Let me set the stage for what you will see in these articles. There are two completely different "Messiah" in the New Testament; one real and one false. One was the culmination of Eastern and Oriental sun-myths and the other from the Davidic lineage of Israel. They two very different concepts concerning the redeemer to come are blurred in the New Testament. One approaches the New Testament and reads it as if both these concepts were included in Jesus of Nazareth. The later "Gospels" would be written under a Pauline and an Essenic influence; and influence that promoted an Angel-Messiah instead of a Davidic human Messiah. Such a doctrine of the Messiah would be the last straw to break the camel's back and separate the Jewish church from the Gentile church along with the repudiation of the Torah by the evolving Gentile Christian community. The Jews in Palestine in the days of Jesus had their Palestinian Jewish Scriptures (the Palestinian Masoretic text) preserved and it read completely different from the corrupted Greek translation (Septuagint) and these Jews looked yet for the Davidic Messiah and not a cosmic sun-g-dman as taught in the doctrines of the Angel-Messiah which were added throughout the Greek translation of the Jewish Scriptures by these Greek-Jews of Alexandria, Egypt. One only needs to read the Gospel of John and compare it with the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels to see we are talking about two very different persons!
In other words reading the Gospel attributed to John we read of a g-dman, but when reading the Synoptic Gospels attributed to Matthew, Mark, and Luke, we find a human anointed leader only. But such a dual-Messiahship is not true to the Jewish Scriptures not the beliefs of the Jews who were not looking for a cosmic redeemer but the Messiah of Israel.
The translators of the Jewish Scriptures, the Greek-Jewish Pythagorean-Buddhist sects of Alexandria, Egypt, 200 years before Jesus, wrote "into" their Greek translations of the Jewish Scriptures the religious beliefs of their sect intermingled among the pages of their Old Testament translation. THIS IS A FACT THAT CAN BE SEEN TODAY! Today we read the Christian Old Testaments, which came from this Greek source, never knowing that such forgery has been done. We fall into the trap of reading such "added sun-myths" and concepts concerning Jesus as quoted in the New Testament, as taken from this corrupted Old Testament, as if they are truths concerning the Jesus of history. Nothing could be further from the truth.
These Essenes had a flourishing university, or corporate body, established upon these principles, at Alexandria in Egypt, long before the period assigned for the birth of Christ Jesus. The Essenes abounded in Egypt, especially about Alexandria (Eusebius, Eccl. Hist., lib. 2, ch. xvii). They esteemed this "corporate body" to such a degree that went so far as to mistranslation on purpose much of the Tanakh to promote their theological ganeda (Christian Ginsburg, The Essenes , Their History And Doctrines, 1863, p. 32).
C.D.F. Moule, in The Birth Of The New Testament, records for us on page 59 that the Greek translation of the Jewish Scriptures is "a wildly inaccurate translation."
Likewise, Lucetta Mowry, in The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Early Church, again tells us on page 11-12: "...the Qumran authors....altered the stories of the Pentateuch by pious and frequently fanciful embellishments. A more serious purpose of alteration was the attempt to use the stories as authoritative expression of the tenants of the Sect....rewriting familiar events of Israel's history and by inserting legendary details to make the Law of Moses correspond with Qumran thought. These documents, together with the commentaries, testify to the Sect's interest in supplementing biblical authority by adapting canonical works to its own purpose. The community desired in particular to prove that its members were the true heirs of Israel's tradition and that the promise of redemption revealed by God to the patriarchs and to Moses now belonged to their brotherhood." This is just the tip of the iceberg and you should understand that many Greek Fathers of the church, men like Clement of Alexandria, who grew up and was schooled in Alexandria, not only heard this Essene theology and their teachings on the Angel-Messiah, but their documents, even the Greek translation of the Jewish Bible had such tenants of the group included within it. This explains the natural tendency for these early Greek Fathers to accept and promote a theology that was in opposition to what the conservative Jews of Palestine believed as preserved in their Jewish Scriptures, which now read quite differently from the Greek translation of the Essenes in Alexandria.
There are literally hundreds of embellishments, but let me give you one such example as I have dealt with hundreds of examples of the corruption of the Jewish Scriptures when then were translated on another website that you might wish to examine to see the evidence for yourself: http://faithofyeshua.faithweb.com.
