[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.

[kosta50]

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

Just the fact that we have no originals of any of the books of the Bible leaves the possibility that each and every one of them is flawed too.

My complaint about the English translations from Greek is that KJV was translated with clear Protestant bias, that words were added or subtracted, as the authors saw fit form their perspective, avoiding "catholic" concepts and terms.

The Septuagint has a lot of variations. The older one, the Sinaiticus and Vaticanus (4th c. AD) are 'less Christian' than the Alexandrian version (5th c. AD) used by the Orthodox Church. obviosuly, as was the case with the KJV, there was an agenda to fulfill by altering the texts.

The much bigger issue with the Septuagint is the canon itself, because it differs from bot the Essene and Pharisaical and Sadducee versions. But one thing is clearly lacking from the Septuagint: an agenda. It was compiled before Christ, so there was no "Christian bias" in it. Secondly, it was done by the Jews for the Jews of the same community.

Thus when the Greeks went to translate the Hebrew text, they had to make choices

It is clear from the way you write that you don't know the subject. The Greeks never translated the Hebrew Bible into Greek. The Hebrews (Jews) did. Not one, not a dozen, but 72 Jewish scholars, roughly 200 years before Christ was born, completed this project using whatever Hebrew text they used in their services.

This does not mean that their Hebrew text agreed with the Qumran Hebrew text, or the Sadducee Hebrew Text or the Pharisee (Jordanian) Hebrew text! They were all Hebrew text and they did not contain the same canon (for the n^th time).

The translation was intended for the Jewish population of Alexandria which spoke Greek (since Alexandria was a Greek colony), the way the majority of American Jews speak English who have have no or only rudimentary knowledge of Hebrew.

Thus, the Septuagint was not by the Greeks, for the Greeks, but by the Jews, for the Jews. The priests and rabbis of Alexandria apparently taught it was good enough. I think 72 Jewish scholars along with Jewish priests and rabbis saying it (with ALL its books) was good enough was good enough for a few hundred years. It was certainly good enough for the Apiostles.

The Christ-denying rabbis of Jamnia (100 AD) decided otherwise. Since the Apostles used the Septuagint as the OT reference in their Gospels and Epistles to promote Christianity, and since they were teaching Greek-speaking Jews and Gentiles, the rabbis all of a sudden found the Septuagint 'objectionable" and threw it out, from cover to cover, along with the New Testament.

If your article has any credibility, which it doesn't, it would observe that if the canon was set the rabbis would have had NO reason to 're-set' it at Jamnia. Obviously the canon was not set because neither the Essenes nor the Sadducees, nor the Greek-speaking Jews, nor the Pharisees had the same canon.

Since only the Pharisee sect survived, morphing into rabbinical Judaism we know today, they can say that (their) Hebrew text was pretty much set all along. Trouble is, their Hebrew text did not correspond with the sadducee Hebrew text or the Essene Hebrew text or the Septuagint.

Their claim is clearly misleading, since the people today assume that Judiasm of today represnets all the Jewish sects of pre-Christian Israel. Which is false. These facts have been repeated ad nauseum on this forum but, as jo kus observed, it seems of no avail.