Moment in the Word

The Vital Importance of Understanding History
  
Isaiah 51:1-2 - Hearken to me, ye that follow after righteousness, and seek the Lord: look to the solid rock, which ye have hewn, and to the hole of the pit which ye have dug. Look to Abraam your father, and to Sarrha that bore you. (Brenton's 1851 Greek Septuagint)
 The Masoretes mixed their tradition, politics, and selfish personal agenda to form a new Jewish Scriptural Canon after Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed by Titus in 70 A.D. The rabbinic Jews were grasping at straws trying to reinvent themselves while Christians were siphoning members from every synagogue. Thus, Christ was more of a threat to Judaism than Rome. So, the Masoretes determined to burn their bridges behind them by censoring troublesome messianic prophecies from their Old Testament scrolls that closely matched the Galilean! They didn't get rid of ALL the prophecies because they still looked for the arrival of a conquering king (but hopefully, some other guy than the one the Christians claimed). Thus, the prophecies that exclusively matched Jesus' divine incarnation and only-begotten sonship to God had to go.
 Much like the ancient Masoretes, many modern Christians are as resistant to truth simply because they too protect their favorite traditions, politics, and selfish personal agendas in defense of ideas that are historically and biblically incorrect. Not knowing Church History is deadly! But 99.9% of modern Church goers are clueless about how we got to where we are today. President Woodrow Wilson said, "A nation (or a people) which does not remember what it was yesterday, does not know what it is today, nor what it is trying to do. We are trying to do a futile thing if we do not know where we came from or what we have been about!"
 Even God spoke to Israel through the prophet Isaiah and admonished, "Look to the solid rock, which ye have hewn, and to the hole of the pit which ye have dug. Look to Abraam your father, and to Sarrha that bore you." (Isaiah 51:1-2, Brenton's 1851 Greek Septuagint)"
 If we told a congregation to "name the four Bible books that Martin Luther tried to remove from our New Testament," people would be totally dumbfounded! Granted, we've been taught that it was a "good thing" for Luther to remove eight books from the Old Testament, thinking that the "horrible books" did not belong. But if people realized that those eight Old Testament books were part of the Bible 300 years before Jesus was born... and that the same eight books stayed in the Bible for 1,800 years through the Early Church Era, the Apostolic Age, and the first 500 years of the Universal/Catholic Church... people would be even more surprised.
If they knew that the Protestant Reformation very nearly cost them the book of James, Jude, Hebrews, and the Revelation (the New Testament books that Luther tried to remove from our Bible)... there would be rioting in the central aisle of the neighborhood church.
After the Masoretes frantically amended their Old Testament scrolls from the 2nd-10th century to eliminate prophecies about Jesus, we must also mention Pope Damasus who commissioned St. Jerome to create a "new and improved" Church Bible - the Latin Vulgate in 405 A.D. Jerome's new Bible was based on the censored Masoretic Texts that all Protestant Bibles were later copied from. Consequently,  people simply need to look in the front of their Bibles and read the introductory pages that explain the translation history, and they will quickly see the words MASORETIC TEXT as proof of the revision and censorship that occurred over a thousand years ago!
 Poor St. Augustine (along with several others) fought like a tiger to preserve the first Church Bible - the Greek Septuagint. But obstinate St. Jerome determined to use the Jew's new Masoretic Text despite the protests of other early Church Fathers. And the rest is history... which most modern Christians sadly do not know.
 In many conservative congregations, the blissfully ignorant members think the King James Version was carved by God's own finger atop Sinai and reverently brought down the mountain slope in Moses' hands (I speak facetiously)! But nothing could be farther from the truth! After the Vulgate was translated from the Masoretic Text (and other Latin documents) in 405, next came the Wycliffe Bible in 1380, then the Tyndale Bible in 1525, followed by the Coverdale Bible in 1535, next the Matthews Bible in 1537, then  King Henry VIII's Great Bible in 1539, followed by the Geneva Bible in 1560, after that the Bishop's Bible in 1568, next the Douay-Rheims Bible in 1582-1610, and finally the King James Bible in 1611... AND ALL WERE BASED ON THE DISTORTED MASORETIC TEXT rather than the Early Church's very first Bible - the Greek Septuagint, used by St. Peter and St. Paul.
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