No, the use of the word ‘stola’ is not a mistake. It’s a play on the word ‘sola’ with the word ‘stolen’. The following article is an introduction to a series of six chapters written by JD Hall on the subject of how the enemies of Christ, a group of Jewish rabbis, some centuries after Christ changed/corrupted the Old Testament Hebrew text away from the meaning of the Greek Septuagint readings which supported Jesus Christ as the Messiah.
Over the past few years I have learnt more and more about the deliberate corruption of the Masoretic text leading me to believe that the Greek Septuagint (LXX) is the purest form of the words of God of the Christian Old Testament. What follows are JD Hall’s words, not mine, but I agree with him.
What you are about to read over the next six installments of Insight to Incite (I2I) is the most consequential controversy in the history of Protestant Christianity, and almost nobody in your church has heard a single word about it.
Fair warning. This series is heavier than what you normally get here. The usual I2I diet runs the gamut from ecclesiastical skullduggery to theological polemics and the occasional flaming broadside at someone who deserves it. That material is light reading compared to what’s coming. This is a six-part investigation into the textual foundation of your Bible; who built it, when, what their motives were, and whether the Protestant church made the single most catastrophic unexamined assumption in its five-hundred-year history.
Also, up front, because I know how you read: these installments are full book chapters. They will not fit in an email. Every part of this series will live at I2I in your browser, and you’ll need to click the link to read it there.
When the series wraps, Premium Subscribers receive the whole thing as a finished ebook, professionally formatted, with a workbook and study helps included. It will be free for Premium Subscribers to print, share at church, hand to your pastor, or press into the hands of whoever in your orbit most needs to read it.
SOMEONE SWITCHED THE BOOKS
You have a Bible. You probably own several. The Old Testament in that Bible is almost certainly translated from the Masoretic Text, the standard Hebrew Old Testament, named after a group of Jewish scholars called the Masoretes who standardized it between the sixth and tenth centuries AD. Your pastor preaches from it. Your favorite commentaries are based on it. The Westminster Confession of Faith, the foundational document of Reformed Protestantism, declares that this Hebrew text has been kept pure in all ages by the singular care and providence of God.
Here is the problem. The men who standardized that text completed their work somewhere between six hundred and a thousand years after Christ. The oldest complete manuscript of your providentially preserved Old Testament dates to 1008 AD. It is less than a thousand years old. And the scholars who produced it were post-Christian Jewish rabbis working in a community that had spent several centuries in active theological warfare with a religion that was using their own scriptures as evidence that Jesus of Nazareth was the promised Messiah.
They had every reason in the world to care how certain passages read.
Now here is where it gets genuinely interesting. Jesus and the New Testament writers – Paul, Luke, the author of Hebrews, Peter, James, and the rest – quoted the Old Testament constantly. Protestant scholars have counted it up. Out of roughly 340 Old Testament quotations in the New Testament, about 300 identifiable citations align with a different Old Testament entirely; the Greek Septuagint, a translation produced by Jewish scholars in Alexandria, Egypt, around 250 years before Christ. That’s the one the apostles used. That’s the one the early church ran on for its first four centuries. That’s the one Jesus quoted when he stood up in the Nazareth synagogue and read his own mission statement from the scroll of Isaiah.
The Old Testament that your Bible is based on is not the one the apostles used. The ratio of New Testament citations runs roughly ten to one in favor of the Septuagint over the Masoretic tradition. In several passages, the apostles quoted texts that make sense only in the Septuagint. In at least one famous case, Jesus quoted a passage from Isaiah that does not exist in the Hebrew Masoretic Text at all. It only appears in the Greek.
THE CAST OF CHARACTERS
The Septuagint scholars abbreviate it LXX, Latin for “seventy,” after the legendary team of Jewish translators who produced it. It was the Bible of the Greek-speaking Jewish world. By the time Christianity exploded out of Palestine into the Roman Empire, the Septuagint was already in the hands of Jewish communities from Rome to Babylon. The apostles didn’t have to convince anyone to start using it. It was already the Bible. The New Testament was written in Greek, for a world that read Greek scripture, and it quotes Greek scripture.
Then came a catastrophe. In 70 AD, Rome destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple. Judaism survived, rebuilt under the rabbis, and eventually produced a standardized Hebrew text. Those rabbis were not disinterested archivists. They were leaders of a community under siege, defining the boundaries of their religion in the shadow of a theological rival that was using their own scriptures against them in courts, synagogues, and marketplaces across the empire.
