Made in Alexandria: The Origin of the Yahweh Cult

[Aractus]

If such things have been discredited and disproven, that is you are not lying about it, then you WHY do you find it impossible to recite all the discreditations and whatever the plural of disproven might since you have read them? Again you have mere assertion which is meaningless. If do in fact have personal knowledge those things occurred then you would have no problem reciting them. And if you understood them you could recite them in your own words. But you have nothing except two, idiot bible verses of disputed to unknown origin.

There's no IF about it. You're simply presenting tired old ideas. And that's it, that's all you've presented. Time and time again I've requested from you evidence for your position - you have none. You simply claim that I, and others, can't substantiate the claim that the Hebrew was written first. Every time you are given evidence, you choose to ignore it. The fact that you can't produce a single *complete* LXX manuscript proves the point in itself. Almost every original Greek manuscript contains substitutions for the book of Daniel and usually other books too. This is true of Codex Vaticanus and all of the early codices. You have no response to this claim. And let me be even more clear - the book of Daniel has just ONE - that's right ONE SINGLE mss of the LXX version and that is codex Chisianos. Furthermore to this, the Septuagint as we know it contains 46 books as has been repeatedly pointed out to you. Yet not a single Hebrew source has all 46 books listed, not a single one. Now let's assume that the Apocrypha was considered scripture, which one would expect if the Septuagint was considered scripture. That would mean that all 7 of those Apocryphal books were translated and then never seen again, and we don't know anything about the Hebrew versions!

Your claim is inconsistent, incoherent, and ignores evidence. Okay, we have the Isaiah scroll and other DSS mss which go a way to proving that the LXX wasn't in use in Qumran at that time, and in fact many of the DSS discoveries go a way to proving, consistently, which books were considered scripture. They're akin to the claims made by Abelard Reuchlin and those before him, and more recently Bart D. Ehrman (the view of the NT as a Greek forgery). The only difference between them and you is that you've chosen to focus on the OT not the NT - oh and the fact that you have no real qualifications to make the claims which you do.

You keep claiming that the earliest biblical mss discovered at Qumran is 1st century BC. This is not true, as has been repeatedly pointed out to you it is second century BC, and possibly even earlier. This doesn't sit well with you.

So the evidence is clear, and the problem you have - that you cannot overcome - is that the LXX as we know it today doesn't appear until the Hexapla (mid 3rd century). I'm not interested in what may or may not have been around prior to the Hexapla - that's conjecture. You don't have any proof that the LXX was ever a complete work until the mid 3rd century AD! All the quotes that supposedly agree with the LXX can be explained by the fact that 1. We know that Origen modified the text substantially, 2. Origen also had a complete copy of the New Testament to work with.

Even if those two illiterate people are who believers want them to have been, immaculate classical Greek and all, who can vouch for their honesty and integrity? They are minor characters in the four canonical gospels and in some of the other gospels. And even those descriptions show them weak-willed to the point of spineless -- skip down to the Passover denying him part. Neither of them wrote a letter anyone thought worth preserving showing what the contemporaries thought of their word.

You forget that both passages are quoting Jesus who was not illiterate, read the temple scrolls and knew every jot and tittle.

Beyond that, how do mid 1st c. AD (for believers) and mid 2nd c. AD (for honest people) gibberish scribblings reflect upon the existence of things to be translated into Greek two centuries earlier in the mid 2nd c. BC?

There were NO complete Greek translations at the time of Jesus of the Hebrew scriptures. Prove otherwise.