I've had to search my heart and pray to God
that I would be objective.
You already know from Vlog 131 that after 18 years
I was convinced that my amillennial end-time views were wrong.
And you know from Vlog 149 that I believed Tischendorf
was telling the truth for 30 years, before finding out he was a liar.
I am still going to have to change the next printing
of some of my books, because of all this.
So you know, I was serious when I told God,
Please, show me the truth.
Was there a B.C. Septuagint?
You see, lots of people through the ages
have claimed that Jesus read the Septuagint,
a Greek Old Testament, and His apostles did as well.
They say that if Jesus and the apostles trusted the Septuagint,
then so should we.
But the Septuagint also includes the Apocrypha,
where we find writings in favor of praying or paying for the dead,
purgatory, committing suicide, an angel of God lying,
sorcery and magic.
I'll tell you more about that in another vlog.
You can also read some of it in Chapter 15
of Why They Changed the Bible.
Also, the Greek Septuagint is the basis
for the Roman Catholic Latin Vulgate.
So actually, this is a very important question.
If I was wrong, it would just be one more change
in a world of changes.
I promised God I would change whenever I was proved wrong.
That's why I've stood for the KJV for the last 17 years,
against my formal training in Bible, college, seminary and SIL.
So let's deal with the issue squarely.
Is there proof of a B.C. Septuagint?
Now I've about finished double-checking my research,
maybe triple-checking.
What is the best evidence for a B.C. Septuagint?
And is it a mountain of evidence, or a molehill?
You may want to press pause right now
and put on the subtitles, because here we go.
Hi, I'm David Daniels from Chick Publications.
First, I had to find the best evidence.
You can find a lot of Septuagint's around.
The main two are here in my hand, Lancelot Brenton's Septuagint
from 1851, based, he supposed, upon the Vaticanus
and Alexandrinus.
The other is the Ralph's Hanhart Septuaginta from 1935,
and updated in 2006, based upon the blending
of Sinaiticus, Vaticanus and Alexandrinus.
It also claimed to have some readings from the Hexapla,
the 6 Old Testaments and Columns done by Origen
in the 230s to 240s AD.
That's all fine, but none of that is B.C.
All of that is A.D.
Only one document claims to tell the full story
of the creation of the Septuagint.
It's called the Letter of Aristeas.
There are two main English translations
of the whole Letter of Aristeas, R.H. Charles from 1913,
and Henry St. John Thackeray from Cambridge in 1903.
Thackeray also made a 1917 book, The Letter of Aristeas,
translated with an appendix of ancient evidence
on the origin of the Septuagint.
That sounds like best evidence to me.
So let's start there.
I've wondered for years if there was anything else available
to testify to this B.C. Septuagint.
I and probably you have assumed so much for so long.
It's like when you go to any class, from elementary school to college,
the teacher says,
When did the dinosaurs roam the earth?
And they'll say, Millions of years ago.
It's rote memory.
It doesn't mean it's true.
Everybody just assumes it is.
It was the same in Bible college.
The teacher could ask, When was the Septuagint written?
And we'd say, 285 BC.
My wife Deborah remembers it.
You probably do, too, if you went to Bible college
or had one of those scholarly Sunday school teachers.
Again, we assumed it was true.
It just doesn't mean that it was.
Nobody actually checked it.
So let's do that now.
But let's save the actual letter of Aristeas for afterward.
Let's talk about the other supposed testimonies
for B.C. Septuagint first.
This comes from Thackeray's appendix entitled,
The Evidence of Some Ancient Jewish and Christian Writers
on the Origin of the Septuagint Version.
First are the rabbinic Jewish writings.
Witness number one is the Megalath Taanis,
the role of fasting, written between 41-70 AD,
three centuries after the supposed Septuagint,
during the Revolution of the Zalitz.
It says, On the 8th or 7th day of Tebeth,
December-January, the law was written in Greek.
Or it could simply mean they put the Hebrew
into Greek characters.
In the days of King Ptolemy, and the darkness,
like in Exodus 10.21, came upon the world
for three days.
That's an interesting quote, but it doesn't tell much.
First, which ruler named Ptolemy, starting with
Alexander the Great's general Ptolemy,
there were no less than 15 generations of Ptolemies
who ruled over Egypt between 305 and 30 BC.