Then came Jerome. In the late fourth century, a brilliant and abrasive Latin scholar in Bethlehem decided to translate the Old Testament not from the Septuagint, in which is what the entire Western church had been using, but from the Hebrew text in the hands of the rabbis. He called it the Hebraica veritas. The Hebrew truth. Augustine of Hippo, the most influential theologian in Western history, wrote him increasingly agitated letters begging him to stop. A bishop in North Africa introduced Jerome’s new translation in church, and his congregation nearly rioted. Jerome finished anyway. His translation eventually became the Vulgate, the Catholic Church’s official Bible for over a thousand years.
Then came the Reformation. Luther, Calvin, and Tyndale rightly wanted the original languages and no Catholic intermediaries. Magnificent instinct, right? They went back to the Hebrew. The same Hebrew. The Westminster Confession then turned it into doctrine and called it “providentially preserved, pure in all ages, the final court of appeal.” Case closed.
Except the Dead Sea Scrolls happened. Discovered between 1947 and 1956, sitting in caves for two thousand years, these ancient Hebrew manuscripts predate the Masoretic standardization by a thousand years. In passage after disputed passage – the exact passages where the Masoretic text diverges from the Septuagint in ways that consistently undermine Christian proof-texting – the Dead Sea Scrolls line up with the Septuagint, not the Masoretic. The Greek translation made before Christ preserves older Hebrew readings than the Hebrew text that the Protestant church declared providentially pure.
WHAT’S AT STAKE
The early church knew something was wrong. Justin Martyr in the second century accused the rabbis of deliberately altering their scriptures to undermine Christian messianic arguments. Ephraem of Syria, in the fourth century, named a specific mechanism and a specific motive. Eusebius, the father of church history, wrote around 310 AD: “we suspect this was something the Jews did.” This is not a modern accusation. It is a two-thousand-year-old charge from men who watched the process unfold in real time.
The rabbis themselves acknowledged in their own literature that the scribes before them had changed the text. The technical term, tiqqune sopherim, or “corrections of the scribes,” appears in rabbinic sources. The prosecution’s best witnesses are the defendants.
This series walks you through it all. The history. The specific passages where the manipulation is most visible. The chain of accusers from the second century through the Reformation. The modern Protestant scholars quietly dismantling Masoretic primacy from inside the tradition. And the question the series places in your hands without answering for you: what does it mean that the church that gave us sola scriptura built its Old Testament on a text produced by the enemies of Christ, those scriptures foretold?
There will be six chapters, one per installment. I’m sure you’ll forgive a missing article here or there for a day or two, so I can complete this important work.
The series begins now.
Stola Scriptura: How the Enemies of Christ Schemed to Steal the Scriptures
A Layman’s Guide to the Controversy surrounding the LXX, the Masoretic Text, and what it means for your Bible.
Picture a man in Alexandria, Egypt, around 250 BC. He is Jewish by blood, Jewish by religion, Jewish in his bones. He observes the Sabbath, keeps the dietary laws, prays toward Jerusalem, and regards the Torah as the living word of the God who parted the Red Sea and spoke from Sinai. He is also, in every practical sense of the word, a Greek. He thinks in Greek, argues in Greek, conducts his business in Greek, and dreams in Greek. His grandfather left Judea before he was born, swept up in the great Jewish migration that followed Alexander the Great’s conquest of the known world. Alexandria is his home. The Mediterranean is his world. Hebrew, the original language of his sacred scriptures, is something he can approximately sound out on a good day, the way a third-generation Irish-American might manage a toast at a wedding – technically present, functionally useless.
He needs a Bible in his language. But it’s not because he has wandered from the faith, nor because he is embarrassed by his heritage, but because the word of God does him no earthly good in a language he cannot read. This is not a theological crisis. It is a literacy problem with enormous theological consequences, and the solution that emerges from it over the next century will shape every Bible that has ever sat in a Christian pew, every sermon ever preached from a Protestant pulpit, and the most consequential textual controversy in the history of Western religion.
The story of your Bible begins here, in a city full of Jews who needed God to speak Greek.
