Chapter H1
Lucifer's Rebellion
The War on the Word
––– Chapter 3 –––
Origen’s Quest to Find the True Text
and Thereby End the Manuscript Mess
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Topics covered: ►Why, even back in Origen's day, finding a good Hebrew or Greek manuscript was a challenge. ►Origen: brilliant scholar & brutally-tortured martyr. ►The Hexapla, Origen's 6,500-page textual critical apparatus used to find the original text of the Bible, used the best manuscripts & was the best critical apparatus in history. ►Origen's unexpected finding (verified by modern computer analyses): the original text of the Bible cannot be determined. ►Why OT & NT critical apparatus (now using AI !) are still being published even though they are known to be a waste of time. ►Examples from the Bible that show Origen and modern computers are correct: the original text cannot be determined & textual criticism is just guesswork. ►To verify Origen's conclusion, just ask scholars & theologians to list the 3 most important critical apparatus findings they've made about the original text. ►What Origen would do if he could compare the text of the King James Bible with the texts of modern Bible versions.
Chapter 3 (8 pages)
ORIGEN’S QUEST TO FIND THE TRUE TEXT
AND THEREBY END THE MANUSCRIPT MESS
THE PROBLEMS ORIGEN FACED
When the Roman army finished fighting the three wars the Jews waged against them from 66-135 AD, millions of Jews had been killed or sent into slavery, Jerusalem was destroyed, the temple was destroyed, the Jews’ religion was (temporarily) outlawed, and their historic homeland had been renamed. The Jews’ last national language, “Babylonian OT Hebrew,” which had been declining in use for about two centuries, began rapidly sliding into extinction. Jews who lived in regions outside of Judea had already spoken very little Hebrew – even before the wars…and most of them were proficient in Koine Greek. Quite logically, therefore, beginning about 150-200 years before the Jewish wars, many of these Greek-speaking Jews wanted the Bible in Greek so they could read it. These Bibles, whether they were papyrus or parchment, were expensive and bulky because a handwritten complete Old Testament (OT) was well over a thousand pages. But finding quality translators who were truly proficient speaking a dying Hebrew language, and who were capable of effectively and accurately converting that sophisticated Hebrew language into street Greek, and who employed decent copyists who were hard to find and harder to afford, was an uncertain and difficult quest. It can be difficult and awkward translating a sophisticated language into a simple language: For example, in English we say “sunglasses.” In Spanish sunglasses is expressed as: “Anteojos para sol.” Literally, that means: Ante: before or in front of; ojos: eyes; para: for or in order for; sol: sun…or: “In front of the eyes for the sun.” Other examples that English speakers will understand: If the Babylonian OT Hebrew text said things like, “You’re kidding me,” “You’re pulling my leg,” and, “It was coming down cats and dogs,” a translator who was not really fluent in the now-rarely-spoken Hebrew, would do the best he could…and miss the point of the original text.
In the first century of the Christian era, Greek-speaking Jews who were already familiar with the Hebrew Bible but who had family members who were barely literate in Hebrew, ordered Greek-language Septuagints. They were often horrified by the text they paid for because it so often changed the message of the Hebrew they’d grown up knowing – sometimes in awful ways, and sometimes in laughable ways. This was the primary reason Jewish communities who were already familiar with the text of the Hebrew Bible – even in Alexandria, the heart of “Septuagint country” – rejected the Septuagint and instead procured more accurate non-Septuagint Greek translations. (More about the superior non-Septuagint manuscripts later.)
If you could not afford a quality translator, there were less-capable translators available who would produce a Koine Greek manuscript for you at “reasonable” prices. These “translators” and “scribes” could usually speak and understand Koine Greek – most people could. But not many of them were truly proficient reading, writing, speaking, and understanding the nuances and complexities of the no-longer-spoken Biblical Hebrew. Various Bible manuscripts over the centuries show that not having a sufficient and proper understanding of the sophisticated Hebrew – and not having a sufficient and proper understanding of the “simplistic-but-full-of-almost-unknowable variations” of Koine Greek – has always been a problem. Therefore, it really didn’t matter if these cheaper “translators,” who did not and could not properly understand Hebrew, were truly proficient with the many-century-variations of Koine Greek or not; the “Bibles” they produced were going to be poor quality because it was difficult using simplistic Koine Greek to accurately and fully convey the meaning of complex Hebrew. The English language is sophisticatedly-complex and can therefore relatively, effortlessly, and accurately express the sophisticatedly-complex Hebrew. The same is almost as true when making a Latin translation of Hebrew. But trying to use the almost-unknowable varieties of street Greek over the many centuries it was used to produce OT Bible manuscripts to accurately convey the complexities involved with Babylonian OT Hebrew was a lot higher on the scale of difficulty. That’s one reason God used Hebrew to write the sophisticated Old Testament, and street Greek to write the relatively simple NT…which – many centuries later – turns out to be a lot more complicated than we knew, thought, and hoped. And that’s why many, many scholars and theologians today study the relatively simple Koine Greek (so they can incorrectly brag that they speak “the original” Greek) …but very few have the patience and the study discipline to tackle even the new, easier Masoretic Hebrew that replaced the Babylonian OT Hebrew 600-800 years after it became a dead language. This is not to say the relatively simple Koine Greek isn’t a problem for modern translators and scribes. For example, even though the “big three” manuscripts of the Alexandrian “family” are written on expensive vellum, and even though their NT texts are loudly claimed to be “the best” because they were produced by “impeccable scholarship,” the facts call their scholarship into question:
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The Vaticanus manuscript: Somebody went over places in this faded-text manuscript with a dark-inked heavy pen…making it impossible to see what words were originally there. A blank section large enough to contain the “long” ending of Mark is still blank, which may mean the end of Mark was already known to exist – it was not a “later invention.” In the four gospels alone, words or clauses are omitted 1,491 times. The myriad problems that exist with this manuscript have caused scholars to say the Vaticanus testifies against itself. The problems with this manuscript were so extensive they caused the famous Catholic scholar, Erasmus, to exclude it from his research when he looked into making a more-accurate copy of the NT.
