of it's written only in Aramaic. There are a couple parts of the Old Testament that do not exist at all in Hebrew. They only exist in Aramaic. In Daniel was one, whereas a significant chunk of it was only in Aramaic. So we still to this day have extant copies of the original Greek Daniel, but the earliest versions of the completed scripture in Greek rejected them, and we don't know why, but we do know that

1:53:53 they accepted a version of scripture based on Hebrew from a man who was a Gnostic and became someone who prayed this prayer asking for all Christians to be killed. And that's what we know. By Origin's day, when he made his hexapla, he includes the Theodosian side by side, 'cause it was it was one of the extant copies and it was floating around and people are arguing about it. And he comments that he doesn't know when the church accepted Theodosian's version of Daniel. So it was far enough before 240 that it was sort of already done. So even when we point to these unseals that are complete copies of the Greek Old and New Testament, and they do have minor differences between them, it's not like it's settled just because we narrow

1:54:38 down our textual basis for what a future translation would look like. We even still have a question of what will we do in the future with the old Greek or the OG Daniel. Personally, I find it highly suspect that Theodosian's version was used instead. We We don't have access to their arguments, but we do have access to the text. So at some point in the future, completely separate from these conversations, we'll have to figure that out. One of the other things that Origin did, in addition to creating the hexaple, which was one of his greatest works, greatest in terms of scope, he stirred up a ton of controversy in other teachings, and there was a great deal of controversy after his death about

1:55:18 some of his beliefs and teachings One of the things that he introduced into the Christian church that hadn't really existed, and certainly to the same degree, was copying another Hellenistic Jew named Philo of Alexandria. Philo's goal was to reconcile Jewish scripture in the first century. He was born about 20 BC and died 50 AD. So he was a Jew his entire life. He remained a Jew. He's damned. He rejected Christ. He wanted to reconcile the Hebrew scriptures with Greek philosophy, especially Platonism. And so what Philo did was significantly push the notion of allegorical readings of scripture. And you begin to see this in Origin, you see it in Jerome, and it really took off significantly at that time and it

1:56:04 really kind of went away later. But when you read these early church fathers, some of what they write is really odd because they're so allegorical. They basically almost reject the text as any sort of literal basis, and they just want to find layers of meaning, which was a very Jewish thing. And he got it from Philo, even though Philo was himself doing it in the inspiration of Plato. So you know, we talk about the genealogy of ideas, you have these layers building up, and if there's someone taking things in a slightly bad direction, you can get wildly off cars later just because someone like Origen listened to someone like Philo who rejected Christ and introduced Platonism in a way that maybe other Christian thinkers wouldn't have.

1:56:51 So this is the first moment where this the early church doesn't suddenly start adopting Hebrew. There was no notion of that. Origin's specific goal was twofold. One, he wanted to just harmonize all these floating Greek copies of the scriptures because they were they're kind of all over the place. And he wanted to compare it to the Hebrew that he had access to to see what was going on. Because if it was a translation, let's match and see what we have. But it didn't shift thinking. It simply opened the door that well maybe we need to consult the Hebrew. And that's something that comes up later with Jerome, and then we get off to the races in the second millennium, which will be next week's episode.

1:57:31 But just remember that if Origin had not opened the door to looking at Hebrew, we don't know who would have done it, and Origin as well. Origin had to go talk to a ton of rabbis in order to learn Hebrew because in the church that wasn't done. People weren't learning Hebrew. They didn't know it. They didn't know how to read it or write it. So Origen himself had to go talk to rabbis who were saying this prayer. They're saying a prayer, May the Nazarenes and the Sectarians die in a moment. You know, I said earlier they that prayer is directed to Satan. Some of you probably got upset that let me just quote you a few passages from scripture that lay that case out so that yeah you can still be mad at me but you'll have to

1:58:12 have Jesus in the room when we do it. Jesus says in John fourteen, I am the way, the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father except through me. Can a Jew after the destruction of the temple who's praying for the Nazarenes to die in a moment, be coming to the Father with his prayer? No. He can only possibly be praying to Satan. And first John two it is written, Who is the liar, but he who denies Jesus is the Christ? This is the Antichrist, he who denies the Father and the Son. No one who denies the Son has the Father. Whoever confesses the Son has the Father also. And so on that basis I change that prayer to say they're not saying you are praised, O God, who subdues the arrogant. They're praying to Satan.

1:58:53 They cannot possibly direct their prayer to God because God does not hear their prayers. And frankly they know it. In first Corinthians ten is written, the sacrifices of pagans are offered to demons, not to God. I do not want you to be participants with demons. There is no greater participation with demons than the Jewish prayer that is not directed to God Almighty. They do not have God the Father because they do not have the Son. They murdered him, they reject him to this day. And the fact that ever since the destruction of the temple, we have these early church fathers, even men in good conscience going to rabbis who blaspheme Christ to say explain God to me is the genesis of the problems that plague us today.

