(July 8, 2014 at 12:48 pm)Minimalist Wrote:Quote:The Hebrew Torah has been around (in Hebrew) since the 5th century BC.
No. We are not misunderstanding each other. You are being deliberately obtuse. You are making this claim and I am demanding that you provide tangible evidence of it. We have fragments of the septuagint which pre-date the Dead Sea Scrolls which are the oldest versions of "hebrew" scriptures.
http://www.deadseascrolls.org.il/featured-scrolls
Quote:The discovery of the first Dead Sea Scrolls in a remote Judean Desert cave in 1947 is widely considered the greatest archaeological event of the twentieth century. Bedouin treasure hunters and archaeologists ultimately found the remains of hundreds of ancient scrolls. These fragile pieces of parchment and papyrus, including the oldest existing copies of the Hebrew Bible,
Now, you are asserting that this shit existed in "hebrew" in the 5th century and I'm saying it is time to put up or shut up. Let's see the evidence.
What I meant to say is that of books that eventually comprise what we call the OT have been copied for centuries or even millennium. The fact that we don't have a copy that old does not mean that older copies didn't exist. How accurate are the copies seem to be the pertinent question. I was trying to point out that the Jews had a process to minimize mistakes. How accurate could the existing copies be?? That would be impossible to know. However, we do know that the Jews believed that they had accurate copies and accredited authorship of these copies to individuals at least up to the first century.