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The Sinaiticus manuscript: 14,800 corrections were made after the not-very-competent scribe finished this poorly-done, error-filled manuscript. The “long” ending of Mark was originally there, but somebody erased it! A lack of attention sometimes caused the scribe to repeat letters, words…and sometimes even entire sentences were copied twice. The same inattention caused 115 sentence clauses in the NT to be accidentally omitted because they end with the same word the previous clause ended with – making the bored copyist lazily assume he’d already written it.
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The Alexandrinus manuscript: The beautiful Alexandrinus is in excellent condition, and is so-named named because it was created in Alexandria. However, like its two manuscript brethren, upon close inspection it turns out to be anything but impressive. It was prepared by a semi-illiterate scribe that scholars believe spoke – but couldn’t read – Greek because of the kind of ignorance-based mistakes he made: As the translator dictated the text, this scribe put spaces in the middle of words, and he confused the letters M and N, and he sometimes used the wrong vowels to represent sounds, and after he was finished somebody erased whole sentences and wrote in new text.
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John W. Burgon (1813-1888), who was the Dean of Chichester Cathedral, defender of the existence of Moses, and defender of the inerrancy of Scripture, said the Alexandrian manuscripts “…have become – by whatever process, for their history is wholly unknown – the depositories of the largest amount of fabricated readings, ancient blunders, and intentional perversion of truth, which are discoverable in any known copies of the Word of God…without a particle of hesitation, that they are three of the most scandalously corrupt copies extant…[they] exhibit the most shamefully mutilated texts which are anywhere to be met with.” He also said they are so bad that you have to think their survival is because scholars kept them on their shelves as laughable examples of how bad some “scholars” of antiquity really were. He also said the manuscripts’ corruption, and the fact that they disagree with each other so often, mean none of them can be taken seriously.
It is believed that the modern-day printed/published versions of these Alexandrian manuscripts – because they deliberately hide all of the sloppiness and damning changes, erasures, and corrections – have kept the bulk of lazy theologians, authors, and seminary professors from seeing with their own eyes how appallingly unimpressive these manuscripts are. Why “deliberately" hide? Because in order for ancient historical documents to be worth anything to scholars, modern reprints must include all of the info we know about the documents, and to not do so goes against everything that scholarship is supposed to mean. Indeed, the quickly-apparent and undeniable problems with these manuscripts tend to support what many scholars believe: Because Bibles in regular use tend to get worn out, it appears the Alexandrian manuscripts survived so long without wear because they were known to be inferior, were not used, and therefore spent 1,500 idle years sitting on a shelf.
CHURCH FATHER, FATHER OF THEOLOGY, AND FATHER OF TEXTUAL CRITICISM
Origen was born in 185 and died in 254 AD. In some circles he is praised as a scholar; in many conservative religious circles he is despised as a heretic. We’ll deal with his scholarship in a minute, but it might be helpful to briefly put his heresy into perspective.
When Origen lived, Christianity was in its infancy, churches were all local, access to the complete Bible was rare, Christianity was more about your relationship with the Lord than about having all doctrines correctly ironed out, and many Christians back then thought (like many Christians today!) that Greek Reason was a good and important tool that could help understand life in general and Christianity in particular. Origen was born into a Christian home in Alexandria, Egypt, and that city was a huge center of Enlightened Greek scholarship. Origen’s well-intentioned Christian father made sure his son read the Bible daily and got a good Greek education. Origen became a Bible literalist who, because of Mt 10:10 decided to live with but one coat and went barefooted. He also ate no meat (1 Cor 8:13), and when he thought that his being a teacher of young women was causing some people to doubt that his relationship with them was purely non-sexual, he castrated himself (Mt 19:12; Mk 9:43-47). I, too, am a Bible literalist, and I’ve never had those verses affect me like they did Origen…and that makes me conclude that, while Origen had some doctrines screwed up (such as thinking everybody will eventually go to heaven), he didn’t have a problem humbly reading and submitting to some very plainly-worded Bible verses. Origen “the heretic” did things that make modern conservatives grudgingly admit he may have truly believed the written, literal Thus saith the Lord.
When Decius became the emperor of Rome in 249 AD, he decreed that all Christians had to offer a religious sacrifice to the pagan Roman gods…or be executed. Proving that Satan was right when he said to the Lord in Job 2:4, Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give for his life, many Christians complied…but Origen, living in Caesarea at the time, refused. He was arrested, thrown into prison, shackled, and horribly tortured for two years. Because he continued to steadfastly refuse to renounce Christ, he was scheduled for execution…but the sudden death of Emperor Decius ended the persecution of Christians, and the near-death Origen was released from prison. However, he was in such bad shape he continued going downhill and died a few months later. Was he a heretic, or should we admit we don’t know everything we need to know – and refrain from judging him? Let’s move on and look at his scholarship and at what he found out while searching for the True Text of the Original Autographs of the Bible.
Origen lived at a time when there were lots and lots of Bible manuscripts available…if you wanted either the NT or the OT in Greek. The quality of copies of the NT wasn’t generally a problem; many people could copy Greek into Greek. The OT in Greek, however, was a problem because the poor translations of Hebrew into Greek outnumbered the good, and both Christian and Jewish scholars were alarmed by that fact. Origen was well-equipped to examine that problem because he wasn’t just a Bible scholar, he was also fluent in both Koine Greek and Babylonian OT Hebrew, and could therefore quickly recognize the difference between a quality manuscript and a poor one. He was an “ancient church father,” he was respected throughout the Mediterranean region as a man of brilliant intellect, strength, and high moral character, and he was the foremost scholar and intellect of his time. He is praised by liberal scholars today as the father of both theology and textual criticism.
