Witness number 14 is none other than Eusebius of Caesarea himself.
He lived from 263 to 339 AD.
He was greatly influenced by Julius Africanus,
whom Origen convinced that the Greek Septuagint was from God,
with all the extra words that weren't in the Hebrew,
and all the missing words that were in the Hebrew,
especially in the Apocrypha.
Eusebius was the main defender of a BC Septuagint story.
He's the only source of a number of the questionable quotes
I've given you so far, in support of a BC Septuagint.
So let me give you the highlights of what he wrote
about the origin of the Greek Old Testament.
He wrote about this in his Preparation for the Gospel,
Book 8, Chapter 1.
It can be found at tertullian.org, along with other writings
that are difficult to find.
Eusebius claimed that God wanted the prophecies of the Saviour
to be in public libraries, and accurately translated
before He came to earth.
So Eusebius wrote,
God put it in the mind of King Ptolemy to accomplish this.
Eusebius said that the Hebrew translation into Greek
was dispensed by divine providence, and executed by men
who for wisdom and learning in their country's lore
were held in high repute by their nation.
After this, Eusebius summarized parts
of the letter of Aristeas in his Book 8, Chapters 2-5.
It's easy to justify a legend saying that God made it to happen.
But first, you have to prove it actually happened at all.
It doesn't become true, all of a sudden,
just because someone says it helps their faith.
That is a diversion from the question of
whether the event actually happened.
Some say that God made the Mary goddess
appear on the mother goddess Tenansen's
hill of Tepeyac, in Mexico.
They can say it changed their lives for the better.
But it doesn't mean that the legend of the Lady of Guadalupe,
which no one even heard of until about 118 years
after it supposedly happened, is suddenly an historic event.
In the same way, Eusebius doesn't get a pass
for saying that God put it in King Ptolemy's mind
to make a Greek Old Testament.
First, you have to be able to prove that it happened.
Then you have to be a prophet.
Eusebius fails on both accounts.
Quoting other people who also didn't prove
the existence of a BC Septuagint doesn't cut it,
even if he quotes a lot of them.
So witness number 14 is excused.
Witness number 15 is John Chrysostom,
who lived from 349 to 407 AD, over 650 years
after the Septuagint was supposedly made.
The people called him Chrysostom.
It means golden mouth.
But I keep thinking of the rock group Smash Mouth,
because seriously, he looks like a rock star in this picture.
This golden mouth spoke at the Golden Church of Antioch,
when people heard he was in an area.
They wanted him to be the main speaker.
So his mouth made him very popular.
It also got him in a lot of trouble.
On the good side, he told about the evils
of focusing on outward appearance and expensive things,
but ignoring the poor.
That got one rich lady named Aelia Eudoxia,
wife of Emperor Arcadius, all upset.
But he also got upset at Christians
joining with Jews in their feasts, and preached against that
in eight homilies against the Jews.
That's where his mouth crossed the line.
After affirming the three witnesses on earth
and three in heaven, so there were three witnesses
on earth and three in heaven.
Meaning 1 John 5-7-8 was known and accepted
by the people in 387 AD.
And the applause his sermon received.
After that, he launched into a tirade
against the Jewish people.
It was supposed to be a sermon against Judaizers,
who tried to get Christians under the law of Moses.
But he got carried away.
He started calling the Jewish people, as a whole,
the slayers of Christ.
In Homily 6 of 8, Chrysostom said this,
For the martyrs have a special hatred for the Jews,
since the Jews crucified him for whom they have a special love.
The Jews said, His blood be on us and our children.
The martyrs poured out their own blood for him
whom the Jews had slain.
And he denied that the Jewish people
will ever have the temple back again.
I don't know how he could stand in the place of God like that.
Then he called them murderers and devilish,
because they tried to keep the festivals,
even though they didn't have a temple in Jerusalem.
Chrysostom also really liked Origen.
In fact, he liked Origen and his teachings so much
that he was banished from Constantinople for it.
But he was still so popular that the people threatened
to burn down the royal palace if they didn't get him back.
So he was brought back for a while.
Now let's read what Chrysostom said about
the origin of the Septuagint.
This comes from Homily's on St. Matthew 5-2.
The Seventy may justly be deemed more trustworthy
than the rest of the translators.
The others translated after the coming of Christ,
continuing to be Jews, and might with justice
be suspected of having spoken rather from enmity,
and of obscuring the prophecies of set purpose.