Second, was it started, finished, or all done
on the 8th of Tebeth?
It doesn't say.
Third, was it translated from Hebrew to Greek?
Or was it just Hebrew words, written in Greek letters,
transliterated?
Fourth, where did the story of darkness
on the world for three days come from?
We have no such story anywhere else
in the world.
It would be rather obvious if it happened.
Somebody would have recorded it.
So I don't trust this story at all.
It sounds like a folktale, not solid evidence.
So witness number 1 is excused.
Witness number 2, Massacat Soferim,
the Tractate of the Scribes, from the 700s AD,
almost a thousand years after the supposed Septuagint.
These are snippets of Part 1, Section 8.
It happened once that five elders wrote the Law in Greek,
which could mean, again, Hebrew words written
in Greek characters, for one of the 15 Ptolemies,
"...and that day was a hard day for Israel,
like the day on which Israel made the golden calf."
Then it basically says that on another occasion,
one of the Ptolemies put 70 elders in 70 cells,
private rooms, without telling them why.
Then he said,
"...write me out the law of Moses your master."
Then all of them were of one mind, and wrote out the law,
evidently without a copy of the Hebrew law,
"...but they altered thirteen passages."
And it lists them in detail.
7 in Genesis, 3 in Exodus, 1 in Numbers,
and 3 in Deuteronomy.
Which is weird, because it adds up to 14, not 13.
Going on, Massacat Soferim also says
that the Hebrew names for God in that scroll
sent to Alexandria were all written in gold letters.
But it says that the wise men replied,
Put it away!
They commanded that the scroll be stuck into a Geniza,
a storage room, because the gold letters
made it unfit to use in a synagogue.
So now we have a different story.
We still don't know which Ptolemy.
It was only 70 elders, not 72, like in Aristeas.
And they all wrote the exact same words
in their private cells, even in the 13 verses of 14,
where they disagreed with the Hebrew,
without even one Hebrew text in their possession.
Remember, according to this account,
the king didn't say why he was putting them
in separate cells, so they had no way
to prepare for this.
Massacat Soferim also says that just the names of God
were written in gold.
But guess what?
The Letter of Aristeas, section 176 says
the whole scroll was written in gold.
So that testimony doesn't match either.
I don't trust this account.
Neither do the Jewish scholars.
They wouldn't even accept it as true Talmudic writing.
They printed it as an addendum at the end.
In other words, it wasn't important to them.
Witness number 2 is excused.
Witness number 3, Jerusalem or Palestinian Talmud,
350 to 400 AD, over 600 years after
the supposed Septuagint was made.
This is from Megillah 1, 71d, bottom.
The Jerusalem Talmud account says pretty much the same
as the Massacat Soferim.
So you can't trust this story, either.
It has the same problems I just listed.
Witness number 3 is excused.
Number 4, the Babylonian Talmud, Talmud Bavli,
from around 499 AD, almost 800 years
after the supposed Septuagint was made,
Megillah 9a.
It matches the story of the Massacat Soferim,
but changed 70 elders to 72.
It also declares that it was only permitted
to translate the Hebrew into Greek.
The Hebrew text may not be translated
into any other language.
And it had some other differences.
So it corrected one part of the Septuagint story,
but the rest has the same errors.
Witness number 4 is excused.
And that's all the witnesses from Rabbinic Judaism.
None of them passes the test.
Now for the Hellenistic Greek Jewish writings.
Witness number 5, the Letter of Aristobulus of Panaeus,
was supposedly written around 186-145 BC,
100 years after the supposed Septuagint,
because it is addressed to King Ptolemy VII Philometer
during his reign.
However, so many scholars have disputed this letter
that they actually call it...
pseudo-fake Aristobulus.
The only one who claimed it even existed
was Eusebius of Caesarea in the 300s AD,
in preparation for the Gospel, chapter 13, section 12.
It took me a while to track this one down.
I verified the wording in a 1903 translation
by E. H. Gifford.
The Letter of Pseudo-Aristobulus claims that Plato,
who lived in the 300s BC, was a follower of the laws of Moses
and studied all their details.
But, he said, the complete translation of the law
and all its contents was made under King Ptolemy Philadelphus,
ancestor to Ptolemy VII, who displayed the greatest zeal,
in quotes, while Demetrius of Philarum
busied himself with the necessary arrangements.