Over a thousand years later, scholars of the Protestant Reformation, such as Hus and Zwingli, still admired Origen. The Dutch Catholic scholar, Erasmus (who is beloved among KJVers because he was involved in researching the text of the Textus Receptus) believed Origen was a greater Christian scholar than both Augustine and Jerome. Yes, Erasmus knew Origen was an Enlightened “Christian philosopher” who espoused some false doctrines; but unlike some Christians today, Erasmus did not use Origen’s Greek-philosophy-based heresy as an excuse to discount anything and everything he ever said. But Erasmus wasn’t blind to facts, and he had good reasons to disparage Augustine: he was well aware that Averroes (see AOR p.H7-8; D27-15) revealed that Augustine used a brain-dead “proof” that all humans have immortal souls, and Erasmus may have agreed with other scholars such as Vincent of Lérins who believed Augustine to be an overrated, ever-popular purveyor of false doctrine (AOR p.H6-2). Erasmus’ diminished opinion of Jerome, on the other hand, was solely because of scholarly pride: Jerome was famous for his life’s work, the original Latin Vulgate Bible, and Erasmus’ scrutiny of the much-revised Vulgate 1,100 years later (!) by the growing Roman Catholic denomination (which made it no longer Jerome’s work), led Erasmus to conclude that “Jerome’s” Latin Vulgate was doctrinally biased and therefore Erasmus needed to produce his own Latin NT. (We’ll see why Erasmus was wrong about Jerome, his character, and his scholarship in chapter 4.)
Origen, to his credit, did not let the Reason of Greek philosophy change his belief in the inspiration of Scripture, which he considered to be the living word of God and superior to human knowledge. He believed all interpretations of Scripture and all allegorical renderings of Scripture were invalid unless they were based on the actual wording in the Bible. That belief, together with the fact that in his day the Hebrew language was dying, which contributed to its often being poorly translated and inaccurately copied into manuscripts, caused him to quit his teaching job and devote himself to figuring out the original-autograph words of the Bible.
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Origen was so brilliant, and other scholars of his day were so impressed with his works, they actually sent dozens of researchers, secretaries, and copyists to work for him so he could more efficiently and quickly complete his various projects. He was considered to be a walking, talking fount of research-based knowledge, insight, and wisdom. He was the brightest of the bright, and research and knowledge were his whole life. The fact that he spent much of his life in Alexandria, which was the library and research capital of the world, certainly contributed to his education, which he supplemented by traveling widely in search of more information and more Bible manuscripts. Origen was sometimes criticized by contemporary scholars who envied and resented his intellect and accomplishments. Modern scholars and theologians, however, are awed by the breadth and depth of his intellect and by his feats of Biblical scholarship that still dwarf today’s somewhat doltish, cookie-cutter type of “scholarship.” Origen’s young friend, Eusebius of Caesarea, who was a brilliant scholar in his own right, owed much of his reputation and many of his accomplishments to Origen’s work, upon which he relied heavily. For example, Eusebius’ writings were later used by theologians when they were trying to see if they could make educated guesses about which NT books and manuscripts of the first several centuries were and were not credible enough to be considered “genuine,” “authentic” ...or even “better” or “more reliable.” How did Eusebius know so much about early Bible books and manuscripts – is it because he was an expert? No, but he was smart enough to realize Origen was an expert: Origen had firsthand, unsurpassed knowledge of Old and New Testament manuscripts that he had acquired during his tireless research in the libraries of Alexandria and during his extensive travels throughout the known world examining and acquiring Bible manuscripts. For example, he traveled to Jericho and purchased a huge (that’s an understatement!), increasingly-rare handwritten manuscript that contained the full text of the Hebrew Old Testament in the rapidly-vanishing “Babylonian OT Hebrew” language that had been used by the Jews for 700 years ever since their Babylonian Captivity.
Alexandria’s huge library complex had well over a million manuscripts and was called the “Musaeum” after the “Muses,” who were Zeus’ mythical Greek-goddess daughters who presided over knowledge…and Musaeum is the origin of today’s word museum. Because the library complex and its scholars sought out and collected manuscripts that dealt with any and every topic – including complete Bible manuscripts from all over the world in all languages – numerous scholars actually moved to Alexandria and resided there for research purposes. The Musaeum was destroyed and its manuscripts burned in 272 AD by Roman armies trying to discourage the increasing number of rebellious uprisings against the weakening Roman Empire. That was about 20 years after Origen died, and about 50 years before the inferior Vatican and Sinai manuscripts were created on expensive vellum by mediocre scribes. However, in all fairness to the poor quality of the Alexandrian “family” of manuscripts you have to set the quality bar very low: 50 years after the Musaeum and its manuscripts were destroyed, decent manuscripts were scarce and Alexandria was no longer the world’s foremost center of knowledge and scholarship. After Alexandria went into decline, the world’s best scholars moved to other places like Caesarea and Antioch in Syria Palestina; to Rome, Italy; to Hippo in northeast Algeria in north Africa; and to various Greek-speaking cities in Constantinople’s Byzantine Turkey. Alexandria had become a rubble-filled has-been city, and some of its manuscripts were created by men who couldn’t even read Greek. Therefore, the truly amazing thing about the Alexandrian manuscript family isn’t its abysmally-corrupt text, it’s the deceitful public-relations job modern scholars have done: They use the “rich vellum” they were written on, and they use the pre-Alexandrian manuscript glory days of the Alexandria Origen lived in to make it seem as if these manuscripts have an impressive history and pedigree.
Modern scholars wish they could go back to the year 240 AD so they could sit at Origen’s feet to learn more about the many complete manuscripts he examined (which we’ve never seen). Origen was a living treasure trove of information about early manuscripts that were the closest to both the original Greek autographs of the New Testament, and to the Babylonian OT Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament. Therefore, scholars would like to know what he knew about those ancient manuscripts that caused him to choose some and reject others. Compared to what Origen knew about Bible manuscripts, modern scholars know very little – even with the addition of the over-hyped, very disappointing Dead Sea Scrolls. Modern scholars are missing so many pieces of the manuscript-mess puzzle they cannot be sure of anything except, like Socrates, the fact of their own ignorance.
