posted on Mar, 9 2010 @ 02:37 PM
Just to keep everyone one the same page here...
Iesous (R. Yehoshua bar Yosef the Galilean Nazir. BCE 12 to CE 36) did not have a single 'bible' (i.e. Old testament) as say American protestants
have today between two covers: what he had were several hundred scrolls that were not even exact copies of each other- some are more familiar (the
torah scrolls) than others (the testaments of the 12 patriarchs) but he QUOTES from both types as if they were 'scripture'
introduced by the word FOR (meaning, 'even as it is written...') see e.g. John 4:22 which MIS-quotes the Testament of Naphtali, chapter
13:8 'Know that days to come that the Salvation of Israel shall come from the Judaeans').
So where did 'Iesous' get all of his bible material from since it is SO different than the 'bible' that modern Christians read today in their
churches as 'scripture'?
The Answer is the Dead Sea Scrolls Time Capsule at Qumran (Caves 1-11 - not to be confused with later Dead Sea Scroll material found at Wadi
Murraba'at or the sites during the bar Kokhba revolt of 136 CE which are more 'conformative' to the later familiar texts)
Here's a quick backgrounder: Please do not tell me all this is NEW information to you people !
In November of 1946 some Bedouin re-discovered some rock caves near Jericho (at Qumran, ancient Seccacah) now numbered caves 1-11 which were filled
with jars and flatly laid out Scrolls in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek which were SEALED UP INTO THEIR CAVES FORMING A SORT OF TIME CAPSULE in June of 68
CE during the 1st Failed Jewish War against Rome (66CE - 72 CE) which began at the 70th anniversary of the Death of King Herod which caused Rome to
re-annex Judaea under 'direct rule' (4BCE).
So we can see that the roughly 800 hand copied scrolls (dating from 300 BCE to CE 68) sealed up in Caves 1-11 in 68 CE are a fragmentary SNAP SHOT
(albeit today most are in tattered fragments due mainly to being buried in feet of bat dung which ate away much of the surface of the original
goat-skins) of what 'the bible' looked like in 68CE (= A.D. 68) i.e. shortly after the execution of R. Yehoshua bar Yosef the Galilean Nazir (Gk.
'Iesous') for Armed Sedition against the Maiestas of the 'divine' Roman Emperor Tiberius in 36 CE (at the 100th anniversary of the 1st Invasion of
the Roman Army into Judaea in 63 BCE under Pompey).
In the year 217 CE the Bishop Origen states that Bedouin discovered 'scrolls in Hebrew and Greek sealed in jars stored in rock caves near Jericho'
and 'Jews came in droves and took them away' - in 1946 it seems that cave 2 and 3 and 5had been broken into and most of their contents were taken
out.
In the year 790 CE, Timotheus the Patriarch of Seleucia claims that 'Bedouin had discovered some scrolls in Hebrew in jars in Rock caves near
Jericho' which might refer to the rifling of Caves 6, 7 and 9 - and again, 'Jews came and took many scrolls away...'
So Caves 1-11 were clearly rifled through by Bedouin at least twice before the most recent discoveries in Nov of 1946 - and some of these ended up in
Cairo (at the Synagogue of Ben-Ezra) in 'clean copies' made from some of the material than ended up there (re-copied c. 1100-1400 CE)
Clearly the books of the 'bible' are DIFFRENT during Iesous' life than what it LATER became.
Opening up caves 1 and 4 and 11 for example, scholars unearthed a massive pile of fragments which represented a series of c. 800 Hebrew and Aramaic
Unpointed Consonantal Text Scrolls - which included what we call the Torah, the Psalms and the Prophets in various text versions (about 15-20%
difference between them, ALL BEING COPIED SIDE BY SIDE despite the differences) as well as MANY OTHER BOOKS / SCROLLS that did NOT get voted into the
Old Testament after Jerusalem was ground to powder in AD 70 at the Council of Javneh c. AD 90 -
Interestingly, some of these books have quotations from them PLACED INTO THE MOUTH OF THE GREEK SPEAKING IESOUS in the GOSPELS -
which suggests he not only KNEW these books well (or memorised versions of them as 'scripture') but that he used them as PROOF TEXTS
e.g. The Scroll of the Book of the Testament of Moses (aka The Book of Jubilees), the Scroll of the Book of the Words of Henoch the Son of Jared (aka
I Henoch chapters 1-36 and I Henoch chapters 72-104), the Scroll of the Book of the Wisdom of Iesous ben Sirach (aka 'The Book of Wisdom' or 'Ben
Sira' or someetimes called 'Ecclesiasticus'), the Scroll of the Book of the Testaments of the 12 Patriarchs being the Sons of Yakkov in the Last
Days, the Book of Tobit and other 'Apocryphal books' e.g. Susanna and Judith &tc.
These 'biblical texts' were cited as scripture in the Dead Sea Scrolls unpointed, i.e. written wiithout vowels) along with some Greek texts (mostly
Torah, Psalms and Prophets in various Septuaginta like translations, eg. once scroll that followed the Greek OT version of the Torah and Prophets of
Aquilla, others resembled various Greeks version of Symmachus, another used (e.g. Greek Daniel) followed the Greek of Theodotion, the same version
used in quotations in Greek in the 'Book of Revelation' for the prophet Daniel's citations.
Also if you take a closer look at the Greek citations of the 'Propecies of the Messiah' found in the Hebrew 'bible' (i.e. Old Testament type
texts) which were quoted as FULFILMENTS in the Greek text of the 1st canonical Gospel (according to 'Matthew' whoever he was), you can see that the
VERSION tghat is being quoted DOES NOT MATCH THE LATER LXX Septuaginta Greek OT at all, nor is it very close to either Aquilla's Greek LXX version or
Theodotion's version or Symmachus' Greek OT - it seems to be a Greek Translation of an Aramaic Paraphrase which resembles much of the text types we
see in the Dead Sea Scroll Fragments - which means the Dead Sea Scrolls 'Bible' is one that the early Christians were using as their authoritative
Text - about 20% different from the 'bible' (OT) that is used today by Jews and Protestants (i.e. the socalled Masoretic text) - and is more similar
at many times to the Hebrew Textual underlay (vorlag) to the Greek LXX copies - which formed the basis of the Catholic Old Testament (based on
Jerome's LATIN translation of these texts).
So buried within the 'gospel of Matthew' are citations of the Old Testament which are closer to the text families of the Dead Sea Scrolls than they
are of modern 'old testaments' and therefore...closer to Iesous own day.