So none of these 17 witnesses
said anything more than was or was supposed to be
in the Letter of Aristeas.
Now let's see what it actually says
in its official form.
As I said before, the Letter of Aristeas
is available in two main translations,
R.H. Charles's, from 1913, and
Henry St. John Thackeray's, in 1903.
Working from R.H. Charles's copy,
the Letter of Aristeas in English has,
after you remove the verse and chapter numbers,
19,407 words.
That's equal to a 98-page book, with no formatting,
no headings, and no table of contents.
So the Letter of Aristeas is not a letter at all.
It's a book.
And it's a book of propaganda.
It's supposed to be a letter from a Gentile guy
named Aristeas, to his brother, Philocrates.
But what brother would write this in a letter?
And I suppose that the thing will seem incredible
to those who will read my narrative in the future.
But it is unseemly to misrepresent facts
which are recorded in the public archives.
And it would not be right of me to transgress
in such a matter as this.
I tell the story just as it happened,
conscientiously avoiding any error.
It sounds like he declared his purpose,
to set up a supposed letter for people
in the future to read.
This is exactly what a con would do,
when setting up a letter, then pretending it's old.
See?
It says people will read it in the future.
So it must be in the past.
Methinks he doth protest too much.
Somebody is faking his readers out.
Now if that were all, we could say
that I'm totally wrong.
But let's find out more about this supposed letter.
Thackeray noted this letter is not what it professes to be,
which it describes as
a contemporary record of a Greek who played a prominent part
in the actions described.
First, who is Aristeas?
He was not a contemporary of Ptolemy Philadelphus.
We can see that, because Aristeas writes,
as though he were looking back over an epic
of a long dynasty of Ptolemies.
Check out sections 28 and 182, from 28,
For all affairs of state used to be carried out
by means of decrees, and with the most
painstaking accuracy by these Egyptian kings,
and nothing was done in a slip-shot or haphazard manner.
Then from 182,
For this arrangement has been made by the king,
and it is an arrangement which you see maintained today.
So someone clearly wrote well after the fact,
intending for the letter, or book, to be public.
And who is Demetrius?
He is supposed to be King Ptolemy Philadelphus,
confidential friend, and over the library.
But we know that Demetrius voted for
Philadelphus' older brother Caraunos.
So Demetrius was exiled to northern Egypt,
got bitten by a snake, and died right after 283 BC.
And that's another problem.
Epiphanius of Salamis and many scholars say
the 7th century was translated in the 7th year
of Philadelphus' reign.
That would be at the latest, 276 BC.
Then they quote Aristeas, which says
the high priest was Aliazar.
But the lists of the high priests don't say that.
They say that Ananias I was high priest until 280 BC.
Then Simon I was high priest from 280 to 260 BC.
Then Aliazar, another son of Ananias I,
was high priest from 260 to 250.
Aristeas would make Aliazar a priest in 276 to 283,
16 to 23 years too early.
That's not all.
In sections 180 to 181, Philadelphus said
at their arrival,
"...it happens also that it is the anniversary
of my naval victory over Antigonus."
No, it wasn't.
He confronted Antigonus Gonatas in 260 BC,
at least 16 years later, and lost horribly.
He didn't defeat him until 245 BC, 31 years later.
Something doesn't add up.
Again, who is Aristeas?
I used a Greek minor deity called Aristeas,
because it doesn't actually exist.
And I think Aristeas doesn't actually exist, either.
Both Thackeray and many Jewish writers I have read
have agreed that the letter of Aristeas is
"...Jewish propaganda under a heathen mask."
In other words, whoever wrote the letter of Aristeas
was a Jewish person, not a Greek.
I have been chipping away at the letter
all through these vlogs.
And as you may have noticed, let me say,
I believe the letter of Aristeas is a complete fabrication,
a fraud, a fiction, and it doesn't even have
a grain of truth.
If I'm right, who could have written it?
I'll answer that after we tackle the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Ever since scrolls and 17,000 bits of scrolls
were found in caves near the Dead Sea starting in 1946,
people have been looking for evidence of ancient Bibles.
They have found some astounding things,
like scrolls that are virtually identical
with the Leningrad Hebrew Codex that I showed you
and other Masoretic texts.
But some people have been desperate
to find a BC Septuagint.
Take a look at this.
This is a Nahal Haver Greek text found in a cave near Hebron.