1:59:34 So Origin made a small mistake. It wasn't a big deal. He didn't Judaize the entire church in a moment. Satan was content to let this just sit and lie for a while, but he opened the door because he reintroduced Hebrew where it had been completely lost. He said, Wow, we have all these Greek copies flying around, rather than just comparing the Greek to each other, he compared the Hebrew as well. I wish to God that he had never done that because had that door not been opened, who knows how much better off we would be today. And And so the next step in this narrative is indeed as Mo mention Jerome. Because it is really Jerome's translation that truly starts the use of Hebrew, restarts the use of Hebrew

2:00:20 in the actual church. Prior to Jerome's translation, there was an existing old translation into Latin from the Septuagint. That was the Vetus Latina, which is just the old Latin translation. Jerome was commissioned by the Pope to produce an updated Latin translation Now, Jerome had already had some interaction with rabbis from this time, and so he had some knowledge of Hebrew. In order to increase his knowledge of Hebrew, because he felt that was something he should do in order to translate the Old Testament, he spent about fifteen years in and around Jerusalem. So during his time in Jerusalem, learning from Jews, learning the Hebrew language from them, he is dealing with men who have explicitly rejected

2:01:17 Christ. Because bear in mind we are now dealing at the end of the three hundreds, not BC, but AD. Centuries after Christ's ministry on earth, these are Jews descended from Jews descended from Jews, all of whom rejected Christ and prayed daily for Christians to be destroyed, and for the church of Christ to be destroyed. And Jerome went to these men to learn how to translate Scripture. In fact, it is seemingly from these men that Jerome obtained the Hebrew text that he used in order to translate Scripture. We don't have access to what he used, so we don't actually know for certain which Hebrew sources he used in his translation. It may have been some proto-version of the Masoretic text, but we

2:02:12 have no way of knowing, because those were not preserved. In fact, when Saint Augustine asked him for some of his resources, he gave various excuses as to why he could not provide them, one being that he said he didn't have a sufficient number of scrib have hand to do so. And incidentally, in his correspondence with Augustine, Augustine urged him to maintain the historical and traditional usage of the Septuagint. It was Jerome who decided not to do that. Jerome, in his consultation with rabbis, decided that he should use the Hebrew. Whatever it happened to be. And so in his translation that became the Vulgate, he used Hebrew and some Greek and also reference the older Latin version. But it was in fact Jerome who introduced this usage of the

2:03:06 Hebrew as a source for the translation of the Old Testament. And this is the beginning of the usage of Hebrew. It is the entry of Hebrew back into the church. But as we laid out earlier in this episode, this is not biblical Hebrew. This is not ancient Hebrew. That was not maintained. That was lost because God destroyed it. This is something else. This is something that was produced by rabbis in Jerusalem and the surrounding territory, and then passed off to Christians as if it were the word of God. And slowly but surely over the ensuing centuries, it would replace the use of the Greek. Obviously, much more quickly after the Great Schism, because then you have that divide between the Eastern and the Western Church, and Satan used

2:04:00 that in order to entrench Hebrew, because he used the animosity between the Greek speaking East and the Latin-speaking West, in order to entrench this new version of the Latin, the Vulgate, with its Old Testament based on Hebrew. To be fair to Jerome, we are not saying that Jerome was an entirely faithless man. We're not saying that Jerome was apostate or actively wicked. There may have been some of that in some cases, it is a wisdom call on that count. What we are saying is that Jerome was deceived. Jerome was led to believe that it is the Hebrew, so called, that is the proper basis of the Old Testament, and then he foolishly went and spent a decade and a half dealing with rabbis.

2:05:00 That is not something that Christians should be doing. You do not go to the men who murdered the Lord Christ, who daily blaspheme him, who daily curse Christians, who daily curse the Church of Christ, and ask them to interpret scripture for you. This is in fact one of the central points that we are making in this series. One of the fundamental problems with Hebrew is that ask almost any pastor who has learned Hebrew, and he will praise rabbis, because he will say that we go to rabbis to ask them how to understand these difficult passages of scripture. We go to rabbis to help us understand this Hebrew language. Any Christian should have the hairs on the back of his neck stand up on end when he hears that.

2:05:52 You do not go to the sons of Satan to ask about the Son of God. That is exactly what is being done when Christians go to Jewish rabbis in order to learn about Scripture. What does Scripture say about itself to those who don't have the Spirit, which is to say those who are not Christians, which is to say in this instance Jews? It says they're blind, and they're deaf. They cannot see, they cannot hear, because Scripture is a closed book to those who do not have the Spirit. It is a denial of the Word of God to go to rabbis and ask them to interpret Scripture Because Scripture says they can't. We should not be using this text that they produced from somewhere and then passed off to Jerome, who then gave it to the

2:06:45 Western Church as if as if it were scripture. Now again, as we've said, God miraculously preserved most of his word through that line, despite the evil intentions of the Jews. But we have a better text available. We have the Septuagint. We have the text that our forefathers in the faith used. That is the text that we should be using. Not this one that was given to us by wicked apostate Jews. This is again one of those instances where we're looking at the genealogy, in this case not just of an idea, but the provenance of an actual document. Incidentally, we don't know the exact provenance of what would become potentially the Masoretic text or whatever it was that predated it, that preceded it in the hands of these rabbis.

