After the destruction of Jerusalem and God’s Holy Temple*“The virgin shall conceive and bear a son…”,*Aquila, with the approval of the council, changed the Greek word "parthenos" = “virgin” in the Isaiah 7:14 passage to the Greek word for “young woman” = “neanis” in the newer Greek translation. These scholars also began to debate the Old Covenant canon and began recording the Oral Law [c. 200AD], which had been passed down through the ministerial priesthood from the time of Moses. This recording of the Oral Law would become the Mishnah. The Mishnah and its commentary, the Gemara [there are two, the Babylonian and the Palestinian], comprise the Jewish Talmud by the Romans in 70AD a group of Jewish scholars received permission from the Roman government to gather at a town called Jamnia [Jabneh]. These Jewish scholars, Pharisees and rabbis, formed a religious council and a school to study Sacred Scripture. Since the followers of Jesus were using the Greek Septuagint translation for apologetic and evangelistic purposes–using the text to prove that Jesus fulfilled the prophecies of the Old Covenant and was indeed the promised Messiah-- this translation became an anathema to the Jewish scholars of Jamnia. Christians, for example, were using the Greek text from Isaiah 7:14 quoted from the Septuagint in Matthew 1:23 as proof of the prophecy of the virgin birth. In response to the conversion of many Jews to Christianity through the Septuagint translation, in about 100AD the scholars of Jamnia authorized a new Greek translation specifically to hinder such “proofs” of fulfillment of Old Covenant prophecy, thereby hoping to hinder the spread of Christianity. For example, the Jewish scholar Aquila, with the approval of the council, changed the Greek word "parthenos" = “virgin” in the Isaiah 7:14 passage to the Greek word for “young woman” = “neanis” in the newer Greek translation. These scholars also began to debate the Old Covenant canon and began recording the Oral Law [c. 200AD], which had been passed down through the ministerial priesthood from the time of Moses. This recording of the Oral Law would become the Mishnah. The Mishnah and its commentary, the Gemara [there are two, the Babylonian and the Palestinian], comprise the Jewish Talmud.
Even though challenges to the canonicity of Ecclesiastes and Song of Solomon were debated at Jamnia, none of the 46 books of the 1st century AD Septuagint that we have in our Catholic Bibles were dropped until the early Middle Ages when the Masorites, a school of Jewish scholars, re-translated the altered Greek language Old Testament that was constructed in Jamnia back into Hebrew. At this time 7 books which we include were dropped from the Old Covenant canon including the only books of the Old Testament that recounted the story of the Jewish feast of Hanukkah, 1 and 2 Maccabees. The other books dropped from the Jewish canon were Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, and Baruch, along with parts of the texts of Daniel and Esther. Later in the 16th century AD, after over a thousand years of accepting the Catholic canon, Protestant Christians rejected the canon of the Catholic Old Testament and instead accepted both the translations and canon of the anti-Christian Masoretic Jewish Old Testament.
