Is your Bible Scripture?

Is your Old Testament (or if you're Jewish, your Torah/Prophets/Writings) Sacred Scripture? It's probably largely, if not entirely, based on the Masoretic Text (MT) of the "Hebrew Scriptures." Are you dedicated to the oldest text, "closest to the origins"? The MT was edited down in the latter centuries of the first millenium After Christ. Changes were introduced to the "original text," changes to undermine Christianity. The biggest example is, was the Messiah to be born of any young woman, or one who had not known a man? That's the basis not only of today's Jewish Bibles, but the Protestant and increasingly the Catholic Bibles as well! Is an emasculated text "Sacred Scripture," or human meddling? You don't have to believe the books of the Bible fell down out of the sky, to believe they have been composed under the influence of the All-Holy Spirit of God, One of the Trinity. But what about a deliberately skewed text...one with an "agenda," arguably against its original meaning?

What else is there? A thousand years before the MT - centuries before Christ - there was the Septuagint [pronounced "sep-TOO-uh-jint"] Greek version, by tradition translated by seventy or 72 devout Jewish translators at once, under Divine influence, in Alexandria, Egypt, from Hebrew and Aramaic originals that, interestingly, keep popping up in the Dead Sea Scrolls and other ancient manuscripts "in these latter days." At the time of Christ/the Second Temple, the Septuagint was "the Bible" for most of the world's Jews, including many in Palestine as well as outside, and also their Gentile (i.e., Greco-Roman) proselytes. Usually it's the version quoted in the New Testament. The Septuagint was also "the Scriptures" for the Apostolic Church, and for a number of centuries afterward, until the final New Testament canon was added to it.

Why did Protestants abandon the Septuagint after a millenium and a half of Christian use? Because they figured "the original" was in Hebrew/Aramaic, so any version not translated into another language was likely to be closer to "the original." But as we have seen, it is not. Why did Catholics pretty much abandon the Septuagint in the last century or two? Because that was the direction of (Protestant-led) "Scripture scholarship," and because they wanted to get on better with the Protestants?

What choice do we have? The Orthodox Church, traditionally, has consistently used the Septuagint Old Testament, in its original Ancient Greek or in translation into Old Church Slavonic. [Can someone tell me about Romanian and Albanian usage?] In the Western world we've sometimes had to settle for MT-based translations into the local vernacular, but a new translation into English, at least, is tentatively expected to be released next year. What does it matter? Well, if you're thinking about o/Orthodox Christianity, or even about Judaism before its texts were changed to be anti-Christian, and your thinking is based on faulty texts, you're bound to go astray. Now, o/Orthodox faith in YHWH, both before and after Christ's life on earth, isn't textual, but experiential. But the ancient patriarchs and prophets left us these texts to report about and guide us to the experience of uniting our energies and activities with God's Uncreated Energies. That's why they're important, and "only" that.

In the interests of full disclosure, as with many ancient texts, there is not one single Septuagint text, but a number of versions, even in use in the Orthodox Churches. But these do not differ significantly, doctrinally, like the MT - and modern Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish Bibles - do from them. I should also point out that some Orthodox consider none of the existing English translations of the Septuagint to be satisfactory, so be advised.

And that's my "higher criticism" of "Higher Criticism"!