Essential Rabbit Trails

It's been way too long since I posted an addition to Map the Bible.  However, rather than allow you to assume that I have given up on my little project or fallen entirely off the planet, I thought I should share why I haven't been making much visible progress.

KJV-only advocates, pretty please suspend your objections until you read all the way to the end.

As I explained in an earlier post, the inspiration for this work came during a fast last fall. Certain passages of scripture jumped out at me regarding the location of the Garden of Eden, but I didn't just want to throw it out there in a spoon.  It seemed like the perfect opportunity to encourage others to really dig into their Bibles and find out for themselves where Eden was, by following the same clues I did.  But there has been so much background research to wade through, it's taking a lot longer than I thought it would just to lay the groundwork, and the extensive network of rabbit trails has brought me to a significant discovery, which has some rather far-reaching implications.

I wanted to encourage students to be able to use a Strong's Concordance to look up words in the scripture so they could see how those words were used in the source languages (Hebrew in the Old Testament and Greek in the New Testament). For example, in Gen. 2:11, it says that the Pishon River went around the land of Havilah, so we should look up the word Havilah to see who or what it is, and where else it appears in scripture, to discover more clues about its location.  But before students can look something up in the Strong's Concordance, they need to know what it is.

So...I was doing a little background on the theologian, James Strong, who used the King James version of the Bible to catalog all the Hebrew and Greek words from which the English is derived, and this exercise led me to dig into the history of the King James Bible, which brought me to some very startling discoveries.  I will try to encapsulate them here by saying that King James was a narcissistic snake who apparently had some rather nasty motives for allowing the Bible to be printed and distributed. ("Some indeed preach Christ from envy and rivalry, but others from good will...whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed, and in that I rejoice." [Phil. 1:15,18, ESV])  His authorized version was essentially the Geneva Bible, stripped of its insightful and (he thought) inciting margin notes which emphasized the sovereignty of God (to Whom the king himself was subject), and which were not at all favorable to the idea of the king being the head of the church, as King James took it upon himself to be.

So...I began to research the source documents for the King James Bible and its Geneva predecessor, and discovered that despite claims to the contrary, they relied quite heavily on the Masoretic text.  So, what is that?

Well, to oversimplify it, once upon a time, the Jews had a temple, but it was destroyed in 70 A.D., as were many of their documents, including their scriptures, which some speculate were recodified during the Council of Jamnia around 85 A.D. However, the earliest extant text of the Hebrew scriptures (prior to the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls) dates from about 900 A.D.  The Masoretic Jews set about compiling, from many varied manuscripts, an authorized version of the Old Testament, which was completed sometime during the 9th century, A.D. Were it not for the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, we would still be wondering if they got it right.  Turns out, they did a great job with what they had to work with but the truth is, their source texts varied significantly from the Septuagint (and from each other).  So, where are we going with all of this?

The word "Septuagint" is a Greek word meaning "seventy," and refers to the 70 or so (some say 72) Jewish scholars commissioned by the Greek king of Egypt, Ptolemy II, to translate the Hebrew scriptures (the Old Testament) into Koine Greek, the common language of that time, about 285 B.C.  Since Greek is such a precise language, this mandate crystallized the scriptures into very clearly defined concepts, in contrast to the more flexible and poetic Hebrew. It is the Septuagint that the New Testament writers quoted from (This alone might be enough to authenticate it.). It is the oldest complete, extant version of the Old Testament.

There is no Hebrew equivalent!  The Masoretic text has literally THOUSANDS of changes, and as mentioned previously, it was compiled just over 1000 years ago.  English translators have only begun to recognize the value of the Septuagint within the last century, so older versions (the KJV) and those derived from them (such as the NKJV) don't lean very heavily on the Septuagint when there are translation differences. You may see it mentioned in footnotes occasionally, if one translation was chosen over another, but as I'm discovering, digging into the original language DOES NOT mean looking up the Hebrew!  Only the Greek Old Testament provides a complete, accurate rendering of the Hebrew scriptures.  Counterintuitive, I know.  And the implications are monumental!  Stay tuned to find out why, and what we can do about it.  And then maybe I'll get back to Map the Bible.  And I'll provide all the links so you can check up on me.

One more thing: I just want to clarify that if you've been relying on the KJV or any other version of the Bible that doesn't line up with the Septuagint, that DOES NOT mean you got the wrong Gospel message.  This information does not affect the integrity of the New Testament!  So please don't think I threw the baby out with the bath water!  Check back to find out more about the amazing way God is working to preserve His Word!

Shalom in Christos!