Origen produced roughly 6,000 different works before he died. But he took most of his knowledge and expertise to the grave because most of his works are lost, and many that survive are written in an ambiguous, cryptic, impenetrable vocabulary that some scholars say was deliberate – they think Origen was mocking and baiting the mediocre minds of the scholars who scoffed at many of his works. But it is a single work of his that interests us – his Hexapla.
THE HEXAPLA
Origen knew, because the hated Jews had been dispersed all over the world, the Old Testament manuscripts written in Babylonian OT Hebrew were rapidly disappearing. Those Hebrew manuscripts were known for their impeccable scholarly quality and consistency, and he wanted to compare them with the “new breed” of Greek translations of the Hebrew OT, which are called the “Septuagint.” Two kinds of Septuagint manuscripts existed, and Origen knew they often disagreed with each other: These Greek-language Old Testament translations included “the Septuagint” (Apocrypha-including); and “the non-Septuagint” (Apocrypha-excluding). Just to be clear:
Septuagint defined: A Greek translation of the Hebrew OT…with the Apocrypha added.
Non-Septuagint defined: A Greek translation of the Hebrew OT…with nothing added – no Apocrypha.
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The Septuagint (with Apocrypha) was translated from the Hebrew OT…and the Hebrew OT never included the Apocrypha! Now add to that confusion the fact that “the Alexandrian Text” is often used as a synonym for Septuagint, and Septuagint technically only refers to the Greek-language translations of the Hebrew OT (no Apocrypha)…but the Vatican and Sinai manuscripts are not just OTs, they are whole-Bible manuscripts containing the Greek-language OT, the Greek Apocrypha, and the north-African version of the Greek NT. In other words, of the three parts of the Alexandrian and Vatican manuscripts, the only part “Septuagint” technically applies to is the Greek translation of the Hebrew OT part – not to the NT part or to the Apocrypha part. Another of the problems with the Alexandrian manuscripts is they are said to contain “the Apocrypha” – but there is no such thing as “the Apocrypha!” Much to the chagrin of modern scholars, every Alexandrian manuscript’s “Apocrypha” differs from every other manuscript’s “Apocrypha.” The various “Apocryphas” contain different collections of books, and books with different names and content, and books arranged in different orders. In other words, even back when the “Apocrypha” was first added to these manuscripts, nobody knew what “the Apocrypha” consisted of. That is but one of the reasons no Hebrew Bible manuscript contains “the Apocrypha,” and one of the reasons it was always rejected as Scripture.
Origen was smart, he was disciplined, he was zealous about research...and he determined to use textual criticism to carefully evaluate and compare manuscripts and readings to determine the true original-autograph text of the Old Testament. His work is important not just because he was bright, it is important because:
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He lived back when Babylonian OT Hebrew was still spoken – and he was fluent in it.
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He lived back when OT manuscripts in Babylonian OT Hebrew were still available – and he purchased a magnificent, massive handwritten-by-impeccable-scholars manuscript that contained the entire text.
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He lived back when Septuagint and non-Septuagint Greek translations of the Hebrew OT were commonly available.
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He lived back when NT manuscripts – in Koine Greek as well as many other languages – were commonly available…and remember; Origen lived in the third century when Koine Greek hadn’t yet undergone the coming ten centuries of language bastardization that most modern “Greek-speaking” scholars try to ignore.
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He lived in Alexandria during its heyday: it was the scholarship capital of the world, and its famous library was at its peak.
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The Septuagint and the Apocrypha were popular among many of the scholars in the Alexandrian community. And because Origen was not blindly biased, he became very familiar with all of their arguments in favor of those manuscripts he rejected.
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He lived back when the manuscript predecessors of the not-yet-existing “Alexandrian-Minority” family of manuscripts that are so exalted today were plentiful and readily available.
Even though Septuagint OTs were popular among a number of his fellow scholars in Alexandria, Origen did not favor those manuscripts; and, by extension, neither would he favor today’s manuscripts that are descended from them – the Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, and Alexandrinus of the Alexandrian “family.” A big reason for that was the Biblical research resources in the massive repository of the Alexandrian libraries of the Musaeum complex conveniently located just down the street from his home. The Alexandrian/Septuagint manuscripts are popular today because they’re the oldest fairly-complete manuscripts available, but Origen had access to a wealth of much older manuscripts of all text-type “families” that were both complete and in mint condition. Logically therefore, since the Vaticanus and Sinaiticus were copied in 325 AD – which was 71 years after Origen died in 254 AD – they were copied in the rubble-filled has-been Alexandria by third-rate “scholars” from manuscripts with which Origen was familiar…and rejected.
In his quest to discover the True Text, Origen selected six manuscripts to be in his “critical apparatus,” which was a six-columned manuscript with side-by-side direct-verse comparisons and copious textual criticism notes. (“Critical apparatus” is what theologians call the methodology used to make choices as to which textual readings they prefer.) Because Origen’s critical-apparatus manuscript had six columns, it is called the Hexapla:
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Column 1 of his Hexapla was the Babylonian OT Hebrew text of a Bible manuscript used by the Jews. This was the traditional Bible in use by God’s people since the Babylonian Captivity, and as such had to be favored because it was the basis for all other-language translations of the OT.
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Column 2 was the above same Hebrew text, but it was written in the Hebrew language using the Greek alphabet. It was to see how the Greek alphabet affected Hebrew as a baseline comparison when examining Septuagint (Greek) manuscripts.