WHAT ALEXANDRIA ACTUALLY WAS
Alexandria in 250 BC was the most cosmopolitan city on earth, which in the ancient world was simply a way of saying it was the most Greek city outside of Greece itself. Ptolemy II Philadelphus, the Macedonian pharaoh who ruled Egypt from 285 to 247 BC, had turned it into the intellectual capital of the Mediterranean. The Library of Alexandria – the most ambitious knowledge-gathering project in human history – was his father’s gift to the world, and he had spent lavishly to make it the greatest repository of human writing ever assembled. According to ancient accounts, Demetrius of Phalerum, the library’s chief custodian, reported to Ptolemy that the collection stood at around 200,000 volumes and that he intended to bring it to 500,000. What the library apparently did not have was a decent copy of the Jewish scriptures in a language anyone at the library could actually read.
The Jewish population in Alexandria at this period was enormous. Philo of Alexandria, writing in the first century AD, estimated that roughly a million Jews were living in Egypt, most of them in and around Alexandria. They had come in waves – some as merchants following trade routes, some as soldiers serving in Ptolemaic armies, some as refugees from various catastrophes in Judea. They had synagogues, community organizations, legal protections, and a thriving intellectual culture. What they mostly lacked by the third century BC was functional Hebrew. The language of their scriptures had become the language of their ancestors rather than the language of their lives. Greek had swallowed everything else.
The story that has come down to us about how the translation happened is called the Letter of Aristeas, and like most founding legends, it mixes historical kernel with generous mythology. According to Aristeas, Ptolemy himself commissioned the project, sent to the High Priest Eleazar in Jerusalem requesting seventy-two translators; six from each of the twelve tribes, who were welcomed to Alexandria with a seven-day royal banquet, seated at the king’s table, peppered with philosophical questions, and generally treated like honored guests rather than scribal workmen. They were then installed on the island of Pharos, the same island that held the great lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, and in seventy-two days, they completed the translation of the Torah. According to Philo and Irenaeus, the translators were kept in separate cells and produced identical translations independently, a miracle of divine inspiration confirming the translation’s authority. At least, that’s how the story goes.
Despite some claiming the story is embellished, what we know for sure is that the Torah was translated from Hebrew into Greek in Alexandria in the first half of the third century BC, almost certainly with some form of royal patronage, and the result was immediately embraced by the Greek-speaking Jewish diaspora as authoritative Scripture. The annual festival the Jews of Alexandria held on the island of Pharos to celebrate the translation – a beach gathering with Jews and curious Gentiles alike – suggests how significant the event felt to the community that produced it. They were not marking a useful administrative achievement, but celebrating what they understood to be a providential gift.
THE BIBLE THAT RAN THE WORLD
The Torah was just the beginning. Over the following century and a half, the rest of the Hebrew scriptures were translated into Greek by various hands in various places, some in Alexandria, some apparently in Palestine, with varying degrees of skill and varying translation philosophies. Some books were rendered with careful literalism. Others were paraphrased with considerable freedom. The Greek of Daniel reads like a different document from the Greek of the Pentateuch, which is to say the Septuagint is not really one thing; it is a collection of ancient translations that accumulated over roughly two centuries and eventually got treated as a unified whole.
What mattered was what this collection became in the hands of the Jewish diaspora. By the first century BC, Greek-speaking Jewish communities from Rome to Babylon were reading the Septuagint on the Sabbath as the word of God. Synagogue inscriptions across the Mediterranean world were in Greek. The great Jewish philosophers who engaged Hellenistic intellectual cultural figures like Philo of Alexandria, who produced an enormous body of biblical commentary and philosophical theology, worked from the Greek text as their primary scriptural reference. The Septuagint was not a translation that Greek-speaking Jews tolerated as a second-best substitute for the Hebrew. It was the Scripture. It was the Bible. The Hebrew text was for specialists, scholars, and Palestinian rabbis. The LXX was for the world.
This matters enormously for what comes next, because the world the LXX was running was the exact world into which Christianity was born. Jesus of Nazareth preached in an Aramaic-speaking corner of a Greek-speaking empire. His disciples were Galilean Jews whose scriptural world was the LXX. When he stood up in the Nazareth synagogue and read from the scroll of Isaiah, he was reading a text that the Greek-speaking majority of world Jewry already knew in the Septuagint. When the disciples fanned out across the Mediterranean after Pentecost, the communities they entered – Jewish and Gentile alike – already had Bibles. Those Bibles were the Septuagint. The early church did not adopt the LXX as a theological statement about which text tradition was superior. They used it because it was what Scripture looked like in the world they were trying to reach, and because – as the next chapter of this series will demonstrate in painful detail – the apostles themselves quoted it constantly, specifically, and authoritatively.