2:07:36 But we know the source. We know that it was held by those who rejected Christ. We know that it was copied by those who rejected Christ. We know that it was edited by those who rejected Christ and then passed off by them to Christian men. On the other hand, we have the Septuagint, which was produced by those who were faithful, which was passed to those who were faithful, and then passed down by those who were faithful, and then used by those who were faithful to build the Church of Christ of Christ. This is not a difficult question. Now as we have said a number of times in this episode and will undoubtedly say in future episodes as well, it certainly produces some problems. This is not an easy thing to investigate, it's not an easy

2:08:23 thing to teach. But when it comes to causing problems so called in the church, The issue always lies with those who are advancing a lie. The man who stands up and speaks the truth is not the one who is causing trouble in Christ's Church. It is those who are defending a lie. And in this case, the lie is that we need Hebrew in order to have the word of God. Because God rendered his judgment on the Hebrew language. God rendered his judgment on the Hebrew text, which again we don't even have, it was not preserved. God rendered his judgment on all of these things. They're dead and gone. He gave us the Greek. That is the word of God. That is the one we should defend. So when we stand up and defend the Septuagint, or when you

2:09:19 stand up and defend the Septuagint if it falls to you to do so, we are not, and you are not, the ones or the one causing dissension or conflict in Christ Church. That was caused by those who failed to defend the things they should have defended and reject the things they should have rejected. Because as soon as a rabbi stands up and says, I can tell you about Christ, don't listen. Tell him to shut up, walk away. He has nothing to tell you that doesn't come from Satan. Even if what he happens to speak in that particular moment at that instant is true. He is a son of his father below, and he will eventually seek to mislead you. Because that's the whole reason he wants to start that interaction.

2:10:07 The whole reason that Satan wanted Origen to wonder if maybe Hebrew is useful was so that Jerome would go and learn from rabbis, so that Jerome would use Hebrew in his translation of the Old Testament, so that everything that has flowed from that in subsequent centuries could be brought into and poisoned the churches. That is the reason that he did it. You don't give him the opening. As we've used in a number of previous episodes, the analogy of Satan as a snake is perfect. Is anyone who has dealt with snakes, and this would have immediately resonated with basically everyone down through history, except for those of us in the modern world usually don't have to deal with snakes, thankfully. But everyone knew if a snake can get his head into a

2:11:00 place, the whole snake will follow. Perhaps these days it would be easier to compare cats for people because cats use their whiskers in the same way. If a cat's whiskers hits something when he is pushing his head through, he knows he may have trouble getting the rest of his body through. That's how cats tend to find their way and size things. Snakes do it with their head. Satan is a snake. If you give him an opening big enough for his head, the rest of the snake is going to follow in the fullness of time. That was the opening that was given to Satan as soon as Christians started consulting rabbis to use Hebrew, the language that God killed, the language that God did not preserve, the language that is

2:11:48 not the language of God's word, because again the language of God's word is the Greek. I want to plug what Origen and Jerome did by consulting rabbis back into this timeline that we've laid out for you. By the time of the Maccabean Revolt, Hebrew was long dead. By the time of Jesus and the Apostles, all scripture was being read in Greek and taught from Greek. When Paul argued from the scriptures with the Jews and the synagogues, he used the Septuagint, 'cause it's the only thing they could understand. So So even the rabbis who rejected Christ, even those who murdered Christ, subscribed to the Greek, as Corey said earlier, it wasn't until Christ's death and resurrection, which was kind of a ruining moment for

2:12:36 those people, when Christ was raised from the dead and ascended into heaven and Christianity took off, and the proselytization inside the synagogues was running wild, so they eventually had to throw the Christians out of the synagogues 'cause they were too successful. Because remember the among the Jews in that day there were those who hated Christ and continued, and there were the elect, who when they heard the word of God and they saw the miracles performed, they believed. Just like us, we hear the word of God and we believe because we are elect. They were Jews racially, they were Jews culturally, they heard the word of God and they became Christians. Crucially, they ceased to be Jews. They did not perpetuate their habits, their lifestyles, their language.

2:13:20 None of it persisted. They just became the local Palestinian people in that place. And until the state of Israel has basically exterminated Christianity with America's help in this century, that was one of the oldest communities of Christians on the planet in existence. Those were originally Jews and they just intermixed, they didn't they ceased to be racial Jews, they were just Middle Easterners, they were Palestinians. But they're Christians because once you set aside the habits and the Mosaic Law, which Christ fulfilled perfectly, there's no more reason not to marry your neighbor who is your cousin, who is, you know, not racially Jewish, but they're all basically the same there. After the destruction of the temple, when the Jews were on the

2:14:09 warpath and were continuing to kill Christians, or the first thing they did after killing Christ, one of the first things was to murder Stephen. And Paul had been active in doing that. He was proudly going around murdering Christians. This was sport for the Jews. These people, after the destruction of the temple, began to push back towards saying, hey, we need to get rid of this Greek stuff because it's been causing problems. Incidentally, just like the Maccabeans said during the revolt, that was one of the reasons for the revolt was Hellenization. And they were right, it was going to ultimately end Jews in Judaism. There's nothing left anymore, because that was God's decree. The return to Hebrew was in intent.