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Column 3 was the Aquila non-Septuagint Greek-language translation of the Hebrew OT (which shunned the Apocrypha). Origen included this Aquila non-Septuagint because his research caused him to respect this manuscript as a scholarly, literal, and accurate translation. This Aquila non-Septuagint translation was created in 126 AD (200 years before the Vaticanus manuscript) for Greek-speaking Jews by an influential scholar, Aquila, who was from Sinope, a town in Turkey east of Constantinople. Sinope had been founded by Greek-speakers from Miletus, a town near Ephesus – see Ac 20:15-17. Aquila was related to Rome’s Emperor Hadrian, was involved in the rebuilding of Aelia Capitolina (Jerusalem), and, interestingly enough, he rejected Christ and converted to Judaism. Aquila’s non-Septuagint manuscript was preferred by many Jews, including those in Alexandria during that city’s academic heyday. Aquila’s pro-Jewish manuscript was lauded by both Origen and Jerome, even though they noted and exposed several bias-based faults that subverted Christian doctrine…such as the use of “woman” instead of “virgin” in Is 7:14. It aligned mostly with the Babylonian OT Hebrew Bible, avoided most of the translation problems in the later 4th-century Alexandrian manuscripts, and therefore was very similar to the later Masoretic OT. It is despised by modern Alexandrian-text-promoting scholars.
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Column 4 was the Symmachus non-Septuagint Greek-language translation of the Hebrew OT (which shunned the Apocrypha). A famous scholar from Syria-Palestina who rejected Christ and converted to Judaism, Symmachus created this translation for Greek-speaking Jews in 175 AD, making it an older witness than the Alexandrian manuscripts. Origen respected this Symmachus non-Septuagint, as did Jerome, who used it when making his Latin Vulgate Bible two centuries later…although Jerome properly used virgin instead of Symmachus’ woman. The use of woman in Is 7:14 in Hebrew Bible manuscripts that were copied during the early NT centuries after Christ may be a result of the enmity Bible-rejecting Jews had for the rapidly-growing number of Bible-quoting Christians who used the OT to show Jesus really was the Messiah (Ac 24:14). Today, two thousand years removed from scholars who fluently knew Hebrew, many scholars suggest the ancient Hebrew word’s meaning might have been broad enough to include young woman, pregnant woman, virgin, or unmarried woman. I say yet another time: a huge number of things we modernists simply do not know about the past have been pompously and scurrilously filled in by guesswork. There was no authoritative manuscript in existence that could settle this dispute until an authoritative manuscript was published in 1611 AD. Symmachus paid particular attention to accurately translating the sophisticated Babylonian OT Hebrew into street Greek because he knew poor translators were beginning to give Greek-language OTs a bad reputation. His ability to smoothly capture the purity and essence of the Hebrew original without making the Greek translation too abrupt and unwieldy (like poorly-qualified translators tended to do) starkly highlights one of the problems with the Alexandrian/Septuagint family of manuscripts. The Alexandrian family is widely acknowledged as having suffered the most from poor scholarship – perhaps because the city of Alexandria had become known for its academic mediocrity. In fact, the Sinaiticus manuscript is so obviously oafish that modern scholars all agree that those who produced it were very poorly educated men whose “careless and illiterate” errors ranged from “poor spelling” to “unusually serious mistakes.”
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Column 5 was one of the better versions (their quality varied widely) of the Greek-language Septuagint translations of the OT (which contained the Apocrypha) from Origen’s own region of northern Africa. However, Origen deliberately excluded its books of the Apocrypha because he had little respect for the Septuagint/Alexandrian texts. He may have included this one manuscript because, even though it already testified against itself by including the Apocrypha, it was a rare Greek-language manuscript that captured his attention because it wasn’t as poorly translated as many of them were back then. This higher-quality 5th column has textual differences from today’s existing lower-quality Septuagint/Alexandrian manuscripts. And these higher-quality 5th-column readings agree with today’s respected Masoretic Hebrew text (which did not exist until centuries after Origen died). Today many scholars seriously doubt if a “family” of Alexandrian manuscripts existed in Origen’s day. In support of that theory is Origen’s integrity: he would not have used any manuscript, no matter where it came from, if it contained as many head-scratching errors and outright corruptions as Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, and Alexandrinus. Therefore, according to the theory, the few manuscripts in today’s so-called “Alexandrian family” do not represent “ancient faithful manuscript witnesses;” they are merely 4th-century witnesses to the known fact that the scholarly Alexandria of old was gone…and it was populated by the kind of mediocre “scholars” whose most famous works were rejected and therefore sat on shelves for 1,500 years until resurrected by modern-era theological mediocrity. But nobody knows; it’s all guesswork.
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Column 6 was the Theodotion non-Septuagint Greek-language OT (which shunned the Apocrypha). Theodotion was a Jewish scholar from Ephesus, Turkey, and he created his fine translation in 150 AD. His finished work was widely copied by early Christian groups. Origen respected this Theodotian non-Septuagint manuscript, and noted that the Theodotion manuscript did not have the major problematic differences from the early Hebrew Bible that the Septuagint had. For example, when Jerome was later preparing to create his Latin Vulgate Bible, his research revealed that the book of Daniel in the Alexandrian (Greek-language) family of manuscripts had substantial differences from earlier Hebrew versions of Daniel. Jerome wrote: “I…wish to emphasize to the reader the fact that it was not according to the Septuagint version [with Apocrypha] but according to the [non-Septuagint] version of Theodotion himself that the churches publicly read Daniel.” When the Masoretic Hebrew scholars produced their Hebrew OT centuries later, they, too, agreed with Origen, Jerome, and Theodotion…and the mass of evidence is so strong that even modern Bible version committees have quietly shunned the Alexandrian/Septuagint version of Daniel…and contain the Theodotion/Masoretic non-Septuagint version instead.