THE SHADOW FALLING ON THE HEBREW TEXT
While all of this was happening – while the LXX was becoming the Bible of the diaspora, then the Bible of the early church, then the Scripture the New Testament was written to be read alongside – something was also happening in Palestine that the church largely failed to notice at the time and has been reluctant to examine carefully ever since.
The Hebrew scriptural tradition in Palestine during the Second Temple period was neither uniform nor static. Multiple Hebrew manuscript traditions existed alongside one another, with variant readings, different organizational structures, and, in some cases, significantly different textual content. The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered between 1947 and 1956, confirmed this plurality beyond any serious academic dispute; the scrolls contain Hebrew manuscripts that align with the Septuagint against what would become the standard Hebrew text in one passage, align with what would become the standard Hebrew against the Septuagint in another, and occasionally go their own independent direction altogether. The Hebrew text was a living tradition with contested readings, not a single pure stream flowing uninterrupted from Moses.
Then came 70 AD. The Roman general Titus demolished the Temple, scattered the Jewish population of Jerusalem, and effectively ended the world of Second Temple Judaism as a going institutional concern. The catastrophe was not merely military and political, but was theological. The Temple was the center of the sacrificial system, the priesthood, the high holy days, the entire institutional architecture of the religion. Without it, Judaism had to become something different to survive, and the rabbis who stepped into the vacuum of leadership were the ones who decided what that something would look like.
Among the many decisions they faced was the question of the text. Multiple manuscript traditions with variant readings coexisted throughout the Second Temple period, with the Dead Sea Scrolls as our most dramatic evidence of this. After 70 AD, the conditions that had allowed that plurality to persist were gone. The Temple library was ash. The priestly class that had maintained certain textual traditions was scattered or dead. The competing sects had been largely destroyed by the Roman war. What survived was the Pharisaic rabbinic tradition, and the rabbis who rebuilt Judaism in the academies of Jamnia and later Tiberias were the men who would decide which manuscripts to copy, which readings to follow when manuscripts conflicted, and which variant traditions to set aside.
Sixty-two years later, in 132 AD, another catastrophe arrived. The Bar Kokhba revolt, led by Simon bar Kokhba, whom the celebrated Rabbi Akiva had declared to be the Messiah, ended in another Roman annihilation of Jewish Palestine. The Romans renamed Jerusalem Aelia Capitolina and barred Jews from entering it. Rabbi Akiva, who had staked his messianic credibility on Bar Kokhba and lost catastrophically, was executed by the Romans. The rabbinic academies relocated to Tiberias. The scholars who survived were rebuilding in a community that had twice tried to throw off Roman rule, twice been destroyed, and was now living under an empire that had simultaneously become the patron of Christianity, a rival religious movement growing explosively across the same empire, using the “Jewish scriptures” (as they thought of them) constantly to argue that the rabbis’ own Bible predicted Jesus of Nazareth as the fulfillment of everything Israel had been waiting for.
This is the world in which the Hebrew textual tradition was being shaped and standardized. The men doing the standardizing were not disinterested librarians. They were scholars and community leaders building a Judaism that could survive without a Temple, without a homeland, under occupation, in active theological competition with a religion that had taken their scriptures and was wielding them as courtroom exhibits against them. What that means for the text they produced is the central question this series at I2I exists to answer. But answering it requires understanding what happened between the fall of the Temple and the moment a bad-tempered Latin scholar in Bethlehem decided to do something nobody in the Christian world had done since the apostles: go back to the Hebrew.
THE MAN WITH THE HEBREW PROBLEM
Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus, known to history as Jerome, was not the kind of man people found easy to be around. He was brilliant, acerbic, petty when crossed, ferociously productive, and constitutionally incapable of suffering what he regarded as scholarly incompetence in silence. He had opinions about everything and the linguistic gifts to express them in multiple languages with maximum sharpness. He is the patron saint of translators, which is either a tribute to his achievement or a warning about his personality, depending on how you read hagiography.
