Day 2486 – Theology Thursday – Jeremiah’s Double Vision – I Dare You Not To Bore Me With The Bible

Welcome to Day 2486 of Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me. This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom – Theology Thursday – Jeremiah's Double Vision – I Dare You Not To Bore Me With The Bible. Wisdom-Trek Podcast Script - Day 2486 Welcome to Wisdom-Trek with Gramps! I am Guthrie Chamberlain, and we are on Day 2486 of our Trek. The Purpose of Wisdom-Trek is to create a legacy of wisdom, to seek out discernment and insights, and to boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before.   Today is the twenty-seventh lesson in our segment, Theology Thursday. Utilizing excerpts from a book titled: I Dare You Not To Bore Me With The Bible written by Hebrew Bible scholar and professor the late Dr. Michael S Heiser, we will invest a couple of years going through the entire Bible, exploring short Biblical lessons that you may not have received in Bible classes or Church. The Bible is a wonderful book. Its pages reveal the epic story of God’s redemption of humankind and the long, bitter conflict against evil. Yet it’s also a book that seems strange to us. While God’s Word was written for us, it wasn’t written to us. Today, our lesson is: Jeremiah’s Double Vision. If we look beyond the details of Jeremiah’s anguish and apparently fruitless ministry, we can spot a dual emphasis in the book that bears his name: judgment and repentance. But emphasis is not the only double issue. Two complete versions of the book have survived from antiquity and diverge in many ways. The “Jeremiah Problem” The book of Jeremiah has come to us in two versions—a Hebrew version, the Masoretic Text, and a Greek version, the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament). Our modern English Bibles follow the arrangement and content of the Masoretic Text (mt). The Septuagint version (or lxx) was translated from a Hebrew text of the book that differed in many ways from the mt. Because of this, the Greek version is roughly one-eighth shorter than the mt, and after Jeremiah 25:13, the order of the chapters differs dramatically. Despite attempts to solve the “Jeremiah problem,” the textual history of both versions remains unresolved. We still don’t know which Hebrew text is older —the one we have today (mt) or the one used by the scribes who created the Septuagint. The fragmentary scrolls of the book found among the Dead Sea Scrolls usually follow the order and content of mt, but some of the material matches the Hebrew manuscript that was translated into the Septuagint. Consequently, the Dead Sea Scrolls cannot offer a definitive answer regarding which version of the book more closely aligns with the time of the prophet. We also find mixed results when examining the history of these versions. The Jewish community favored the mt version, but this is only apparent from around ad 100 onward, after the time of Jesus and the apostles. New Testament writers favored the Septuagint when quoting the Old Testament. Studies reveal that when the Old Testament is quoted in the New Testament, the wording found in the Greek New Testament, the mt, and the Septuagint differs in some way 80 percent of the time. Word-for-word quotations of mt are not common, amounting to less than five percent. Even when factoring in nearly identical quotations of mt, it is clear that the New Testament writers only appear to have used mt 20 percent of the time. The New Testament writers most often quoted from the Septuagint,- but this doesn’t mean they endorsed it, since they used both versions. They were writing in Greek,...