Now for example... Christian Ginsburg details for us on page 32 of his monumental work The Essenes, Their History and Doctrines, when these Greek-Jews of Alexandria were employed to translate the Prophet and the Psalms into Greek, that they availed themselves of the opportunity to introduce their tenants and rites into their version of the translation. This version is called the Septuagint and is a grossly mistranslated version of the Jewish Scriptures. Millions of Christians are not aware of this and many of the Christian scholars stop short to examine the evidence for themselves; simply they just don't know it happened. Not being able to read Hebrew for themselves, they accept the Greek translation bequeathed to them as if it came for God. Your evaluation of the facts concerning this translation will show you otherwise. One example should suffice to begin your curiosity into the matter. Thus, for instance, when David said "Sacrifice and burn offering thou didst not desire, mine ears has thou opened" (Psalm 40:6) was changed by the Essenes translators of Alexandria to: "Sacrifice and burnt offering thou didst not desire, but a body hast thou prepared me." The Essenes, by changing this verse and taking away and adding to the Word of God introduced three of their tenets:
1. They made the Prophets speak absolutely as if God had entirely rejected sacrifices because they themselves would offer none
2. By dropping my the words, "mine ears has thou opened," they showed disapproval of slavery:
Exod 21:6 6 Then his master shall bring him (his slave) unto the judges; he shall also bring him to the door, or unto the door post; and his master shall bore his ear through with an aul; and he shall serve him for ever. (KJV)
3. By substituting "a body has thou prepared me," the were promoting their college of devout Essenes in Alexandria who met together as a body, and whom they believed God had appointed instead of the corrupt Priesthood. This body of Essenes was to be the now corporate "body" of Israel; the New Israel. Along with this the Torah and the Tanakh had been replaced with the religious and Apocalyptic writings of the community.
From this Essene corporate body of the "New Israel" they sent out missionaries promoting their theologies, and had established colonies, auxiliary branches, and affiliated communities, in various cities of Asia Minor, which colonies were in a flourishing condition before the preaching of St. Paul. Now you can understand that when Paul went on his journeys preaching "Christ crucified" that this was not a new message to his recipients. Jesus was just another name in a long line of crucified sun-g-d saviors that had come before. Chrishna crucified was now Christ crucified: http://paganizingfaithofyeshua.netfirms.com. There had been a long line of "personified sun-g-dmen" who were crucified; first in the heavens due to the blending of astrology and religion, and later personified in human terms reflecting the "heroes" of various Indo-Germanic nations since the beginning of time.
Col 1:23 23 If ye continue in the faith grounded and settled, and be not moved away from the hope of the gospel, which ye have heard, and which was preached to every creature which is under heaven; whereof I Paul am made a minister; (KJV) Notice please Paul used the "past tense" indicating that "his gospel" had already gone into all the world. A little study in comparative religion verifies the truth to his statement.
Answer for yourself: Have you ever wondered what was "the gospel" preached all over the world before Paul took the Christian message? These nations had already received the cosmic sun-myths from these Buddhist-Essene missionaries which covered according to their own testimony the whole of the known world. So Christ crucified was not a new message, but the personification of sun-myths long held by primitive mankind. Paul was only reiterating what they already knew and this explains the rapid spread of the Christian message...he had to give them nothing new...only a new name for their crucified g-dman. This also explains why the Jews continually followed Paul on his travels troubling him in their efforts to "undo" his preaching as the men from Jerusalem knew the distortions Paul was preaching about the Jesus that had personally known! Sadly, the New Testament blasts these men as "Judaizers." Redactionist history at its best!
Thus the pseudo-Aristeas, as cited by Josephus; thought, as a matter of fact, this Septuagint Version, so-called because of the legendary Seventy-two, was in the grossest manner inaccurate, and imported innumerable errors into the Christian religion which was based upon and propagated for several centuries only through the Septuagint texts. Indeed, "the text of the Septuagint was regarded as so unreliable, because of its freedom in rendering, and of the alterations which had been introduced into it, etc., that, during the second century of our era it was discarded by the Church." (Catholic Encyclopedia. iv, 625.)
