The LXX Septuagint is more reliable than the Masoretic Text

It will truly be an exciting debate and I hope that it may prove very educational to my opponent and I as well as the audience viewing this debate. With that being said, let's get started. Amendments to definitions My opponent made a good point last round in that the seventy translators only translated the Torah. The rest of the Septuagint was translated over the next few hundred years. I hope that clarifies the definition above. Another amendment is that the LXX dates back to the 3rd century BC , not 2nd as stated earlier. See [1] C1 : The age of the texts One of the primary rules of textual criticism is to first determine the age of texts to be able to determine their authority. In simple, the phrase goes , "the older the better". The Masoretic text is an extremely young version of the original Old Testament with the earliest manuscripts dating back to 1000AD at best. The MT is young in age and as such bares very little authority on what the original text contained despite the fact that it is written in hebrew. The LXX on the other hand, is far older as it dates back to the 3rd century BC. The oldest surviving manuscripts of the Septuagint are the Leviticus and Deuteronomy fragments that date to the 2nd century BC. The Septuagint is well over 1000years older than the MT and as such is more reliable in the light of textual criticism. The Dead Sea Scrolls The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of writings found in Qumran by a young shepard who stumbled upon the jars that the DSS were contained in. The scrolls contain the oldest extant Old Testament that has become the authoritative source used in textual criticism to evaluate the value of our modern versions of the OT, namely ; the LXX and Masoretic text. John Allegro, one of the scholars on the original translation team and the first to be put in charge of Cave 4 material as well as the only non religious member of the team, described how Frank Cross in 1954 found a place where the DSS seemed at odds with the MT. He began to discover numerous other places, and then discovered that these texts which differed from the MT, happened to agree with the LXX. Now this is an important find as this is an ancient Hebrew text agreeing with the LXX (a greek text) rather than the modern hebrew version known as the Masoretic text. This affirmed the older textual family of the LXX and provided substantial proof of the authenticity of the Septuagint as the DSS text proved to contain an ancestor of the LXX. John Allegro presented an extensively long chart comparing readings from 1 Samuel demonstrating that the text of the books other than the first five (Torah) existed long before the MT existed. Allegro also documents that most of the time when there is a contradiction between the Septuagint and the MT, the Septuagint most often agrees with the Dead Seas Scrolls. A latter article also demonstrated that this same agreement holds for the Book of Jeremiah. The DSS contain the longer reading for Jeremiah, as opposed to the shorter version in the Masoretic text, demonstrating significant support for the authenticity of the LXX For more on this : . http://www.doxa.ws... # SOURCES OF THE TWO TEXTS The sources of the countless differences between the Septuagint and the Masoretic text have long been debated by scholars of all ages. One extreme view was that the LXX provides a reasonably accurate record of an early Semetic textual variant, now lost, that differed from the Masoretic text. The other extreme, favoured by Jewish religious scholars, was that the differences were primarily due to intentional or accidental corruption of the LXX since its original translation from the Masoretic text. Modern scholars, however, now follow a path between the two views. The discovery of the fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls that agreed with the Septuagint rather than the Masoretic text proved that the LXX is more likely a better reflection of the original Old Testament as compared to the farely recent Masoretic text. One point that discredits the MT is that they were , in fact, known episodes of Jewish recensions in both Greek and Semetic dialects. The most famous of these being those by Aquila (128AD), a student of Rabbi Akiva. More on this issue will be discussed next round as I am running short on time. Consequently the Septuagint is indeed a more reliable text of the original Old Testament . Its textual integrity has been upheld by proofs of its agreement with the Dead Sea Scrolls as well of the evidence of its early age. Scholars have also found favour with the LXX now that more light has been given upon the original OT through the DSS. As a result I still hold firm to my position that the Septuagint is more reliable than the Masoretic text. References : [1] . http://www.en.m.wikipedia.org... [2] . http://www.scrollpublishing.com... [3] . http://www.catholicchampion.blogspot.com... [4] . http://www.biblebelievers.org.au...