Jerome was born around 340–345 AD in Stridon, on the border of Dalmatia and Pannonia, roughly the territory of modern Croatia. He studied in Rome under the grammarian Donatus, received a thorough classical education, got baptized as a young man, and spent several years living as an ascetic in the Syrian desert, where he made his first attempt to learn Hebrew under the guidance of a Jewish convert. The experience apparently nearly broke him. In a famous letter, he described the difficulty of moving from the elegance of Cicero to the rough, consonant-heavy awkwardness of Hebrew as a man accustomed to fine wine being forced to drink well water from a cracked vessel. He persisted anyway, driven by what he understood as scholarly necessity (you cannot properly understand a text in translation without access to the original).
By 382 AD, Jerome had become the secretary and protégé of Pope Damasus I in Rome, and Damasus had a problem. The Latin Bible situation in the Western church was, to put it gently, a mess. Various Old Latin translations of the scriptures, all ultimately derived from the Septuagint and made at different times and places by translators of varying competence, had proliferated across the Western churches, with the inconsistency of documents produced before anyone had access to a printing press or to editorial standards. Congregations in different cities heard different Latin Bibles. Scholars consulting different manuscripts found different readings. The chaos was real, and the Pope wanted it fixed. He commissioned Jerome to produce a standard Latin translation, beginning with the Gospels.
Jerome revised the Latin New Testament from Greek manuscripts and produced a workable revision of the Psalms. Then Damasus died in 384, and Jerome, who had made a quantity of enemies in Rome owing to his habit of writing insulting satirical letters about people he found stupid, left for Bethlehem, where he spent the next thirty-four years producing the translation that would bear his name.
THE DECISION THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING
Here is where Jerome did something that alarmed nearly everyone who heard about it. Rather than revising the existing Old Latin translations from the Septuagint, which is what everyone assumed he would do, what everyone had always done, what the entire Western church expected, Jerome went to the Hebrew. He hired Jewish teachers in Bethlehem. He paid handsomely for their instruction. He spent years working through the Hebrew text with rabbis who understood it natively, producing what he called the iuxta Hebraeos, the version “according to the Hebrews,” and what he insisted on calling, with characteristic confidence, the Hebraica veritas: the Hebrew truth.
His argument was philological. A translation, however ancient and however venerable, is still a translation. The Septuagint was produced by Jewish scholars working in Alexandria centuries before Christ, and those scholars – brilliant as many of them clearly were – were doing the best they could with the Hebrew manuscripts available to them, in a linguistic and cultural context that shaped their choices in ways a later reader could not always detect. Where the Greek diverged from the Hebrew, Jerome argued, the Hebrew had priority. The original has authority over its rendering. It was the expression, “the spring is purer than the stream.”
He was not wrong about the principle. The problem was the application, and the problem with the application was the specific Hebrew text he was applying it to, and who had produced that Hebrew text, and when, and under what circumstances, and with what interests shaping their hands. Jerome was reaching beyond the Septuagint to the Hebrew truth, which is a sound philological instinct. What he could not fully see – what nobody in the fourth century had the tools to see clearly – was that the Hebrew text in the hands of the rabbis he was learning from was not simply the ancient original sitting unmodified since Moses. It was already a tradition that had been shaped, and was being shaped further, by men with strong reasons to care how certain passages read…especially Messianic ones.
THE RIOT AT TRIPOLI AND THE ARGUMENT THAT NEVER ENDED
Augustine of Hippo, who was at this point the most formidable theological intellect in the Latin church and who had the considerable disadvantage of never having learned Hebrew, got wind of what Jerome was doing and was not pleased. The two men exchanged a series of letters over several years (seventeen of them survive) that constitute one of the most fascinating arguments in the history of Christianity.
Augustine’s objection was not primarily philological. He was perfectly willing to grant that Jerome knew Hebrew better than the Septuagint translators, and better than Augustine himself certainly did, which, given Augustine’s ignorance of the language, was not a high bar. His objection was ecclesiological. The entire church (East and West, Greek-speaking and Latin-speaking, from the apostolic era forward) had received the Septuagint as Scripture. The apostles quoted it. The martyrs died with it. The councils had reasoned from it. If the Septuagint was wrong in the places it differed from the Hebrew, then the church had been reading the wrong Bible for four centuries. And if the church had been reading the wrong Bible for four centuries, divine providence had failed in its most basic obligation to the people of God. Augustine found that conclusion theologically intolerable, and frankly, his argument makes sense.
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