Steven Avery
Administrator
Substack
Part V of Stola Scriptura delves deeper into the specific allegations of Jewish Scripture-tampering made in real-time by the Church Fathers against the Rabbinic scribes. Far from a recent "Internet conspiracy" by those rascally antisemites, it was Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Eusebius, Augustine, Tertullian, Origen - they all pointedly claimed that the Bible had been tampered with in an attempt to weaken Christian proof-texting that Jesus is the awaited Messiah. The men who watched the editing happen said so in public, naming passages, translators, and motives. For example, Justin accused them of cutting three words from Psalm 96, "from the wood," to remove an obvious reference to the cross. Irenaeus accused them of intentional Scripture-twisting when they changed Isaiah 7:14 from "virgin" to "young woman" to weaken the Christian talking point about Jesus' miraculous conception. Origen so strongly believed the Jewish scribes were deceptively editing the scriptures to gut the Old Testament prophecies of details that show Jesus is the Messiah, that he created the first parallel Bible, a 50-volume work that laid out 6 Jewish translations side-by-side, to easily show who was doing the twisting and where they were doing it. But it wasn't just the church fathers. This was a constant claim up through the Reformers. John Calvin, writing his commentary on Psalm 22, concluded that the verse had been "fraudulently corrupted by the Jews." He used those exact words. Martin Luther, in his treatise On the Jews and Their Lies, accused the rabbis of deliberately distorting Old Testament messianic passages and specifically named their handling of Isaiah 7:14 as a calculated deception. Even Jerome, who built his entire Vulgate translation on the Hebrew rather than the Greek, grew increasingly uneasy in his later writings about what that proximity to Jewish "scholarship" in Palestine had cost him, acknowledging in letters that the rabbinic tradition had influenced his translation decisions in ways he regretted. Augustine, writing from Africa, accused him of being mind-melded by that Jewish influence and warned him he'd come under their spell. He also warned him that by choosing the Hebrew over the Greek, he would fracture the church between East and West. He was right. And then there's this: the same punctuation mark the Masoretes inserted into Daniel 9 to push the messianic timeline away from Jesus accidentally became the entire foundation of the whole Dispensational prophetic system. The rapture, seven-year tribulation, the rebuilt temple, the antichrist's covenant, all of it rests on a hard stop punctuation mark inserted by tenth-century Jewish scribes into a verse they needed to not point at Jesus. Harold Hoehner of Dallas Theological Seminary built the standard Dispensational chronology on that punctuation mark, which doesn't belong there. The scribes didn't do it to help Dispensational mythology, obviously, but that was the downstream consequence of Jewish scripture-twisting. It's amazing how much damage a single out-of-place punctuation mark can do. As I've stated in each article in this series, the point isn't to make you doubt your Bible, but trust it. The reason we know an attempt was made to corrupt the Bible is that it was uncovered and largely unsuccessful. From the church fathers to the Reformers to the modern Bible translators, the church has done a good job of looking verse by verse to determine the best reading, knowing that the Jewish translators in the Masoretic Text had been shady, a fact largely agreed upon by almost everyone except modern Christians who know little about textual criticism. The reason why James White - or anyone else - freaks out when the topic comes up isn't because this is some wild-eyed conspiracy theory, no matter how much they paint it that way. It's because it reveals an uncomfortable truth: Rabbinic Judaism was willing to corrupt its own Holy Book in order to rip Jesus out of its pages. We have invested so much in the myth of a "shared religious heritage" that any attempt to speak historic truths that might make Jews look bad is met with hostility instead of truthfulness. It busts the myth about how careful the Jewish Scribes were with the Bible, and nobody hates myth-busting like people who've been repeating them their entire career. Read more at Insight to Incite. Link in bio. Audio version IS available!
Part V of Stola Scriptura delves deeper into the specific allegations of Jewish Scripture-tampering made in real-time by the Church Fathers against the Rabbinic scribes. Far from a recent "Internet conspiracy" by those rascally antisemites, it was Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Eusebius, Augustine, Tertullian, Origen - they all pointedly claimed that the Bible had been tampered with in an attempt to weaken Christian proof-texting that Jesus is the awaited Messiah. The men who watched the editing happen said so in public, naming passages, translators, and motives. For example, Justin accused them of cutting three words from Psalm 96, "from the wood," to remove an obvious reference to the cross. Irenaeus accused them of intentional Scripture-twisting when they changed Isaiah 7:14 from "virgin" to "young woman" to weaken the Christian talking point about Jesus' miraculous conception. Origen so strongly believed the Jewish scribes were deceptively editing the scriptures to gut the Old Testament prophecies of details that show Jesus is the Messiah, that he created the first parallel Bible, a 50-volume work that laid out 6 Jewish translations side-by-side, to easily show who was doing the twisting and where they were doing it. But it wasn't just the church fathers. This was a constant claim up through the Reformers. John Calvin, writing his commentary on Psalm 22, concluded that the verse had been "fraudulently corrupted by the Jews." He used those exact words. Martin Luther, in his treatise On the Jews and Their Lies, accused the rabbis of deliberately distorting Old Testament messianic passages and specifically named their handling of Isaiah 7:14 as a calculated deception. Even Jerome, who built his entire Vulgate translation on the Hebrew rather than the Greek, grew increasingly uneasy in his later writings about what that proximity to Jewish "scholarship" in Palestine had cost him, acknowledging in letters that the rabbinic tradition had influenced his translation decisions in ways he regretted. Augustine, writing from Africa, accused him of being mind-melded by that Jewish influence and warned him he'd come under their spell. He also warned him that by choosing the Hebrew over the Greek, he would fracture the church between East and West. He was right. And then there's this: the same punctuation mark the Masoretes inserted into Daniel 9 to push the messianic timeline away from Jesus accidentally became the entire foundation of the whole Dispensational prophetic system. The rapture, seven-year tribulation, the rebuilt temple, the antichrist's covenant, all of it rests on a hard stop punctuation mark inserted by tenth-century Jewish scribes into a verse they needed to not point at Jesus. Harold Hoehner of Dallas Theological Seminary built the standard Dispensational chronology on that punctuation mark, which doesn't belong there. The scribes didn't do it to help Dispensational mythology, obviously, but that was the downstream consequence of Jewish scripture-twisting. It's amazing how much damage a single out-of-place punctuation mark can do. As I've stated in each article in this series, the point isn't to make you doubt your Bible, but trust it. The reason we know an attempt was made to corrupt the Bible is that it was uncovered and largely unsuccessful. From the church fathers to the Reformers to the modern Bible translators, the church has done a good job of looking verse by verse to determine the best reading, knowing that the Jewish translators in the Masoretic Text had been shady, a fact largely agreed upon by almost everyone except modern Christians who know little about textual criticism. The reason why James White - or anyone else - freaks out when the topic comes up isn't because this is some wild-eyed conspiracy theory, no matter how much they paint it that way. It's because it reveals an uncomfortable truth: Rabbinic Judaism was willing to corrupt its own Holy Book in order to rip Jesus out of its pages. We have invested so much in the myth of a "shared religious heritage" that any attempt to speak historic truths that might make Jews look bad is met with hostility instead of truthfulness. It busts the myth about how careful the Jewish Scribes were with the Bible, and nobody hates myth-busting like people who've been repeating them their entire career. Read more at Insight to Incite. Link in bio. Audio version IS available!
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