But the Seventy, in that they approach their task
a hundred or more years before the coming of Christ,
and were so many, and are above all such suspicion,
and by reason of their date, their number,
and their agreement, may well deserve a greater credence.
Let's take that apart.
First, he talked of the Seventy, but as you've seen,
no one even proved their existence yet.
And note that he says Seventy, not Seventy-two,
as in the letter of Aristeas.
Next, he said only a hundred or more years
before the coming of Christ.
There is a huge difference between 100 BC and 276 BC.
Then he claimed that they were above all such suspicion,
by reason of their date before Christ,
so they deserved to be trusted.
How can I trust someone who may not have even existed?
The point is that even St. John Chrysostom
didn't prove the existence of a BC Septuagint.
He only assumed it.
So witness number 15 is excused.
Witness number 16 is Epiphanius of Salamis,
on the isle of Cyprus, who lived from about 315 to 403 AD,
over 650 years after the Septuagint was supposedly made.
Some of these pictures are from an icon of Epiphanius,
which is awful funny, because he spoke and wrote
against heresies, including the heresy of making icons.
Jerome, the Catholic Vulgate creator, his buddy since he was 20,
called Epiphanius five-tongued, because he could speak
in Hebrew, Syriac, Egyptian, Greek and Latin.
He is best known for two book series.
One was called Against Heresies, or the Panarion, Medicine Chest,
and the other, On Weights and Measures,
which talks about the Old Testament, measures and weights,
and Israel's geography.
He didn't name it. Somebody else did.
On the one hand, the guy looked thorough in his writing.
But his research wasn't so careful.
For some of the 80 heresies he wrote about,
he relied on hearsay evidence.
Someone said something happened, and Epiphanius just took
it as true, and wrote against it, strongly.
You can make mistakes that way.
Ironically, Epiphanius was anti-origin.
He traced heresies to origin and originism.
And his teachings influenced our last witness,
author of the Roman Catholic Latin Vulgate, Jerome.
Epiphanius spent years in Egypt with anti-origin monks.
After that, he spent the rest of his life
fighting origins teaching, as he saw it,
as the root of the 80 heresies of his day.
One of his last battles was with golden-mouthed Chrysostom,
for taking in pro-origin monks.
Epiphanius said he wished Chrysostom would die a bishop.
And Chrysostom wished that Epiphanius would not live
to get back home.
Believe it or not, both curses came true.
Chrysostom was deposed and exiled, and Epiphanius died at sea
on the way home to Cyprus.
Even though he wrote a lot, historians say
he didn't do the best research.
Many times he trusted hearsay instead of actual evidence.
Even though Epiphanius was against origin,
he grew up using origins' septuagint.
So he didn't say anything bad against it.
Just everything else that origins stood for.
It was in On Weights and Measures 3-11 that Epiphanius added
a whole bunch of fanciful elements that we can find nowhere else.
Here's a quick summary.
He says the 72 translators, 6 from each of the 12 tribes of Israel,
were in 36 cells, 2 per cell.
The cells only had a roof window.
3. All 36 rooms were locked by day.
4. They had two youths provided to give them food,
as well as they had scribes.
5. To every pair, one book of the Bible was given
of every book of the Old Testament, used by the Hebrews,
plus the Wisdom Solomon and Sirach, the Epistles of Baruch
and Jeremiah, etc., the Apocrypha.
6. Every night they would take small boats back to Philadelphus
to dine with him.
7. Then they slept in 36 bedchambers,
so they might not talk with one another.
8. Each day they rotated books of the Bible
among the 36 pairs.
He goes into great detail how they did this.
In total, 8 of the Old Testament books
were translated 36 times, and the
22 that are Apocryphal, 36 times.
9. At the end, the king had 36 readers,
with 36 duplicates, and one person with the Hebrew.
Each reader read alone, and the others checked the text.
Amazingly, not one single text was different
in a single word. Not even the ones added to the Hebrew
are subtracted from the Hebrew.
10. Thus, in the seventh year of
Philadelphus' reign over Egypt, he says,
he now had one copy of the Hebrew scriptures
and 36 copies of a perfect, Holy Spirit-inspired
Greek Old Testament, plus 22 books of the Apocrypha.
Perfectly believable, right?
No one yet has made up a story like this one.
He goes far beyond the Letter of Aristeas
to tell this story.
I bet it was thrilling to hear. The only problem is,
he's the only guy to ever tell it this way.
There is too much brand new information here
for a guy who lived over 600 years
after that was supposed to have happened.
So witness number 16 is excused.