Old Testament (Hebrew Bible)

And interesting discussion can be made regarding the Old Testament. Many Christians today will insist that God would not permit the Bible, His Holy word, to be tampered with, omitted, or polluted. They will state the Bible contains everything we need to obtain life and salvation. 

But most Christians are unaware that the Bible has in fact been edited, altered, rewritten, and has major portions inserted or left out. I will give some examples  How many of my Jewish or Christian readers are aware of how many versions of the Bible exist?   Did you know the Catholic Bible is different from the King James Version?  Did you know the Greek Orthodox also have a different Bible?  Also there have been Christians living in parts of Africa for centuries that are fully disconnected from European Christianity and they have a different Bible too. 

Our Protestant Bibles (KJV and several others including the NIVs) base their Old Testament content on what is contained in the Hebrew Bible. And it would stand to reason that the "Hebrew" Bible would be the original Old Testament. But if that's what you think, you would be mistaken. 

First off, let's make one thing perfectly clear. There is no "original" Bible. Bibles have always been collections by their very nature. What is contained in those collections always has a back story. In the case of the Hebrew Bible, it too has a back story, and one that will embarrass Jews and Christians alike.  

One has to remember that Jesus Christ was a Jew.  As such early Christians were not considered to be a new religion. Rather early Christians often identified as Essenes.  At the time of Christ you find that there were many factions of Judaism. It was not a unified religion, just as Christianity is not today. At the time of Christ there were four major groups: Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, and Samaritans.

The number of Christians began to grow, and as political strifes grew between the groups, as well as between some of the Jewish sects and Rome, many Jews felt that their faith was in danger.  Many of the Jews were being converted to the Christian view using widely accepted teachings from the Biblical texts common at the time. The Bible used at the time, and that Christ and His disciples would have used is known today as the Septuagint or Greek Bible, so called because it was written in Greek.  

Jews at the time felt that by separating from their Hebrew heritage and mingling with the Greeks and Romans, that all kinds of pagan ideas and doctrines had been mixed into Judaism, and that the solution was to abandon any perceived influences from Greek or Roman culture. And they rejected Yeshua (Jesus) as the Messiah despite the fact that there were a lot of prophecies that fit and described Yeshua perfectly. In fact these prophecies in particular were such strong evidence that many Jews were converted on that evidence alone. So in an effort to save the Jewish faith as they saw it, they needed to define what texts would be included in a new Bible. 

So they established a new Hebrew Bible by first abandoning the Greek Bible and including only texts where old Hebrew copies still existed that they considered to be scriptural and verifiable. This obviously ruled out a lot of books and did not add or include anything new. Their thinking was that Hebrew was the holy language, so only books written in Hebrew could accurately convey the word of God. Secondly, they omitted many of the prophecies concerning the coming of Christ. This meant that parts of the Books of Daniel and Ester and other books were removed because they gave credence to the Christians.  Other books may also have been omitted because they taught other "strange" doctrines that did not appear to be in line with traditional Jewish theology.  More specifically, most of the selection was to bring Judaism in line with the Sadducee beliefs. So this was hardly representative of all Jews at the time, though few would have been opposed to the actual content.   

So in short, the Hebrew Bible was selected and compiled for purely political reasons to try to unify a faith and limit the spread of a rival faith.

Now for an interesting question which I will endeavor to answer in an upcoming article. Why do the Protestant Bibles use the Hebrew Bible for their Old Testament if it was specifically designed to reinforce a particular version of the Jewish faith and disprove Christianity?