The Anonymous Gospel Manuscripts

[Aractus]

I'll being my response with a question: Which denomination of Protestant were you before you became an atheist?

Anglican, but it shouldn't matter because it's a matter of consensus among both New and Old Testament scholars that the Vulgate and "the" Septuagint are far less reliable sources for the original wording of the New and Old Testaments when compared with the Masoretic Text and the Greek text. Or to be more specific, Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia and Novum Testamentum Graece. Those are the two primary texts that the majority of modern translations use. Of course they do make some use of "the" Septuagint and the Vulgate, but give them much less priority.

And the reason why I say "the" LXX, is because it is a collection of translations written over an unknown period, presumed to have been "completed" (as in all 66 books and Apocrypha) by the mid second century, it was systematically edited and altered though, and what exists today is a copy of the fifth column of the Hexapla written in the mid-3rd century which we know Origen substantially modified by removing whole sections of LXX text and replacing it with other text from the Theodatian (the Sixth column) and other Greek translations. He in fact removed the whole of the book of Daniel and replaced it with the Theodatian translation, so that almost all ancient manuscripts that contain "the" LXX (such as Sinaiticus & Vaticanus) contain the Theodatian translation of the book of Daniel. By the time that we get to Jerome, he had both versions available to him. He had the fifth column (which is now what most people mean when they say "the Septuagint"), and he also had the pre-Hexapla version, which no longer exists. He chose to use the fifth column - consciously as it happens because he even says he didn't want to use the LXX version of Daniel.

Oh, and until recently there was just one copy of "the" LXX book of Daniel, but another was discovered, so now among the 5800 Greek language manuscripts of the New Testament (many of which contain the Old Testament in Greek as you know) there is just two that have "the" LXX book of Daniel, and of those two only only one is complete.

Let's recap for a moment.

Earliest complete copy of the Hebrew OT: 11th century (Leningrad Codex - c. 1008 AD).
Earliest complete copy of the Greek NT: 4th century (Codex Sinaiticus - c. 350 AD).
Earliest complete copy of the LXX: NONE EXIST!!


Okay, so the book of Daniel. The only known complete ancient LXX version of the book of Daniel in Greek is contained in Codex Chisianus, written in the 9th century. As I mentioned, until recently this was not just the only complete copy - it was the only copy. That's not counting the Syriac translation, of course. The only other one one is p967, which was discovered in the 20th century and originally contained 59 folded parchment leaves (ie 236 pages), it exists in a fragmentary form (it's something like 60% complete going from memory).

Even today it is impossible to get an Orthodox person to see any sense and recognise the LXX is a collection of translations, not one translation, and was systematically altered from the time that it was written up to and including the time that the Hexapla was written.

The Catholic church started changing their tune in the 20th century, when Pope Pius XII said it was OK to translate from the Greek and Hebrew instead of the Latin in 1943. As I mentioned in my previous post though, the guarding of the Vulgate since the middle-ages (and actually well before that) clearly served the purpose of protecting the RCC's doctrines which were based on the Vulgate and not the Greek New Testament. Such as the authority of the Church vs the Authority of the Scripture. For the Church to exhort its authority over Christians, it needed to be above the authority of the Scriptures.