Apologetics: How We Got the Bible, Part 8 (the Old Testament)

The manuscript history of the Old Testament is quite different from the New Testament. The Jews considered it disrespectful to the scriptures to keep an old, tattered copy around. And so they buried their old scrolls when a new scroll was acquired. As a result, until the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, the oldest Hebrew manuscripts available dated only to the Ninth Century, with the oldest complete Old Testament dated to the Tenth Century.

However, we can take considerable comfort that the Jews were more careful about their copying of the texts than the Christians. Around 500 AD, a school of scribes, known as the Massoretes, made diligent efforts to find the best and oldest scrolls to preserve the text of the Old Testament. Moreover, they obsessively made certain that their copies were exact, even to the point of counting the letters in newly copied books.

There were other, earlier groups that worked to preserve the Hebrew Bible, but we know much less about them. But as we’ll see, they must have done an excellent job of copying the texts as well. Moreover, there are two major sources that give us the text of the Old Testament at much earlier dates. The Septuagint (often called “LXX”) is a translation of the Old Testament into  Greek, and several copies of the Septuagint were preserved as part of codices including the New Testament.

The four Great uncial codices of the Codex Sinaiticus (S), Codex Vaticanus (B), Codex Alexandrinus (A), and Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus (C), are the most complete, and there are hundreds of other manuscripts that have a few variant readings that are useful for tracing the development of the text.

In short, the same great codices we have for the New Testament also contain the Septuagint, giving us very ancient records for the Greek translation of the Hebrew. Moreover, the Vulgate was translated by Jerome directly from a Hebrew Bible around 400 AD, and we have passages quoted in numerous authors, such as Philo and Josephus, as well as the Talmud (Oral Law), and Targums (sort of the Jewish version of The Message — paraphrased Old Testament texts in the common language). All these combined give great confidence that the Masoretic text is an excellent one.

In 1948 a shepherd boy found some ancient scrolls in caves  near the Dead Sea. When these were opened and examined, the world found Old Testament texts some of which predate the time of Jesus, even going back to 200 BC. The Dead Sea Scrolls include two Isaiah scrolls, dated to around 100 BC, and a copy of Daniel dated to as late as 200 BC — earlier than the supposed composition of the book!

Many a skeptic has tried to avoid the detailed prophecies in Daniel by arguing that the book was written after the events predicted. But the Dead Sea Scrolls prove that the methods used by Higher Criticism to challenge the dating of Daniel are plainly unsupportable.

At this juncture we need to make another point. According to current historical-critical opinion, the book of Daniel originated in its present form in the Antiochus Epiphanes crisis, that is, between 168/167–165/164 BC. It seems very difficult to perceive that one single desert community should have preserved such a significant number of Daniel manuscripts if this book had really been produced at so late a date. The large number of manuscripts in this community can be much better explained if one accepts an earlier origin of Daniel than the one proposed by the Maccabean hypothesis of historical-critical scholarship, which dates it to the second century BC. … This date is still very significant because the Masoretic text (MT) from which our Bibles are translated comes from a major manuscript that is dated to 1008 AD (Wurthwein 1979:35). In other words, we are able to compare for the first time in history the Hebrew and Aramaic of the book of Daniel with manuscripts of the same book that are about 1,000 years older. A comparison between the MT [Masoretic Text] and the earlier manuscripts contained in 1QDana, 1QDanb, and 6QDan [Dead Sea Scrolls], based upon a careful study of the variants and relationships with the MT, reveals that “the Daniel fragments from Caves 1 and 6 reveal, on the whole, that the later Masoretic text is preserved in a good, hardly changed form. They are thus a valuable witness to the great faithfulness with which the sacred text has been transmitted” (Mertens 1971:31).

In short, the Dead Sea Scrolls testify to the accuracy of the Masoretic text as well as demonstrating that the Higher Criticism scholarship that argued for a late date for Daniel is in error — making the methodology of Higher Criticism highly suspect. Footnotes in modern translations of the Old Testament will frequently refer to places where the Masoretic (“MT” or “Heb”) text differs from the LXX or other ancient translations (such as the Vulgate or Syriac Peshitta) — and even occasionally where the Dead Scrolls give a slightly different reading.