“Eventually, some Jews rejected the Septuagint in favor of another Greek translation before, ultimately, rejecting any Greek translation as authoratative. The Hebrew text of the Hebrew bible would not be fully stabilized until the work of a group of Jewish scribes, the Masoretes, in the early Middle Ages; this became known as the MasoreticText. In addition to finally fixing the text, they added the vowels, (Hebrew does not use seperate letters to indicate vowels), divisions, punctuations, and musical notations that govern the liturgical readings of the Torah.”
Creating Judasim–History, Tradition, Practice -
by Michael L. Satlow - Satlow is an editor of Brown Judaic Studies and chair of the History and Literature of Rabbinic Judaism section of the Society of Biblical Literature, and previously taught at Indiana University, the University of Virginia and the University of Cincinnati before arriving at Brown in 2002. During the 2006/7 academic year he will teach “Judaism,” “Early Jewish Prayer,” “The Beginning of Judaism,” and “The Jewish Lifecycle.”
amazon.com/Creating-Judaism-History-Tradition-Practice/dp/0231134894/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/105-1886218-0658854?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1186820215&sr=1-1
1952 – [Feb.] Bedouin discover 30 fragments of other scrolls in Cave 2, including Jubilees & ben Sirach in the original Hebrew.
– De Vaux locates Cave 4 less than 200 yards from Khirbet Qumran. 15000 of fragments of 574 mss. found including Aramaic versions 1 Enoch & Tobit, a scroll of Samuel that was closer to the Greek Septuagint than the official Hebrew text & fragments of a copy of the Damascus Covenant, a text that had been discovered in 1896 in the geniza of old Cairo synagogue.
The Peshitto
The earliest manuscript of this Syriac Vulgate is a Pentateuch dated A.D. 464; this is the earliest dated Biblical manuscripts; it is in the British Museum. There are two New Testament manuscripts of the fifth century. In all, the Peshitto manuscripts number 125 of Gospels, 58 of Acts and the Catholic Epistles, and 67 of the Pauline Epistles.
newadvent.org/cathen/09627a.htm
Catholic Epistle
The name given to the Epistle of St. James, to that of St. Jude, to two Epistles of St. Peter and the first three of St. John, because, unlike the Epistles of St. Paul, they were addressed not to any particular person or church, but to the faithful generally after the manner of an Encyclical letter. Though addressed to particular persons the other two Epistles of St. John are also styled Catholic, because they have always been grouped with the epistles bearing that name.
newadvent.org/cathen/03453a.htm
Erasmus’ Greek manuscript basis. Erasmus’ final 1535 edition still relied upon no more than six Greek manuscripts, the oldest (but least used!) of which was from the tenth century. Though Erasmus did in later editions of his work consult the Complutensian version of the Greek New Testament, Metzger is able to truthfully state
bibletexts.com/kjv-tr.htm#3
The early church was founded by Hellenistic Jews; naturally, they used the Septuagint. There are passages in the gospels and epistles where Jesus and Paul quote from the Septuagint: 300 of 350 quotations from the Old Testament in the New Testament are from the Septuagint. So while the Jews may have settled on the Palestinian canon by the early first century, the Christian church did not.
apostate.com/2.0/english-bible-versions
Erasmus could not always tell text from commentary and based his reading on the Vulgate. Also, 1r is defective for the last six verses of the Apocalypse. To fill out the text, Erasmus made his own Greek translation from the Latin. He admitted to what he had done, but the result was a Greek text containing readings not found in any Greek manuscript – but which were faithfully retained through centuries of editions of the Textus Receptus. This included even certain readings which were not even correct Greek (Scrivener offers as an example Rev. 17:4 AKAQARTHTOS).
skypoint.com/~waltzmn/TR.html
The Bible was not originally inspired with divisions by chapter and verse. The ancient manuscripts didn’t have them. One man, Cardinal Hugo de Sancto Caro, started to do this from 1244 to 1248 A.D. He did this while creating a concordance of the Latin Vulgate, in order to help people look up verses of the Bible. But the typical modern chapter divisions were apparently devised by Stephen Langton, who was an Archbishop of Canterbury in England. He started to do this around 1227 A.D. The Wycliffe English Bible did use them, as it was circulated in 1382.
biblestudy.org/question/biblever.html