2:14:52 It was something that we saw in the Bar Kokhbal revolt around one hundred thirty five. But it still took them a while to begin to actually even have anything liturgically. But what happened after this was the writing down of the Talmud mostly in Aramaic, and some in Greek incidentally, and bits in Hebrew that were older. When Origen laid down those translations of Greek and then he put the Hebrew side by side, one of his reasons I I forgot to mention earlier, one of his reasons was apologetics against the Jews of his day. Because in a Christian environment, the rabbis realized that the Greek was a big problem for them. And so one of the things that they did, despite just two, three generations previously having accepted the Greek Septuagint as the inspired word

2:15:44 of God, they now rejected it. So when a Christian came to them with the Greek Bible, they said, no, I I reject that. The original is in Hebrew. Come learn Hebrew with me, and then we can discuss scripture as it was given to us. That was complete BS. That was a total LARP. It never happened, but they lied and people fell for it. See, there's no continuity of the Hebrew language even in that day. There's a reason the Apocrypha is all Greek. It's because Hebrew was killed. God let it happen. God did it. And so by the time of origin, when part of the reason he lays down Hebrew is so he can argue with Jews who are gonna reject all the other Greek versions. One of the purposes of the hexapla was to say, look, the

2:16:26 Greek is consistent with the Hebrew, but he had to put it side by side so he could show, you know, which of Which of those four versions it was floating around was better. And incidentally, when Pope Damasc I commissioned Jerome initially to come up with a new Latin translation of the Bible, initially the focus was just on the Gospels, but the goal that Jerome was given was to solve the problem of the old Latin that was floating around, the Weddus Latina, as Corey said. There was not a single version of a Latin translation. There were a bunch floating around, more than there were of Greek translations, and they were not inspired. So that some of them were pretty bad and it was causing scandal and it was causing fights in the church.

2:17:08 So the Pope was solving the right problem, saying, hey, let's have an officially commissioned Latin version of the Bible, since increasingly people can't read Greek. Let's translate it into Latin so we can all be on the same page. That was a perfectly correct order from this pope. What happened was as Corey said Jerome is like no no no I need to go talk to the rabbis that I already know and they're helping really improve my learning. So he went off on his own and decided he wanted to resort to the Hebrew. That was not his command, and it was a scandal when he did it. Augustine sent him numerous letters, which he ignored for about twenty years, saying it look, you're stirring up dissent, you're confusing people.

2:17:49 One of Augustine's objections to Jerome at that time, which is a valid concern, and one that we have to this day, is spreading confusion. And unfortunately, simply racing this question is going to spread confusion. It's a tragic but necessary part of telling the truth when things have gone awry. So as Corey said, it's not that someone who asks questions about the Septuagint is causing dissension, but rather the dissension began in the second and third and fourth centuries when these guys, with no warrant from Christ or from the prophets or from the apostles, went to Jews, rabbis specifically, and said teach us Hebrew so we can bypass the scripture of Jesus and the apostles and we can get down

2:18:35 to the real thing. That's what it boils down to. And crucially, the other thing from the timeline that you have to remember, Hebrew in Jerome's day was not a written language. It was an oral tradition. What they had written did not have the vows, the only way to read it was to talk to a rabbi. It was exclusively by oral tradition that the text that was given to Jerome could have been transmitted. He had to sit there with a rabbi, not just being taught Hebrew, but being But being taught every word in the Old Testament. Because without vowels, you can't just look at it and read it. That was the entire reason for the Masoretic text that we're going to finish up with. Before the inclusion of vowel pointers and the other things that made

2:19:17 it a complete written language for the first time in history, at least with the Aramaic script, it was necessary to have a Christ killer explain what it said. And so when Origin went to rabbis, when Theodosian himself translated, when Jerome went to rabbis, everyone involved in giving the Hebrew to these people was wicked, was a Satan worshiper. And we are using them as the basis for our scripture today. Now, as I said earlier, it doesn't matter if every word matches word for word. It honestly doesn't matter because the Greek is what we were given by God. But When you do look, you find sometimes substantial differences. And the other crucial mistake that Jerome entered into the Christian lexicon,

2:20:08 for which I can never forgive him. This is one of the most evil things ever said in human history. Was an entirely reasonable intellectual argument that, well, the Septuagint in Greek is a translation from an earlier source from a Hebrew forelaga, I want to return to the pure spring, because what I have in front of me is a muddied water. That's essentially the analogy that Jerome made. And has been repeated by everyone ever since. And he called it the Hebraica Weritas the truth of Hebrew, or the Hebrew truth. The only way to get to the truth of Scripture according to Jerome was to bypass the Greek entirely and go to the Hebrew because it was older. Is that true if you believe what we've said about Jesus and

2:20:51 the apostles? It can't be. They quoted it as scripture. They said it was breathed out by God. At no point in the entire New Testament does anyone say we have to learn Hebrew in order to preserve scripture? You won't find anything of the sort. On the contrary, you're going to find practically entire books dedicated to lamb basing Judaizing. This is the Judaizing heresy for which we did an entire episode. To say I can't know God unless I talk to a Christ murdering rabbi is it's blasphemous and it's insane. And it's not even substantiated by history. Jerome Origin wanted to argue with Jews about Scripture, and the bait ever since has been, oh well, if we can argue with them in Hebrew, we can convert them.