In his Hexapla critical apparatus, Origen used extensive notes, comparisons from other sources, and cross references. His in-depth study grew to 6,500 pages spanning numerous volumes. Modern theologians do not have anywhere near the manuscript-and-witness resources Origen had upon which to base his conclusions. In addition to the resources we’ve already mentioned, Origen had personal relationships and in-depth discussions with other ancient church fathers. He was the world’s foremost expert on the Septuagint/Alexandrian family in any era because he lived right there when they were (supposedly) being produced (according to a popular modern theory) …and he rigorously compared them with now-extinct Babylonian OT Hebrew Bibles and with reputable Greek translations of the Hebrew OT. Based on his research, Origen leaned away from the Septuagint/Alexandrian family (a conclusion that was repeated by other famous scholars throughout history), and he disdained the Apocrypha. Surprisingly though, during his many years of research, study, and critical-apparatus comparisons, Origen arrived at a conclusion he didn’t expect – and it caused him to permanently put aside his decades-long work trying to discern The True Text of the Bible. I say again: after this brilliant Bible-believing literalist created the greatest, most respected, most complete, and most unbiased “layman’s aid” in history from the best manuscript resources known to man – he arrived at a conclusion (agreed to by modern computer analyses evaluating if critical textual apparatuses can ever deduce “the True Text”) that caused him to carry his prodigious faith-driven work into an unused cobweb-filled storage room…never to be consulted again.
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Perhaps it started with different scholars chatting about all of the poor Bible translating going on, and then agreeing about how important and critically-necessary it is to have translators who are dual-language experts: First, the translator must accurately understand the original message, and second, he must have the language skills to correctly convey that message in writing in the second language. Then, those discussions may have led to the fact that you’d generally have more faith in the accuracy of a Hebrew manuscript than in a Greek translation of that Hebrew (like the Septuagint manuscripts). And that undeniable logic then led to the fact that the steadily-dying language of Babylonian OT Hebrew was in no way close to the versions of Hebrew of Moses or David: The Hebrew manuscripts of Origen’s day were merely translations of the old, extinct “Davidic Hebrew” spoken 800 years before. And before the Davidic Hebrew there were the “pre-Davidic Hebrew” and the “Egyptian Hebrew” manuscripts that were written during the different-dialect phases the Hebrew language went through during the centuries from crossing the Red Sea up to King David.
Origen was also certainly aware of the “manuscript mess” caused by honest efforts by many men to put together both Old and New Testaments from piecemeal sources from different geographic areas, and to replace crumbled, lost parts and pages of papyrus manuscripts.
But no matter what it was that began to make the pieces of the manuscript-mess puzzle fall into place for Origen, at some point during the prodigious effort he was putting into his incomparable work with various manuscripts and readings, he began to realize an inescapable truth that most scholars and all mediocre scholars have rejected throughout history until very recently. Multiple computer analyses have shown the fact-based logical conclusions of the few scholars with integrity throughout the last two thousand years beginning with Origen have always been correct: No matter how many manuscripts and no matter which manuscripts you consult, and no matter how many layman’s aids you consult, trying to determine the True Text of the Original Autographs is a waste of time because nobody knows which readings are correct, and there is no way for anybody to know…no matter what their decision-making methodology is. I say again, no matter which type of “critical-apparatus” layman’s aid you use – it’s nothing but futile guesswork! The reasons useless layman’s aids and other references are still being published isn’t because the religious skeptics who publish them (oh, you didn’t know that?!) aren’t well aware of this info; it’s because
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they are still making lots of money meeting the demands of ignorant well-intentioned Christians who naïvely believe the advertising hype, and
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scholars and theologians do not view all of this time-wasting research into “what this word should really be” as a waste of time! ...because it’s a very profitable waste of time! And there’s no law against publishing or purchasing layman’s aids!
The years between 1900 and 2000, when it wasn’t widely known and admitted that “textual criticism” is an intellectual fraud and waste of time, one new Bible version was being churned out by publishers every year. But since the year 2000, even though it is widely known that this “textual criticism” stuff is a racket, the number of new Bible versions published each year is up to two per year. Is the increased rate of publishing “new, improved” Bible versions because we keep digging up new Bible manuscripts that are “better and more reliable”? No, it’s because shallow humans are susceptible to the Mars Hill fascination with what’s new, what’s cool, with “the latest” (Act 17:21,22). Look at this review of a popular layman’s aid:
“I just-purchased the 27th edition of Nestle-Aland’s Greek-English Interlinear New Testament, which – because I prefer to use the latest critical text apparatus for serious study – will occupy a prominent position on my shelf next to my previous 4 editions. Though more often than not I agree with the conclusions in this latest edition, there are a number of cases where I feel that one of the provided alternative readings should be preferred, and for that reason I support the idea of Christians using these critical texts to choose their own individual Bible readings.”
Today’s scholars and publishers of layman’s aids are keenly aware that we simply do not have access to the now-lost superior manuscripts used by luminaries such as Origen, Jerome, Jimenez, Erasmus, Stephanus, etc. And they are also quietly aware that the manuscripts favored by many scholars today are the very manuscripts that were consulted and rejected by those luminaries. Today’s scholars are also aware that when a modern Christian puts down his Bible and grabs his cherished Hebrew/Greek dictionary off the shelf to see what Genesis 2:2 really means when it says And on the seventh day God ended his work… because he has a new friend who seems impressively-knowledgeable about his adamant belief in evolution – and he wants to see if the “original-autograph” wording supports evolution or Creationism. When he opens the book that he thinks will help his religious faith, he gets more than he bargained for: The Hebrew word for “day” is the word “Yowm,” which can mean: 1) a period of light or warmth rather than of darkness or coolness; 2) a period of 24 hours or from one sunset to the next; 3) an undefined length of time; 4) a specific point in time; 5) a year; 6) a season; 7) an age; 8) a lifetime; 9) a while; 10) ago; 11) ever or forever...and then he learns that more word definitions are added to Hebrew and Greek dictionaries every time some “scholar” comes up with another guess based on how some dead-language phrasing struck him in an old manuscript fragment. Over time he realizes nobody knows; it’s all guesswork! And by definition any and all guesses could be wrong! And Judgment Day is coming, so he needs to decide if he’s the kind of faithful Bible believer who sticks with the literal Thus saith the Lord as in John 12:48 He that rejecteth me, and receiveth not my words, hath one that judgeth him: the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day …or if he’s going to allow himself to be a pride-filled fraudulent lightweight by perfecting the age-old theological art of “baffling them with bullshit.”
