Hi Folks,

Your long paragraph is so muddled and confused I really can't do much with it. However, one point blares out ..

"the Guardianship of the OT was being held by Christians in the LXX "

Matthew, this is simply false. This is not the view of Edward Hills, the King James Bible translators, Jerome, Dean Burgon or anyone scholarly we have used as references here, nor of anybody familiar with the issues involved who supports the King James Bible as the pure word of God. This is your own peculiar view. Later, below, I discuss from where it may have arisen.

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Matthew, I would like to focus on and address two fundamental issues. I will put aside the question of the overwhelming textual evidences for a minute just to work with the conceptual aspect. And let us put aside the ultra-complex Psalm 22 issue for now.

"I am not convinced that Martyr and Origen are misreporting ... how can we be certain that some Jews were not deliberately altering ... Hebrew scrolls."

The certainty we have is that the King James Bible is the pure word of God. And since the King James Bible accurately translates the Masoretic Text, the MT cannot be an altered text.

The issue is not what is reported above by Justin is right or wrong (Justin had little or no Hebrew background, how much Origen had is unclear). I will return to that later.

The issue is much simpler .. whether there could be a different true Hebrew Bible other than the one we have today. The issue is whether the Masoretic Text is a text tampered by prophecy manipulations, with the true texts maintained in some other scattered manuscripts or commentaries somewhere, as in Latin or Greek. (Note that there is no consistency, the commentary remarks of Justin and Origen may not even align with the extant Greek texts.)

Basic fundamental point.

If, e.g. the Jews altered the Hebrew scrolls in the way that Justin claimed in Psalm 96 - then the King James Bible is not the preserved word of God.

Thus you have two choices in basic understanding.

a) The Masoretic Text is a true and preserved text, and the Messianic verses (like Psalm 96) are not tampered and this is translated for us into the King James Bible.

b) The King James Bible is not God's preserved word.

I choose "A", loud and clear.
You are unclear as to what you choose.

You need to really come to grips with that simple fact.
We have the pure word of God in the Hebrew-Aramaic Bible which was translated to give us the King James Bible. There is a significant textual variance (majority/minority reading) on only one verse relating to Messianic prophecy.

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"Making a claim that such readings do not appear in the DSS are irrelevant ... We would only find the evidence of the tampering after it occurred"

Your thinking is fuzzy here. Very fuzzy.

The DSS can disprove tampering 100%. In fact, that is what it does in the book of Isaiah since we have an extant pre-Jesus text essentially identical, outside dialect differences, with the Hebrew text in use today. Thus the Masoretic text had to be a faithful copy of the pre-Jesus text, it could not be the result of tampering. Not at 50 AD, 200 AD, or 1000 AD. No tampering at all. Tampering of Isaiah prophecy verses is 100% disproven by the Great Isaiah Scroll.

Inversely, if the Hebrew Bible in use today had post-Jesus Messianic prophecy tamperings, then the DSS reading in those verses must be different, being a pre-tampered version. However we look at Isaiah 7, Isaiah 9, Isaiah 53 and lots of other Messianic verses throughout Penteteuch and the rest of Tanach - and these verses match 100% the Masoretic Text (again - with the complicated issue of Psalm 22:16 and its split Masoretic Text excepted).

So when you conjecture how the ..

"Masoretical text would take into it some corruptions"

You somehow do not seem to realize that any such supposed corruption (note: you really offer none outside the split MT reading on Psalm 22) would have to also be a corruption in the King James Bible.

It seems that you have a residue of propaganda from the folks who argue against the Masoretic Text as corrupt. Often these are the Christian Identity crew who argue that the Jewish-passed-forth text must be unreliable. However they are in a terrible bind, and generally must attack the King James Bible as well, since that was translated from the Masoretic Text.

You seem to be walking in two worlds on this question.

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Here is the pure and true word of God of :

Psalm 96:10-12
Say among the heathen that the LORD reigneth:
the world also shall be established that it shall not be moved:
he shall judge the people righteously.
Let the heavens rejoice, and let the earth be glad;
let the sea roar,
and the fulness thereof.
Let the field be joyful, and all that is therein:
then shall all the trees of the wood rejoice

All that happened here is very simple. The same type of poor copyists (perhaps alexandrian gnostic "Christian") who tampered by putting Romans 3 into Psalms 14 of the Greek OT tampered with the text here, and moved "trees of the wood" by "The LORD reigneth".

(Helping along Messianic prophecy by tampering with God's word ! .. an abomination.. God's word needs no such help.)

And Justin wrongly thought that the errant reading was original. Justin could have been reporting accurately, he simply had very limited, if any, Hebrew textual and language and manuscript background. Clearly Justin was far too quick to accuse, he was like those who accuse the King James Bible today, and his words should be seen only as an embarrassment.

(btw .. it is even possible that some Christians in the first centuries occasionally translated the Psalm 96 blunder back to Hebrew ... although there are little if any evidence of this blunder in any language .. not even extant Greek and Latin manuscripts !)

Matthew, if you do not 100% believe that the text section above from Psalm 96 is the word of God, pure and preserved, and that the Justin claim is simply wrong and his Greek text was corrupted .. how can you fully and strongly defend the King James Bible as the pure word of God ?

To put it simply.

On Psalm 96:

If Justin was right,
the Hebrew Bible and the King James Bible is wrong.

If Justin was wrong,
the KJB and the MT can both be 100% right and pure.

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In fact, the evidence is overwhelming and conclusive that Justin was flat-out wrong, God has not passed to us scripture versions in Psalm 96 that were tampered by the Jews. We have the pure and perfect word of God.

Shalom,
Steven