2:21:40 Remember this from episode eight of Stone Choir we did an episode on the neglected matters, and one of them was Christ's command to shake the dust off your feet. I'm gonna read a couple of those passages and I want you to compare it to what's been done here in church history with regard to the Greek and the Hebrew. In Mark six, Jesus says, And if any place will not receive you and they will not listen to you, when you leave shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them. Now testimony here is a particular Greco Roman concept, the word that was used, had to do establishing a legal fact. So testimony against them is not simply a curse, which it was, but it was establishing the fact that God curses these people in

2:22:24 this place. Christ commanded that of anyone who would reject his gospel. And as we point out in that episode, there are only two examples in scripture of being done, and then it just vanishes. We couldn't at the time, and I don't think we've located since. I haven't heard of anyone saying, here's an example of someone cursing someone in the name of God for rejecting the gospel. I'm gonna read two long passages because the entire text is really crucial for this understanding. The first is Acts thirteen. The next Sabbath almost the whole city gathered to hear the word of the Lord, but when the Jews saw the crowds, they were filled with jealousy, and began to contradict what was spoken by Paul,

2:23:03 reviling him. And Paul and Barnabas spoke out boldly, saying, It is necessary that the word of God be spoken first to you, since you thrust it aside and judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life, behold we are returning to the nations, for so the Lord has commanded us saying, I have made you a light for the nations that you may bring salvation to the ends of the earth. And when the nations heard this they began rejoicing and glorifying the word of the Lord, and as many as were appointed to eternal life believed, and the word of the Lord was spreading throughout the whole region. But the Jews incited the devout women of high standing, and the leading men of the city stirring up persecution against Paul and Barnabas,

2:23:40 and drove them out of their district. But they shook off the dust from their feet against them and went on to Iconium, and the disciples were filled with joy in the Holy Spirit. And again five chapters later. After this, Paul left Athens and went to Corinth, and he found a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus, recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius has commanded all the Jews to leave Rome. And he went to see them, and because he was of the same trade he stayed with them and worked, for they were tent makers by trade. And he reasoned in the synagogue every Sabbath, and tried to persuade Jews and Greeks. When Silas and Timothy arrived from Macedonia, Paul was occupied with the

2:24:20 word, testifying to the Jews that the Christ was Jesus, and when they opposed and reviled him he shook out his garments and said to them, Your blood be upon your own heads, I am innocent. From now on I will go to the nations. Because we said in episode eight, the very beginning of Stone Choir, what do we have? We have a command from Christ To curse a people in a place who reject the gospel, and we see Paul and Barnabas doing precisely that. He went to the Jews, they reviled him, they rejected the gospel. He said, I'm out of here. Cursed be you, may your blood be upon your own heads. I am innocent of it. I'm going to the Gentiles. I'm going to the nations. And where'd he go? He went to the Europeans.

2:25:00 That is what God commanded when we are confronted with any unbeliever who blasphemes and rejects Christ. No Now, tell me this. Did we see Origen obey Christ? Did we see Jerome obey Christ? When they were confronted with blasphemers, who hate God Almighty, who reject his word, who refuse to hear the gospel, did they curse him as Christ commanded? Or did they say, No, I need to learn even more Hebrew? I gotta get really into this, and then I convince them. Paul was the one going around doing all the convincing from scripture, and he was also the one cursing. He shook the dust off his feet as a testimony against them because they rejected him. When you reason from scripture, when you reason from the Septuagint, and

2:25:45 someone rejects it, Christ commands that you curse them and you leave. The Jews have been cursed since the day that the temple was destroyed. There is to be no more mission work to them. I don't see how we reach any other conclusion and yet what do we see instead? Since Origin, since Jerome, and up until this day, there are guys on X who revile Cory and me because they love the Jews so much that they go to Israel and try to preach to them in Hebrew and show them in their own Bible where Jesus is found. And you know what you see on the faces of those Jews when they do it? They're smiling. They love it. Because one, they love arguing. And two, they've trapped yet another fool. For centuries men have refused to obey Christ and curse those who

2:26:33 reject the gospel. Jesus doesn't say to curse individually, he says curse the whole town and leave. There's no command to go back in the next generation. Those people are to be cursed forever. Now, if they come crawling back, absolutely they're to be received. And there are a few precious examples in church history of men doing that. We have Nicholas Donan in the thirteenth century and Johannes Pfeffricorn in the sixteenth century. We'll be talking about them next week. These were actual Jews by blood in Europe in the second millennium, who were raised as Christ killing, murdering Jews, who repented and believed the gospel, and they ceased to be Jews entirely, and they immediately went to the Christian rulers and said, Do Do you know what

2:27:18 these guys are saying? One of the accusations of Donan in the thirteenth century was the specifically that prayer against the rulers and against the Christian believers. And Donan testified that every man, woman, and child prayed that repeatedly. And in the cases where the Jews in Europe were praying it and they didn't know Hebrew, which was common, they would pray it under their breath in the vernacular. But they prayed it three or five times a day as they were commanded, cursing the Nazarenes, cursing the Christians, wishing for their immediate death. These are not people to whom we are given a command to take the gospel. We are commanded by God to curse them and to turn away from them. And every single time that someone has disobeyed Christ and said, Oh,

2:28:01 I'm gonna learn Hebrew so I can talk to them, A, he's rejecting history because the rabbis who murdered Christ in the first century still accepted the Greek. It was not until after the temple was destroyed that they realized how deadly the Septuagint was to Judaism. That's when the turn occurred. When we go to Jews and say, I'm going to accept your frame, I'm going to learn Hebrew, I'm going to debate you from the original language, we're calling Christ a liar and we're disobeying him. That's the bottom line here. It's not as simple as textual sources for translations, which is why I've said on X previously, this series is the most important thing Stonequir will ever do. Because this is such a fundamental

2:28:47 shift in the approach that Christians should have taken all along to God's word and to how we receive it, that when you start looking at the mistakes downstream from the small mistake that Origin made and the bigger mistake that Jerome made. That was a very intelligent argument. Why would I drink from a muddied stream when I can go to the pure spring? That's a great argument. I love the argument in principle. But the pure spring is the Septuagint. It is the inspired word of God that was received and confessed by Christ and the apostles. That is the pure spring that the church must drink from, and our failures to do so are downstream themselves or upstream from every problem that we have now.