An undeniable truth is that if one manuscript says X, and another says Y; or if a manuscript says X in one part, and that same manuscript in another part says Y, there is no way to know which is the correct reading! And no matter how you try to pretend various scenarios, notations, and cross references “lend credibility” to one reading or another, the bottom line is you’re still guessing! For example, if 10 manuscripts say X, and only 1 manuscript says Y, and you also have research that suggests the Y reading might not be the “best,” that information in your “critical apparatus” may tempt you to claim “the odds” favor the “majority reading” of X. But the undeniable scientific truth is you don’t know if hundreds of wonderful “Y manuscripts” were burned when the Alexandrian library was destroyed...or a million other things that could have happened. This example applies to all of the different readings in the same manuscripts, it applies to different readings between two different manuscripts, and it applies to different readings among any number of manuscripts. In fact, even if you could trace the X reading back through many generations of manuscripts and translations, unless you get your hands on a verified copy of the very first “original autograph” you have proven nothing! And even if you thought you’d found the “very first original autograph,” according to the Bible you have proven nothing – as we’ll now see.
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A brief review of a few Biblical facts to show how correct Origen was when he realized no amount or method of textual criticism can penetrate the manuscript mess in order to reveal the inspired reading God has provided for us:
Question: Which copy of Jeremiah is the Original Autograph?
Answer: It’s the one we have today, the one whose content exposes modern textual criticism as fatally flawed:
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Creation of original autograph #1 of Jeremiah: God had Jeremiah create “original #1”: Jer 36:1-4.
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Destruction of original autograph #1: Pagan King Jehudi cut up and burned “original #1”: Jer 36:20-23.
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Creation of original autograph #2 with added content: God not only had Jeremiah re-create what King Jehudi destroyed, He had Jeremiah add content that hadn’t been in the first original: Jer 36:27-32.
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Destruction of autograph #2: God had His autograph #2 thrown into a river in order to emphasize what was going to happen to Babylon (Jer 51:59-64). (We know at least part of what autograph #2 said because it is reproduced in today’s Jer 45-51 – see the next point.)
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Creation of today’s existing original autograph #3 compilation: The book of Jeremiah we have today (autograph #3) contains material that was added to a re-creation of #1 and #2. In other words, today’s inspired original of Jeremiah contains the material from original #1; plus the material from original #2, plus the info added to #2; plus the material added to today’s original #3. We know all of this because today’s “Book of Jeremiah #3” accurately records the things that God put the book of Jeremiah through on its way to becoming the finalized Scripture we have today.
Question: Did somebody “falsify” Deuteronomy by adding to Moses’ book?
Answer: No; it’s the word of God – not the word of Moses:
If you found a perfectly-preserved Deuteronomy manuscript in what was proven to be Moses’ handwriting (which is what Mormonism’s founder, Joseph Smith got caught lying about when he said he owned original papyrus manuscripts written personally by Abraham himself – look up the info we now know about Smith’s fraud-based book, Pearl of Great Price and the age and the previous content of the papyrus Abe supposedly wrote on), and the Deuteronomy manuscript ended with chapter 33, and right next to it you found another Deuteronomy manuscript in somebody else’s handwriting that ended with chapter 34 (which, beginning with verse 5, contains information that happened after Moses died) – and, using theology’s latest accepted “critical apparatus,” you decided the former was the correct “original autograph” copy in Moses’ handwriting that we should use today…you’d be wrong! God has deliberately used the “manuscript mess” to see who believes in Him…and who believes in research, scholarship, Reason, etc., etc.
Applying what we learn from Jeremiah and Deuteronomy:
Origen’s research led him to the correct conclusion that no matter how many manuscripts of whatever “textual types” and ages we find, we have no way of knowing what the original wording was or wasn’t. It is wrong for scholars to depend on “textual criticism,” “the original languages,” and science falsely so called:
God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise…Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men…For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent… hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? (1 Cor 1).
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Did Adam relay to Eve God’s exact words when He prohibited eating the forbidden fruit…or did he accurately paraphrase it in his own words because it’s the message that matters?
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The NT commonly quotes OT Scripture without using the same exact words, and sometimes adds info we didn’t know from the OT quote alone, and sometimes adds info that isn’t recorded in the OT…because it’s the message that matters, because God is the author, because He knows what He’s talking about, and as we learned in the 3rd original autograph of Jeremiah, God can add whatever He wants to His word whenever He wants.
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In Acts 7 Stephen preached a history of God’s people from the OT that contained summaries in his own words, and it contained paraphrases of important prophesy (cp. Ac 7:37 & Dt 18:18) …and God had “the word of Stephen” put into His Bible as “the word of God” …because God approved it and it’s the truth that matters.
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God’s disciples wrote a bunch of letters to a bunch of saints – letters that sometimes contain folksy, personal information. And, by the authority of God, those letters became part of His holy Scripture…so we could know the truth.
As the book of Jeremiah shows, God has no interest in “original” anything! He has no interest in our figuring out exactly how He shepherded His people way back in the “long ago.” But He is very serious about our present-day walk being conducted not by sight, but by faith in His word. In these dark last days, God expects us to use His definition of His word (preserved inerrancy) when selecting a Bible version so we won’t have our faith diluted by theology’s modern error-ridden versions. If we reject His definition and go our own way based on what we “prefer” – that’s self-based carnality and idolatry because we’re putting what self wants above what God wants…and it’s on us.
