Bait and Switch Evidence: Appropriating from the Jews

In one of the great paradoxes in history, Christian Biblical integrity supporters have rested their best defense on the meticulousness of Jewish rabbis. The accuracy of the scribal history of rabbinical copying of their Hebrew scriptures has been used to support an equal stability of the Christian texts. It is typical among Christian adherents to lump both the Old testament (Hebrew scriptures) with the New Testament and then claim both are reliable because the Hebrew scriptures are accurate. In Yiddish, making this claim takes a lot of chutzpah. It also requires an incredible level of ignorance.

The revelation that the Hebrew Bible has survived nearly unchanged for 2000 years came with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in Qumran, Israel in 1947 and 1956. These scrolls represent the oldest copies of the Bible in existence. Prior to these findings the oldest version of the Hebrew Bible was the Aleppo Codex of Masoretic Texts dating to around 915 CE or nearly 1000 years after the Dead Sea Scrolls. "Masoretic" literally means "transmission" and essentially refers to the process Jewish scribes and scholars used to copy their Bible. This was a very tightly controlled and detailed process designed to maintain a standardized and unaltered transmission of one copy to the next. When comparing these texts with those found at Qumran, which predate the copying process, it is clear that these Masorites did a remarkable job preserving their biblical texts. Jews can feel very confident that the Biblical texts they are reading today are the same texts read by the Saggucees in Second Temple Jerusalem.

Evangelical Christians have simply co-opted this evidence to try and claim their scriptures have the same level of integrity. It is asserted that since the Jews did a good job maintaining integrity, the Christians have done likewise. One has seen this argument made in nearly every piece of Christian Bible accuracy defense since the publishing of the Dead Sea Scrolls materials. Christian defenders have simply assumed that because of the Jewish accuracy, theirs is likewise. There are a number of reasons why this is absurd.

First, (and probably least important), the Hebrew Bible was composed in Hebrew, among Hebrew speaking people. It is infinitely easier to make copies within the same language than when making copies between two dramatically different languages such as Aramaic and Greek followed by Greek to Latin.

Second, and much more significantly, the copying of Hebrew texts was strictly controlled among Jewish scholars and there was a certain level of expertise and professionalism required before someone could even touch a scroll. When a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible was undertaken around 250 BCE a committee of 72 bilingual scholars was assembled to do the work under pain of "a curse from God" if a single change were made. Even with this curse hanging over their heads a few changes crept in because Greek was spoken in such a wide area with varying dialects and local differences. Many of the discrepancies between the Greek and Hebrew versions of the Torah derived from these issues.

The Christian Bible began in the opposite environment with dozens of these Greek dialects in an empire where Greek was not the official language. The copying occurred, not under strictly regimented guidelines (and penalties for slip ups), but by individuals. It is not even likely that a community could assemble 72 Christians in total, let alone 72 literate scholars working diligently to pass along the texts word for word without a mandate or funding to do so. Copying texts was not cheap and doing it right required a structure that the early Christian communities did not possess. The simple fact that those Christian texts that survive rested on papyrus leaves rather than the more permanent, higher quality vellum scrolls or even parchment attests to the work being done on the cheap.

Christian copying of texts was accomplished by whoever was literate and could afford the materials. Copying it in numerous dialects and languages by people who were not professional scribes makes their reliability far less certain. When one envisions the Christian copying process one thinks of monasteries with groups of monks working side by side with supervisors scrutinizing their work. The process; certainly did not begin this way and probably did not gain a level of control and supervision until at least the third century. It began with amateurs, working with the least expensive materials, possibly translating into a different language at the same time, doing simply the best they could. Comparing this to the Jewish Masorite process is obscene. The reason for the link; though, is obvious. The rabbis did a great job preserving their scriptures. Christianity has none of this tradition to offer so rather than admit their own flaws they have simply stolen the evidence from the Jews and made it their own.

Another major distinction is with the very nature of the texts. During the time the copies were being made the Christian message was not yet formulated and fixed. Christians were still competing to determine what would become the orthodox perspective. Both the oral and beginning of the written traditions were occurring at the same time. There was an incentive, by whatever side was writing the texts, to ensure those texts presented the perspective they favored. And this was at a time where there were literally dozens of perspectives.

The Hebrew scribes at Qumran were not trying to argue for a particular theocracy within their sacred texts. Nor were the rabbis who copied them for 2000 years. They saved those arguments for their non-biblical commentaries. What the Hebrew scriptures were and what they said had been worked out centuries prior to the time the Qumran sect set to work. One of the points lost on Christian defenders is that Jewish Bible was not a gospel. The Jewish Bible was not trying to make the case for the superiority or even the truth of the Jewish religion. As famous Jewish scholar and writer Israel Zangwill put is: "The Bible, as I have said before, is an anti-Semitic book. 'Israel is the villain, not the hero, of his own story.' Alone among epics, it is out for truth, not high heroics." The Hebrew texts are not afraid to show their whole history, warts and all. This is one reason why the Hebrew Bible is such a great read but it is also the reason why it was preserved almost intact by the Jewish copyists. They did not have to put their best face forward in order to win converts. They were just trying to preserve the texts so Jews today read the same texts as Jews 2000 years ago. Christians were still competing for the ascendency of a particular message and could not afford this luxury. Making any claims about the reliability of their scriptural texts based on what the rabbis did is desperately misplaced.