[kosta50]

Irenaeus and other, for you information, considered some of the 'apocrypha' as inspired. Most of what they accepted or rejected was based on personal preference and no hard rule.

[the Septuagint] is the oldest of several ancient translations of the Hebrew Bible into Greek. - Wikipedia

The issue was not with translations, but with the books contained in it. The books the Protestants consider 'apocryphal' were part of the Septuagint long before Christ. If they were there, it means that whatever "Hebrew Bible" the 72 scribes used as their original text, contained them too.

The whole point was that the Jewish canon was not set. Obviously, the Alexandrian Jews belonged to a sect whose canon differed from that of the Essenes and Pharisees and Sadducees (all of whom had very different theologies). The Sadducees, for example, considered as canonical only the Five Books of Moses. For them the Pharisee canon was full of 'apocrypha.' The Essenes has numerous revelations not found in others, etc.

As for translations, yes, of course, something is always lost in translation.But transcribing errors and other omissions/deletions are common to manual copying.

Given that we have no original of any part of the Bible whatsoever, we must assume that there is a possibility of error, loss, etc. because whatever extant copies we do have show great variations in context and content, in places where the scribes felt that their predecessors had to make a mistake, and changed whatever text seemed more. appropriate.

This silly argument was never the view of the church fathers-even the Gnostic ones.

You have no proof whatsoever that the originals resemble any particular version of the Bible in their entirety. The only silly thing is people being so gullible as to assume that every word in their version of the bible is exactly as God 'dictated' it.

[HarleyD]

As for translations, yes, of course, something is always lost in translation.But transcribing errors and other omissions/deletions are common to manual copying.

The point you made earlier was the translation from Greek to English is flawed. You cannot make an accurate translation. Using your logic with the Septuagint, which is a Greek translation of the Hebrew text, then the Septuagint must be flawed. You seem to be admitting this.

The whole point was that the Jewish canon was not set.

Actually, according to my sources it was the Septuagint that wasn't set. The Jewish canon was set and great care was taken in transcribing it. It was within the 300 years before Christ when the Greek Septuagint of the Hebrew text was introduced that translations abound because the Hebrews didn't use vowels. Thus when the Greeks went to translate the Hebrew text, they had to make choices. Some of Greek Septuagints were better than others. It wasn't the Hebrew writings that you should be complaining about which was undertaken with care. It is the various Greek translations.

The Masoretes put together the Old Testament and it was this text that the early church fathers seemed to have used. The Masonetes, while Jews, confirmed the Christian version of the Old Testament text, which indicates the church fathers must have settled on one version of the Old Testament and that version must have been consistent with the Hebrew version.

The Masoretes were heirs of the text in use when the Talmud was written, a text which, as is clear from the Talmud itself, had previously been in a relatively fixed condition. The Aramaic versions or paraphrases (the Targums), the Syriac Peshitto version, the Latin Vulgate version of the Old Testament, and quotations of the Old Testament in the writings of Jerome and Origen, and the Hexapla of Origen, with its Hebrew text and Greek versions, bear witness, like the Talmud, to the existence of a Hebrew text for several centuries before the time of the Masoretes which closely resembled their text. Rabbi Akiba, who died about A.D. 132, had a high regard for exactness and fixity of text, and has been credited with inspiring measures toward the settling of the text in the early second century. The view of P. de Lagarde that after A.D. 130 all manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible were closely fashioned after one archetype which had been decided on not long before that date has not been accepted by all; but it is at least the case that a type of text basically that of the Masoretes existed around A.D. 100 and that this text subsequently overcame whatever competitors it had. Biblical texts which have been discovered recently at Wady el-Muraba’at in southern Palestine, which have been dated in the second century A.D., are in notable agreement with the Masoretic text. Kenyon thinks that since the end of the first century A.D. the text has not been altered in any material way.

Tracing the investigation still further back, Dr. Wilson maintains that citations of the Old Testament found in the New Testament, in the writings of Josephus and of Philo, and in the Zadokite Fragments bear witness to the existence of a text quite similar to the Masoretic from A.D. 40 to 100.

I would refer you to Bible Research for an excellent, and objective, history on the scriptures over time.