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Origen began his quest because he believed the inspired word of God existed and it could be scientifically and conclusively discovered. But as he compared and evaluated many manuscripts, he realized every “conclusion” he made along the way was really just an ignorant opinion/guess. Indeed, he had several times changed and reversed his opinion about a number of readings – even though he was working with the exact same material. It was even possible that he had evaluated one or more manuscripts that contained verses that were true copies of the inerrant originals…without even knowing it. But our duty isn’t to know; it’s to believe. God’s word isn’t something physical that we recognize by sight; it is spirit, it is truth, and we find it by faith. From the moment he had that revelation, Origen could either pretend he’d accomplished his scholarly goal by entering the lucrative Bible version racket by publishing his “Guesses” …and later his “New Revised Guesses” (to the critical acclaim of the mediocre masses); or he could put aside his vanity, realize he’d actually found true riches…and obediently walk by faith in Thus saith the Lord. Origen had too much intellectual integrity to pretend his scholarly goal was attainable when in fact he now knew it was not possible. More manuscripts, “better” manuscripts, more learning about language usage, learning more about societal influences that might have influenced textual wording, and learning more about commonly-made mistakes when translating Babylonian OT Hebrew into Greek by men of varying educational backgrounds, etc., etc., etc., would only produce more and more and more questions and debates…but no answers. So, he bowed his head, humbly accepted the truth he had discovered, and permanently consigned his massive-but-unfinished, well-intentioned, pipedream project to a back room. He then set his affection on things above, not on things on the earth (Col 3:2), began his new life…and was horribly tortured and martyred for his faith in Christ.
WHY ORIGEN IS SIGNIFICANT
Today’s theologians who publicly promote textual criticism’s ability to figure out the True Text of the Original Autographs even though they privately know it cannot be done, exalt Origen as the brilliant father of theology and textual criticism. And they try to exalt themselves by modestly claiming all of their “accomplishments” have only been possible because “we’ve been standing on the shoulders of giants” like Origen. They make empty and misleading statements like that because they cannot make simple, direct, factual statements like, “The three most important accomplishments I’ve ever made as a result of textual criticism are...” They have accomplished nothing, and they know if they ever listed their three most important “accomplishments,” they would be revealing to everybody the fact that it’s all trivial busywork and vanity. The true significance of Origen, therefore, is his conclusion that it is impossible for mankind – no matter what methodologies and critical apparatuses he uses – to establish anything definite about the True Text of the Original Autographs.
About 50 years after Origen was martyred, some scholars found his dusty old abandoned Hexapla. They did not realize it was an unfinished – indeed, unfinishable project Origen knew was junk – and they decided to make some money by copying the Septuagint column because Greek-language Bibles were in great demand. One of the popular-but-foolish fairy tales attached to the Vatican and Sinai manuscripts is that when Emperor Constantine of the Christian Byzantine Empire commissioned the elderly Eusebius in about 331 AD to produce 50 Greek Bibles for him on expensive vellum, Eusebius supposedly used the Hexapla's Septuagint column as his source text…and the Vaticanus and Sinaticus were two of that order of 50 Bibles. This oft-repeated contradictory and inconsistent story attempts to use Origen’s reputation to lend credibility to the text of the Vatican and Sinai manuscripts. But this fairy tale makes no sense. If Eusebius (or anyone else) had copied the Vatican and Sinai manuscripts from Origen’s Hexapla, the two Alexandrian manuscripts: 1) wouldn’t have texts that differ in thousands of places; 2) wouldn’t have formats that are different; 3) wouldn’t include the Apocrypha – because the Hexapla doesn’t have it; 4) wouldn’t be written on animal skins of different quality and size; 5) would have been called “the Ceasarean textual family” because Eusebius lived and worked in Caesarea, not Alexandria; and 6) since Vaticanus and Sinaiticus are at least 25 years apart, we are supposed to believe Emperor Constantine (who died in 337) waited decades to receive the Bibles he ordered.
Scholars know everything factual about the Alexandrian manuscripts is execrable, so they invent stories like this to try to make their favorite manuscripts look praiseworthy. That’s why scholars throughout history who carefully researched the Alexandrian manuscripts concluded that Origen was right; the Septuagint-Alexandrian-Apocrypha manuscripts weren’t worth the short time they had on Earth.
Origen's Hexapla was destroyed in 638 AD by Muslim conquerors.
Other Christians in Origen’s day had an advantage he didn’t have: they lived “normal” lives away from the Reason of Greek philosophy, and away from the shallow, competitive insecurity of the academic community. It appears that, after most of his mistake-and-vanity-filled life was past, Origen finally rejected knowledge and embraced faith.
Today we live in an Enlightened Alexandrian world that has embraced Reason, knowledge falsely so called, scholarship, and theology. Our modern world of darkness has rejected God’s definition of His word, and has embraced ERROR manuscripts and their corrupt offspring – modern “Best Guess” Bible versions. Scholars would have us, with the paltry ERROR manuscript evidence that has survived the ravages of time, try to do what even Origen couldn’t do with all of his resources. We shouldn’t be looking at what manuscripts choices we think they may have had way back in the “used to be;” we should be basing our walks on the easy manuscript choices God has given us today. Based on Origen’s example, if he were alive today, he would put aside his incredible 6,500-page Hexapla, put aside Nestle-Aland’s 28th “Best Guess” edition of its comparatively-rudimentary 1,008-page layman’s aid, and put aside UBS’s 736-page 5th “Best Guess” critical apparatus…and make a simple faith-based choice: He’d examine the texts of today’s most-used, most-recommended Bible versions. If one of them made Christ a liar (or some of the other no-brainer verse comparisons discussed in AOR’s chapter D22 on the KJV), he’d reject it as corrupt. If one of the Bible versions bragged that it used the Alexandrian-Minority Apocrypha-exalting text rather than the Byzantine-Majority text, he’d shake his head at the immaturity that causes men to think any reading should be regarded as true just because it comes from this textual “family” or that textual “family.” He’d stick with the type of Bible manuscript that he only dreamed of finding 1,800 years ago: a text that stood out from all of the other irrefutably-corrupt texts because of its miraculously-unique inerrancy – the Authorized 1611 King James Bible. And if Origen wasn’t all that familiar with the more archaic English words, he might get himself an English dictionary so he could effortlessly look up the few words he needed to learn during the short period of time it took him to add those words to his own working vocabulary. In short, he would humbly walk by faith in God in accordance with Thus saith the Lord.
Have ears that hear...
and endure to the end, comrades!