It has Micah 5, 4-6 on the right side.
I decided to take a digital text of the Nahal Haver Greek
and compare it to what we call the Septuagint.
I really gave it the benefit of the doubt.
When it had only part of a word right,
I granted those letters.
It looks like this.
The yellow is what's the same.
It's not the same text.
Lots of different word choices.
It's a translation of the Hebrew, all right.
But the Greek is very different from what we call the Septuagint.
So just people telling you that the Dead Sea Scrolls have Greek
doesn't mean they're Septuagint.
That said, there are some fragments of texts
which do match what we call the Septuagint.
Carson Peter Thede, the author of the Jesus Papyrus,
wrote in another of his books, called Rekindling the Word,
that there are six fragments with a few words
that match what we call the Septuagint.
Just six of them are reliably identifiable.
But he says,
"...all the Greek fragments can be dated to the period
from the middle of the first century BC
to the middle of the first century AD."
This means that even these Greek texts
are the most recent of all manuscripts
found in Qumran.
So after all this investigation, across centuries,
all the scholars and all the investigation,
and we end up with the oldest Greek words
on a piece of papyrus or leather, are only reliably dated
to the first century, at the time before 68 AD,
when the Romans came through Israel.
That does it.
I cannot believe in a BC Septuagint.
But I can and do believe there was something made
in the first century AD.
But let's remember what this means.
1. If there is no BC Septuagint, there is no acceptance
of a BC Greek text.
That means the Hebrew-speaking Hebrew synagogues
in Israel used, surprise, Hebrew.
2. If they used Hebrew in Israel, and even the writers in Alexandria,
including Origen, admit this freely, then there is no way
that Jesus or the apostles could have quoted the Septuagint.
That means they did not quote or reference
a Greek Apocrypha, either.
Only the Septuagint had the Apocrypha, not the Hebrew,
as even Origen and Jerome both admitted.
3. If there is no way that Jesus or the apostles
could have quoted the Septuagint, then how did words similar
to Jesus and the apostles end up in the Old Testament Greek text?
Simple. Whatever Greek texts were made
in the first century were modified later by people
who had a New Testament sitting in front of them.
So the Greek Old Testament was made, during or after
the life of Jesus, even if it came out in Alexandria
by that late date. Do you really think
the Hebrew-using Hebrews would abandon the Hebrew
for an untested Greek that was so different from the Hebrew,
as everyone admits? No way.
So Jesus and the apostles not only did not quote the Septuagint,
they did not use it, either.
So who did create the Septuagint, and when?
I can only go by the information that history has allowed us.
One guy had motive. He wanted to make
the Hebrew Old Testament something he could play with,
to make allegories and analogies, and to compare with Greek philosophy.
For that he want and felt he needed a Greek Old Testament.
2. One guy had means. He was born wealthy.
His family was contemporary with the Ptolemaic dynasty.
He had both social and family connections to the Hasmonean
and Herodian dynasties. And even the Julius Claudius dynasty
in Rome. He was educated in Roman,
Greek and Egyptian culture, and in Judaism especially.
And one guy had opportunity. He had access to the priests
in Jerusalem. He could go back and forth,
as he pleased. He had visited the temple
in Jerusalem at least once. He was a representative
of the Alexandrian Jewish community. And it seems he had plenty of time
to pull it off.
That man is Philo of Alexandria. He had motive, means and opportunity.
If he did it, then he completed it
before he passed away, about 50 AD.
The story would spread, because of his influence.
Who would question him? Then the letter would spread
all over to support his Greek Old Testament,
with apocryphal stories that the Alexandrians liked,
all in one book.
He could have afforded to pay for the people to do the work.
And there's ample time after that, for Josephus, then Aquila,
Symmachus and Theodotion to do their own work.
And there's plenty of time for the Alexandrian religious people
to mess with the Greek.
I'll stop there.
But we don't have to worry if there is no BC Septuagint.
We have God's words, preserved from the Hebrew Old Testament
and the Greek New Testament, and passed down and translated
accurately all the way down to our King James Bible.
God's preserved words in one book for us, in one language.
Now think about this.
If there is no BC Septuagint, if this Greek Septuagint
with Apocrypha isn't God's work, then you can bet
the Devil is involved.
What is the Devil's endgame?
I'll answer that in another vlog.
God bless you, and have a wonderful day.