In the course of a century or two before the Christian Era, the other Hebrew sacred books were likewise translated into Greek for the use of the Greek-speaking Jews of "the Dispersion," together with numbers of the forged Jewish apocrypha, and all these were added to the rolls of "Scriptures." This final and adulterated form of the Septuagint "was the vehicle which conveyed these additional Scriptures [i.e. the apocryphal Tobias, etc.] into the Catholic Church." (Catholic Encyclopedia, iii, 271.)
The role of the Holy Ghost in certifying the ill-translated and tempered Septuagint for the foundations of Christian Faith, was very disastrous, as CE. Points out:
"The Church had adopted the Septuagint as its own; this differed from the Hebrew not only by the addition of several books and passages but also by innumerable variations of text, due partly to the ordinary process of corruption in the transcription of ancient books, partly to the culpable temerity, as Origen called it, of correctors who used not a little freedom in making 'corrections,' additions, and suppressions, partly to mistakes in translation, and finally in great part to the fact that the original Septuagint had been made from a Hebrew text quite different from that fixed at Jamnia as the one standard by the Jewish Rabbis." (CE. vii, 316.)
"Copies of the Septuagint," says CE., "were multiplied, and, as might be expected, many changes, deliberate as well as involuntary, crept in." (CE. xiii, 723.)
Arthur Patzia is associate professor of New Testament and director of Fuller Theological Seminary in Norther California. On the translation of the Jewish Scriptures into the Greek he says this in his book The Making Of The New Testament: "The formation of the LXX was a gradual process spanning several centuries. Scholars have rightly judged that the Letter of Aristeas (B.C.E. 275-295) is a legendary or romantic piece of Jewish propaganda about the origin of the LXX.....But the translation of certain parts of the Old Testament into Greek was not always done consistently and carefully. Some books differ considerable from our present Hebrew Bible.....there are many Old Testament passages in the New Testament which agree with the LXX but differ considerably from the Hebrew Old Testament.....the LXX became identified as the Old Testament of the Christian Church....this led to a Jewish rejection of the LXX in its current form and the production of several other Greek versions that attempted to translate the Hebrew text more accurately...by becoming the Bible of the early church fathers, the LXX influenced church dogma....even the threefold division of Law, Prophets, and Writings was replaced with the Greek fourfold division of Law, History, Poetry, and Prophets" (p. 25-26).
Frank Moore Cross, in Qumran And The History Of The Biblical Text, says in speaking of the translation of the Jewish Scriptures into the Greek: "these errors and textual diversities between the versions affect the intrinsic message only in relatively few instances. Nevertheless this may occur. Some examples of variants significant from a theological or ideo-historical angle may in fact be found....the Septuagint, commonly designated LXX, was in the Pentateuch less open to the uncontrolled impact of translators' idiosyncrasies. It contains indeed fewer deviations from the Hebrew text here than in the renderings of the other books...the ensuing embarrassing textual diversity of the versions of the sacred books soon called for the application of the methods of textual analysis and textual criticism to remedy this deficiency.....the Masoretic manuscripts showed no deviation of any consequence....all (Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament known today) exhibited a tradition which was identical to the smallest minutiae....taken as a whole the Greek tradition represented a textual family which differed from the Masoretic text."
In Burrows' The Dead Sea Scrolls he says in regard to the Jewish Masoretic text of which we no earlier manuscript evidence than the ninth century until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1948 say regarding this: "The age of the manuscript, of course, does not establish its importance. An old manuscript is not necessarily a good manuscript. A copy made in the ninth or tenth century A.D. may be more accurately reproduce the original text than one made in the first or second century B.C." [this in response to many Christian commentators which have supposed the Greek translation of the Jewish Scriptures to be superior to the Jewish Masoretic text because we had "older manuscripts;" thus believing that "oldest" is most accurate]. As you can see this is not always correct!
"Many of the differences between the St. Mark's Isaiah scroll [discovered at Qumran] and the Masoretic text can be explained as mistakes in copying. Apart from these, there is remarkable agreement, on the whole, with the text found in the medieval manuscripts. Such agreement in a manuscript so much older gives reassuring testimony to the general accuracy of the traditional text...what it shows is that anymajor changes that occurred in the translation of the text had already been made before the beginning of the Christian era. In other words, a virtual standardization of the text had come about more or less automatically two or three centuries before the Masoretes made it official. As Hempel puts it, the decisive history of the text of the Old Testament had already been completed by the time of Jesus, not only in the books of the law, of which no jot or title should be altered, but also in the books of the prophets" (pp. 303-304).
