Wednesday, June 09, 2004

Accuracy in Religious History
Christianity is based on the idea that Jesus was the fulfillment of Jewish prophecy.  Until 1947, the oldest copy of ancient Jewish prophecy dated from the a few texts printed around 950 years ago.  The Dead Sea Scrolls date 800-1200 years older.  60 years hasn't produced an "official" translation. One college class of ancient language scholars has done a clearly defended translation of one chapter of one of the most important prophetical works in the Jewish canon, Isaiah, specifically, Isaiah 53.  They say, specifically of Chapter 53, "In fact, perhaps no other chapter in Tanakh has such density of ambiguous and rare words."  In other words, it is the chapter which likely had the most errors.  Jewish scholars who translated the texts, 950 years ago, did not leave their defense of their translation.  Nikolay Bondarchuk and Vadim Cherny deserve your well wishes.

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