Anybody who reads Plato knows full well
that Plato didn't follow the laws of Moses.
That's just bogus.
And the fact that so many scholars don't believe
for a minute that the document is real
pretty much settles it.
Besides, again, we only find this letter
in Eusebius of Caesarea's writings in the 300s AD.
And Eusebius had a personal vested interest
in promoting Origen plus the Septuagint with Apocrypha.
Eusebius copied that from Origen's 5th column
right there in Caesarea Maritima, where he lived.
And the same Eusebius became Emperor Constantine's lapdog.
Witness number 5 is excused.
Witness number 6, Philo of Alexandria,
25 BC to 50 AD, was a Hellenistic Jewish man
who lived in Alexandria, Egypt.
He was born into wealth and society,
educated in Greek and Roman and Egyptian,
as well as Jewish culture.
He believed that the scriptures cannot be understood literally.
He started up the allegorical, non-literal method
of understanding the Bible that Origen later copied.
Philo said that God was too marvelous and complex
to take Him literally.
So of course Philo could not take God's words
of scripture literally, either.
Philo's story of the Septuagint on the life of Moses,
Part 2, sections 5 to 7, is the most complex one yet.
Here are some highlights.
First, he waxed eloquence, saying that
King Ptolemy II Philadelphus, who reigned from 285 to 247 BC,
was the greatest of all the Ptolemies.
Philadelphus had such a passionate desire
for the laws of Moses that he sent ambassadors
to the high priest and king of Judea,
who were the same guy.
So the high priest-slash-king found Hebrews trained
in Hellenic Greek learning, as well as Hebrew.
Then Philadelphus made feasts and asked them philosophical questions.
They passed all these tests with flying colors.
So Philadelphus found the purest and cleanest,
un-diseased location in the land, the island of Pharos,
for them to live and commune with God, while they translated.
Here's how Philo described the translation.
"...In secret they sat, with none present,
save the elements of nature, earth, water, air, heaven,
whose origin it was their first task to expound
for the cosmogony, the origin of the universe,
holds the first place in our laws, meaning Genesis 1-2.
And as men possessed, they produced
not diverse interpretations, but all alike used
the same words and phrases, as though some invisible prompter
whispered in the ears of each."
Then he said that they exactly defined every Hebrew word
with its corresponding Greek term.
And when the people read both the Hebrew and the Greek,
"...they called those men not translators, but priests
of the mysteries and prophets, to whom it was vouchsafed
with sincerity of mind to enter into the spotlessly pure spirit of Moses."
Then Philo claimed that there was a yearly festival
on Pharaoh's Island to thank God for the Greek translation.
So what do we make of this testimony?
First of all, Philo was not a Bible believer.
Second, he claimed that the Jewish High Priest was also king.
That would mean either the High Priest Onias I,
High Priest until 280 BC, or his son Simon the Just,
280-260 BC.
But neither high priest was called or treated as a king.
Remember those names when we come to the letter of Aristeas.
Third, how expert in Greek culture could the Hebrew translators
of this story have been, who spent their entire existence
keeping separate from pagans?
Fourth, who would have taught Jewish people
Greek philosophy in the 280s BC?
Fifth, more importantly, how believable is it
that every translator who worked in secret
translated all five books of Moses, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers
and Deuteronomy with the exact same Greek words?
Or that every one of them had memorized all 187 chapters
of those five books?
And calling them priests of the mysteries and prophets?
Really?
That's assuming direct, divine inspiration
on every person simultaneously.
Sixth, there is nobody else who verified a yearly festival
out on the island of Pharos, which means Lighthouse,
where the famous 400 foot tall Lighthouse of Alexandria
stood from about 280 BC for 1,500 years.
And you can bet if there were such a festival,
it would be pretty exclusive on that small island.
And even if there were one in Philo's day,
you couldn't know when they started doing it.
We have no records.
Without corroborating evidence, it sounds like something
that was added to make the story sound more legitimate.
I could go on, but Philo is saying
too many unbelievable things.
Either somebody gave this bogus story to Philo,
or Philo made it up himself.
Either way, I'm setting aside, but not excusing
witness number 6.
I will recall him later.