2:29:27 Stonequarred wouldn't exist if the Masoretic text didn't exist. If we had not, as a church, long before any of us showed up, if we had not rejected the Greek scripture as it was received, we wouldn't have these problems. You know why? Because at no point would we have ever let a single Jew become a part of the conversation about our God. Look at how many different episodes we've done that involve something some harm that they have done in Christian lands. None of that harm could possibly have been done if we had not listened to them. It's just that simple. That's not even a question of hatred. It's not a question of cruelty. It's just I'm not listening. It's exactly the same thing that many people say about Stonequare.

2:30:10 Don't listen to the go those guys at all. They're dangerous. Yes, we are dangerous to those who hate God. We are dangerous to those who do not believe what Christ says. And even the small things like shaking the dust off your feet, the vanished from Christian practice. At the time I said seems like a small thing, I don't know what to do with it. Ninety-two episodes later, I have a pretty good idea where it should have been done, at least once. If we as Christians cannot shake the dust off our feet against the Jews who murdered Christ and dance in his blood to this day, then we should just delete that from our Bibles. We should rip it out and say that Jesus was wrong. Because if it doesn't apply to them, it doesn't apply to anyone.

2:30:48 And every problem that we have since then can be traced to this mistake. That's why the Septuagint matters so much. And that's crucial. It's not ultimately about the differences as textual sources. It's not ultimately about whether any doctrines will change. I don't think for the most part they will. I you know, there's always clarification when someone makes a better argument. It's possible things will be clarified, but this is not going to revamp Christianity because the text change. What is changing here if people believe what we are saying is we're gonna stop inviting Jews inside the room. We're gonna stop inviting Jews to the table who curse us and wish us dead and curse God every day of their lives and

2:31:28 by every action that they take. Those people should not have been at the table in the first place. And Origin opened the door and Jerome set the table, and the Reformation served the feast to the Jews. By that point, all hope was lost. We're gonna finish with Masoric text. When we talk next week about went on in Europe, it's a lot of really bad stuff downstream from Jerome's brilliant specious demonic argument about springs. It's very appealing. If he had applied it directly to the Septuagint, none of this would have happened. We could actually take Jerome's illustration of muddy waters or a pure stream and really turn it around against him. Because there are two different streams we're dealing with, essentially when dealing with what is

2:32:17 the Old Testament, what is Scripture? On the one hand we have the Septuagint, which is cited by Christ, referenced by the apostles, considered the word of God by the early church, accepted universally, until men started digging into the Hebrew so called. And then on the other hand, we have what becomes the Masoretic text, which which is the muddy water produced by the Jews. So quite simply the question is which one should we as Christians accept? It's fundamentally not a difficult question. Because we've laid out the history, and the history is very straightforward. Do you believe Christ, the apostles, and your forefathers in the faith? Or do you believe the Jews who rejected Christ and pray to Satan multiple times every day for your destruction?

2:33:14 It's almost ridiculous that it is necessary to present that as even being Even being a question, because it isn't really a question. It's like asking, would you like some water or some poison? Very straightforward which you should take. But to end with the Masoretic text, because that is the basis of the Old Testament in most of our Bibles now. It is necessary to look at how that text came to be. Who wrote that text? Where did it enter the church? Before getting to the Masoretes and the production of the Masoretic text itself, it's worthwhile to mention something that happened Or was completed at least, just before they began their project of the Masoretic text. And that is the Babylonian Talmud.

2:34:09 Because the Talmud was completed in about the year five hundred. And incidentally, the earliest time for the undertaking of what would become the Masoretic text by the Masoretes is about five hundred. So they ended one project and began immediately the next one. Now taking place in different parts of the world, although in commerce with each other at the time. So you have the completion of the Talmud, which is everything wicked, about the Jewish religion, which is not the Christian religion, Judaism is not Christianity As I have mentioned before, one of the most famous sayings among the Jews about the Talmud is what Torah prohibits, Talmud permits. It is literally just an inversion of everything God has said

2:35:04 is good. And permission to do everything God has said is wicked. But then the Jews set about producing the Masoretic text. We d don't have whatever documents they supposedly used as the basis for the Masoretic text. We know what documents were used as the basis for the Septuagint, because we have for one, the letter of Aristius, which does have corroborating facts from that time that we know from other sources. For instance, it's the right high priest, it's Onias III. We know his brother, Jason. We know that it was written at a certain point in time because it mentions that the high priest was still wearing a breastplate. Something that stopped happening around the year 200 BC. So that matches the timeline that we have for the Septuagint.

