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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;lrbguy, post: 3751338, member: 88829&quot;]This is a misleading interpretation of what the goal and process of Textual Criticism is about.&nbsp; As worded here these comments make it sound as if the Septuagint and the Greek New Testament are modern inventions.&nbsp; That is at best a misunderstanding, and at worst an outright lie.&nbsp; Modern critical editions of the Greek New Testament, such as Nestle-Aland, and the Greek &quot;Old Testament&quot;, such as the Goettingen Septuagint, are compilations from a large array of earlier manuscripts, but they are hardly&nbsp; &quot;recreated backwards from modern texts and translated by scholars into Koine Greek.&quot;&nbsp; To dismiss them as such is irresponsible.</p><p><br /></p><p>It is certainly the case that the canon of the New Testament developed over a few centuries into its final form, but the oldest full version texts still surviving date back to the fourth century in the codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus.&nbsp; Beyond these there is also a substantial body of partial texts, mostly on papyrus, that date back at least to the early to mid-2nd century.&nbsp; Down through the centuries variant manuscripts came into being via copyist errors, interpolations, omissions, emendations and such, but these produced variants of passages while cleaving to the uniformity of the whole.&nbsp; At no time was it deemed necessary to re-write the whole thing.</p><p><br /></p><p>The history of transmission for the Septuagint is much earlier inasmuch as it originated with the Jews as a translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek from the 3rd century BCE.&nbsp; The textual importance of that Greek translation was upheld by such fathers of Christianity as St. Augustine who regarded it as divinely inspired and preferred it over the Latin translation then being completed by Jerome.&nbsp; For his part Jerome worked with texts in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek which he rendered into the Latin of his time in preference to the Italic versions which had preceded him.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>It is certainly the case that when Erasmus of Rotterdam created the &quot;Textus Receptus&quot; in the 16th century he used a methodology which reconstructed the Greek based on a harmonization of the Greek manuscripts available to him using the Latin Vulgate as a template.&nbsp; That was textual criticism in its infancy.&nbsp; But that is a very far cry from what that discipline can do and has done these 500 years since then.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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