Let me explain what you just read. The Christian Old Testament, corrupted since the Greek translation from which it was later re-translated, contains many passages interpreted as "messianic" and the church interprets these as if Jesus is the fulfillment. In reality, these are not true "messianic passages" as spoken by the prophets but adulterations meant to promote the sun-g-dmen theology of the translators in Alexandria. As Christians, we read them as if they are "messianic" and apply them to Jesus as if they were originally written concerning him. Needless to say, the Jewish Hebrew Scriptures do not read like this Greek "messianized" translation and many passages which read as if they were "messianic" in the Christian Old Testament were never given by the prophets as recorded in the Christian Bibles. The Christian response, when shown that their Old Testament is completely different in this regard when compared with the Jewish Scriptures, respond that the "Jews changed their Bible in response to the Christian message and tried to write-out Jesus from the Old Testament and "de-messiahize the prophets." This is simply false. As you read from scholar after scholar the Masoretic text, although until recently no copies could be discovered as early as the Greek translations, did not undergo change in reaction to the Christian church and its theology; rather the Masoretic text has been an accurate translation esteemed by the Jews since well before the days of Jesus and the passages that the Christian Church reads as if "messianic" are in reality purposeful corruptions of the Jewish text by the translators of the Jewish Scriptures in Alexandria.In other words, many of the beliefs held and applied to Jesus from this corrupted Old Testament in the Christian Bible are completely false and pagan in origin; and if that was not bad enough, such beliefs renders one an idolator!
Further Burrows states: "Considering how widely the earliest manuscripts of the New Testament vary, how radically, the ancient Greek versions differ from the traditional Hebrew text, and what a long time interval between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the oldest of the medieval manuscripts, one might have expected a much larger number of variant readings and a much wider degree of divergence. It is a matter for wonder that through something like a thousand years the text (of the Jewish Masoretic text) underwent so little alterations" (p. 304).
Now listen to what he says that I have already alluded to above: "We must still ask, however, whether the official scribes altered the text to eliminate what they considered objectionable implications, or whether the alteration was made by the covenanters [Essenes[ to introduce their own beliefs into the text [beliefs about the Angel-Messiah in contrast to the Davidic Messiah]. That the latter procedure would not have been out of the question is shown by what was done by what was done with the text of Habakkuk..." (p. 313).
Again, "We cannot pause here to discuss each of those variants, but anyone who carefully examines the passages in question will find that the supposed Messianic implications are decidedly questionable" (p. 313)
Again, in contrasting the LXX and the Masoretic text he says: "By and large it confirms the antiquity and authenticity of the Masoretic text. Where it departs from the traditional text, the latter (the Masoretic text) is usually preferable" (p. 314).
Augustine, in his City of God 15:14 speaking of these Greek translations of the Jewish Scriptures states: "Apart from the errors of copyists, there are discrepancies which may conform to and even emphasize the truth. In such cases, we may well believe that the translators were inspired by divine Spirit to depart deliberately from the original, for along with their duties as scholars they had rights as prophets. [WHAT?] This explains why as Apostles rightly lend their authority not only to the Hebrew text but also the Septuagint, as when they quote Scripture texts from the latter."
Answer for yourself: Did you hear what he just said...that the Holy Spirit inspired these translators to depart deliberately from the original Words of God? What did YHVH warn us about adding to or taking away from His Word? Then how can we rightfully understand that God lied as Augustine just said?
The versions translated from Semetic languages into Greek and Latin were subject to constant revisions. Learned men who copied them introduced changes.....The Septuagint was made in the 3rd century B.C., for the Alexandrian Jews. This version was never officially read by the Jews in Palestine who spoke Aramaic and read Hebrew. Instead, the Jewish authorities condemned the work and declared a period of mourning because of the defects in the version. Evidently Jesus and his disciples used a text which came from an older Hebrew original. This is apparent because Jesus' quotations from the Old Testament agree with the Peshitta text but do not agree with the Greek text (Peshitta, pp. vi-ix).