2:35:58 And so we know that the documents used to produce the Septuagint came from the documents that were held in the temple in Jerusalem. We don't know the source of the source of the Masoretic text. We have speculation. There's plenty of speculation. We don't have proof. But the Masoretic text is produced by these Jews who bear in mind again, this is 500 and not 500 BC. This is AD 500. Between about 500 and 1000, you have the production of this text that becomes the basis. And so you have some fragments of things that exist before that, obviously, because Jerome was doing his translating work before this. He did not have access to this. Again, we don't know what sources he used. He used whatever the rabbis gave him, and then he did not

2:36:51 preserve them for us, so we cannot examine them. But the Masoretes retreat into the desert and produce their version of Scripture, and then pass it into the church. The oldest example we have existing of the Masoretic text is from the year 1008 or 1009. It is the Leningrad Codex. That is the oldest copy of the Masoretic text. A mere one thousand years ago, a little bit more than that today. Compare that to the oldest copies we have of the Septuagint, which are from the second and the third and the fourth century. So when people try to argue that they're returning to the Hebrew, they're going back to the older documents, the originals No they're not. The Masoretic text is significantly younger, is significantly newer than the Septuagint.

2:37:48 The Septuagint is the oldest attested copy of the Old Testament that we have. And as we've already explained in the episode, it has the divine stamp on it. It is the Word of God. We do not have that with the Masoretic text. And so again, just to present the core question here with regard to which one you will choose, are you going to trust the Septuagint, which has the stamp of approval of Christ, the Apostles, and the early Church, Or are you going to pick the Masoretic text, which was produced under dubious circumstances by Jews who had rejected Christ and then brought into the church with no attestation to its provenance? It is not a hard question. This is something that Christians should quite frankly have never got wrong.

2:38:40 This is something our forefathers in the faith should have figured out at the time. Jerome should have known better. Origen should have known better. Augustine perhaps should have tried harder to dissuade Jerome from what he was undertaking. The Pope should not have approved it. Any number of men could have done something other than what they did. They could have acted otherwise and solved the problem before it became a problem for us today. It is unfortunate that it was allowed to not only enter into the churches, but to fester for so long. As we've said, this is not exactly an issue that we want to address. This is an issue that must be addressed. It is going to cause strife. There is no way around that.

2:39:26 But it is unavoidable strife, and it is strife that needs to be caused. Because this is an issue of truth. It is an issue of what is God's word and what is God commanded us to do, and how can we be faithful to that which He has commanded us to do? As Woe said, We are commanded to knock the dust off our sandals when we leave a town full of those who have rejected the gospel of Christ Well That's Jerusalem Jerome went and lived there, in Jerusalem and Bethlehem, for fourteen years, in order to produce his translation of these sources provided to him by rabbis, under the tutelage of rabbis, in cooperation with rabbis. That is most certainly not knocking the dust off your sandals when you leave the town of those who have rejected Christ.

2:40:22 As Christians we need to take seriously what Christ has told us to do. We don't get to ignore any part of Scripture, any of the commands of Christ. And incidentally, now we're dealing with the New Testament. There's no squabbling over that. Incidentally, also Greek. But we have the Greek in the New Testament. We know what Christ has said, His commands are clear. We simply have not followed them. That is something our forefathers in the faith should have done they didn't do. The best thing that we can do now is confess the sins of our fathers, which is a Christian confession, both we and our fathers have sinned, and then do better, correct the errors that they made. One of those errors is, as Woe said, giving Jews any

2:41:08 place at the table. And it's not just Jews, it's particularly Jews because they explicitly rejected Christ, and they had the oracles of God as scripture said and so they had a higher duty and they have a greater guilt. But I wouldn't give a Hindu a space at the table. I wouldn't give a Buddhist a space at the table. No one would ever argue that you should have a pagan or a Buddhist or a Hindu or someone who subscribes to Shinto, whatever it happens to be. No one would ever argue that you should have someone at the table from another religion and yet so many Christians argue that you should have Jews at the table, when they are in fact worse off than any other pagan. Because they not only do not worship the one true God, having

2:41:56 rejected his Son, they explicitly reject him and curse those who do follow him. They are the most miserable of all men on this planet. They are in the worst position to see anything of the truth in Scripture. They should never be at the table. And yet, for centuries, Christian pastors and Christian teachers have gone to them and asked them questions about Scripture. I am almost tempted to say it's tantamount to apostasy because it comes very close. Because asking those about whom Scripture says they do not have the Spirit, about whom Scripture says they are blind and deaf and dumb What the Word of God says, when you are a Christian and you have the Holy Spirit, and Scripture has promised that you will

2:42:46 be led into the truth by the Spirit, you are disbelieving the Word of God by not relying on what on what you have as a Christian, what you have been given as your patrimony as a Christian, which is incidentally given to you in Greek in the Septuagint, and instead going to the wicked Jews who have no promises, who have absolutely no insight into Scripture. If they had any insight into Scripture, they would be Christians. We should never go to them. Our forefathers should never have gone to them. It falls to us to repent of that wickedness, and to correct their errors. And the first step in that is getting rid of the Masoretic text. And going back to the Scripture of Christ and the Apostles, going back to the Scripture of the Early Church, going back to

2:43:36 the Scripture upon which the Christian Church is founded because it is the Word of God. And that is the Septuagint. One of the obvious objections to what Corey just said that will spring to some minds is well what about the Dead Sea Scrolls? To which the response is contained in his previous comment was Jesus wrong? I'll tell you what I think about the Dead Sea Scrolls. A, they're completely irrelevant to every Christian, because we already have Scripture, as Scripture itself attests. B, there is non trivial evidence that at least some, if not a substantial portion, are in fact forgeries. Doesn't matter, because CA but the timing, nineteen forty seven, substantiating, you know, territorial claims in

