Orthodox corruption of Scripture

I beg pardon of my Christian readers for the Ehrman-ism in the title, but I just read a recent interview (conversation, technically) with The Saker. It touches on this topic and points to his 2014 blog.

The Saker, by his own account, was pretty much raised as a Greek Orthodox patristics student. (He follows a Russian denomination, but his key Fathers are Greek.) On the one hand he admits his comments are his own opinion; on the other, he constantly refers to the Orthodox Fathers. I get the distinct sense that The Saker, when he discusses the Tahrif of the Bible, is speaking for a majority of his generation of Orthodox seminarians.

The Saker agrees that there was corruption in the Scriptures... the Western Scriptures. We in the West - and one must add, among the Syrians - have attempted a "return to sources", back to the Hebrew Scriptures. But by then the Hebrew Massoretes had already redacted their own text, hard. As of 800ish AD, an alternate Bible was to be had among the Greeks, the Copts, the Armenians possibly and the Old Sclovenes. This came from a Greek version now nicknamed "The Septuagint", LXX to give it its Latin numeral, in reference to some 72 elders, who by legend did the work under the Ptolemies in Egypt.

That's a birds-eye view of the consensus. And it's correct, as far as it goes - although we can question where the LXX was and where it wasn't a better Bible (I've been supporting its Jeremiah for decades; I am less keen on certain of its Psalms). Where I'm going to call out The Saker, is where he goes on to assert that the Hebrew Massoretes were inspired by a reaction against Christianity. That is a slander.

The Saker, patristics student, traces the claim to Justin the Martyr; an ancient Christian saint writing not long after the Synoptic Gospels, which he quoted through a harmony. For an Old Testament, modern scholars accept that Justin had access to an early Masoretic-tending text in Greek, that of Theodotion. Also extant in his days was a straight translation of the Masoretic, that of Aquila. Theodotion's LXX / MT hybrid might be what The Saker means by the claim (which he rejects) an attempt to corrupt the LXX was also made by Jews. I'd hazard a reason for Trypho's use of Theodotion: this one needs a common Scriptural ground with the Jews before it can debate them intelligently.

It happens that the proto-MT - at least, for Jeremiah (4QJer^a and ^c) and especially for Genesis and for Isaiah(!) - was already loose in Palestine before the abandonment of Qumran and, Ian Young argues plausibly, before Christ. These texts are preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Already by 73 AD, the Masada Zealots' only Bible was MT. The Zealots had no knowledge of Christ; and Josephus, also following MT, knew (famously) little or none.

As for why an MT was done which differs from the other texts at Qumran, and from the LXX: it doesn't matter, for the purpose of this post. (The Bible had taken on several revisions already; any one of these had its own reason to exist in its own time.) What matters is that Christianity didn't matter, yet, at the time the MT was fixed. Justin writing well over seventy years later was mistaken on the MT's motive, and the Jews of his day knew it.

To be fair to Justin, it was difficult for Jews in those days to argue that the MT edition preceded Christ; it is difficult enough for Ian Young in our days. Trypho and contemporaries were already compromised by the fact of the MT. An impartial referee like the Samaritans, if consulted, would just laugh at both sides, scoffing something von den Jüden und iren Lügen; saying with me that, for their own purpose, they didn't care when or why all the other Bibles were all different from the Samaritans' own. But in these days of scientific (even scientodic) analysis, we know better. Pity that The Saker doesn't.

There needs to be an overhaul in how this topic is discussed in Orthodoxy. I don't think The Saker's thesis would fly among the Catholics.

UPDATE 4/17/2020: Rethink Justin (and 2 Clement) on their experience of "Scripture". When Justin was confronting Jews, he might be loose on the NT; but this post deals with the OT.