2:44:28 that part of the world, pretty convenient that it was discovered right then. People were also listening, so I don't know. Maybe true, maybe false. But see, my sole evaluation for what is dug out of the Dead Sea scrolls or anywhere else, that some amazing new archaeological find of some ancient forelaga occurred occurs. Either it says the same thing that the scripture of Jesus and the Apostle says, in which case I will celebrate God's great mercy and his love in preserving his word so faithfully through the generations, or it's gonna say something different and I'll say curse it and burn it. That's it. If we trust Jesus and the apostles and we trust the scripture that they used, then all these other questions fly out the window,

2:45:15 which is Which is why I said in episode ninety nine, I said at the beginning of this one, some of your objections become irrelevant if you accept a portion of our argument. You shouldn't care about the Dead Sea scrolls, because either they say the same thing that the scripture that God gave us says, or they're demonic. Or they're mistakes, or they're forgeries, or they're bad copies, or whatever, but they're irrelevant. You don't have to have a strongly held opinion beyond I don't care. That's a pretty good opinion for most people to have about most things. Because this stuff is time consuming, it's complicated, it's easy to make mistakes, it's easy to get twisted around backwards. But some of this stuff is so important that we have to

2:45:54 get it right. Dead Sea Scrolls and any other example of older writing, and again, the crucial thing about the Leningrad Codex from 1008 AD, that's one thousand seventeen years ago. This is brand new by church history standards. It's over six centuries newer than the copies that we have of the Greek Bible which are authentic. Everything prior to that was a thousand years of Christ killers, and B, it was based entirely on an oral tradition. The only thing that changed when the Masoretes put all those decorations on it so that you could actually read this newly constituted written Hebrew language that never existed before. Is that now they could sell a book to someone and say, here's a primer, which we're going to talk about next week, and

2:46:39 here's your Bible. And so you can go learn Hebrew on your own. You don't need a rabbi anymore. No rabbi in the loop Well, of course, everyone still goes and consults rabbis, or they consult men who are in the church who have consulted rabbis. You can't get away from them because ultimately everything that touches Hebrew in any form is based on the oral tradition passed down from those who'd murdered Christ. As Cory said, if that's not a reason not to reject them, I don't know what is. I honestly don't know any Christian could know that to be a fact Which it is undisputably. And say, well, I'm going to listen to him anyway. Maybe they have some good things to say about Jesus. I'm going to get closer to God by listening to what these

2:47:21 people say. That's why I said it doesn't matter if it's exactly the same word for word or not. I don't care. These people murdered Christ and they hate him and they hate us. They don't get a seat at the table. They don't get to talk about our religion and our God. Every time we have gone to the Jews and said, Well, hey, we're going to argue in Hebrew so we can convert you, that has been an act of wickedness. The apostles stopped doing it. We shouldn't have continued. And it seems like such a Christian thing to do, to take it to all the nations. Do we believe God's command or not? He says when someone rejects the gospel, you curse them and you leave forever. The fact that we didn't do it has borne fruit.

2:48:06 So, as I said, I hope you've been writing down any objections you have. Please, for the sake of my sanity, don't complain too much yet until we're done. We have at least three more episodes to do. This one looks like it's gonna be about three hours long. Hopefully other ones won't be that long. But let us finish making our case before you complain about all the things that we got wrong. I would make my life a lot easier. So if you want to make me miserable, do it. But whatever. I appreciate the people care. Uh thank you to everyone who shares Stone Choir anywhere. If you're listening to us for the first time on Spotify or wherever. The best place to find us is on our own website with the RSS link.

2:48:47 You can find the listen to podcast thing at the top. If you paste that RSS feed directly into your podcast player, you'll never miss an episode. It's completely uncensorable. We've already had at least one episode censored on some of the other platforms, specifically for talking about some of these things. This one probably won't get deep platform, but they would love to see us go away entirely. It may happen at some point. So if you do enjoy us, I would suggest you use the RSS feed because it'll be immune to that. Thank you to everyone who shares our content. Thank you everybody who has donated in the past. It means a great deal. And thank you for sticking around. Thank you for putting up with these long episodes.

2:49:25 The next episode, as I said, is gonna pick up right where this left off. We've ended with the Masoretic text in one thousand eight AD. That's pretty much what we're gonna pick up next week. So we've done is segregated this first episode is more or less the Mediterranean edition of the Septuagint story. Next week is going to be the European edition of the Septuagint story, and that's going to be precisely about all the places where all of our favorite Protestant and even Roman Catholic fathers in the faith didn't do what we said they should have done. And we're going to see what happened when they didn't. And then the subsequent two weeks will be looking at the actual text of the Old Testament, comparing some of the Masoretic to some

2:50:06 of the Septuagint. And the last episode we're going to conclude really with where our argument is fundamentally laid, and that is the scripture of the New Testament of Jesus of the Apostles is the Septuagint. We're going to make that case last because it's the most important part rather than leaving you with our arguments, we're gonna leave you with proof from the New Testament that the Old Testament in Greek is breathed out by the Word of God.