Skeptics Used to Say This About Isaiah ![rw-book-cover](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/jtnH1pHPk3I/sddefault.jpg) 🔗 **Source:** [Skeptics Used to Say This About Isaiah](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtnH1pHPk3I) Do you realize that >> All right, Jeremiah, let's see it. >> Skeptics of the Bible claim that Isaiah 53 did not exist, that it was made up in the the MT, the Masoretic Text. And then we have the greatest discovery of all time, Qumran Cave 4, 1QIsaiah, and there it is. It's It's 200 BC. It's a thousand years older than the Masoretic Text, and there on column 44 is is Isaiah's prophecy of 53. >> So, I cannot find a single example of any skeptic of the Bible prior to the discovery of 1QIsaiah A actually claiming that Isaiah 53 was added to the Bible in the Masoretic Text. And it sounds like Jeremiah started to say in the medieval period, but immediately shifted to saying in the Masoretic Text. Either way, I can't find a single example of any such claim. I can see examples of people claiming that someone has fiddled with Isaiah 53, edited it in a couple of places to make it sound more Messianic, but I can't find a single example of anyone claiming that it just wasn't there until the Masoretic Text. And that's a bafflingly stupid claim because we have the Septuagint going all the way back to the earliest centuries of Christianity, and we have Christian quotations of Isaiah 53 from the Septuagint, and then a few centuries later from the Hebrew. And we have the Vulgate, which begins in the late 4th, early 5th century CE. So, we have all of this ancient attestation to Isaiah 53. So, anyone claiming that Isaiah 53 was just thrown in in the medieval period in the Masoretic text would have to ignore the majority of the data that we use to establish this kind of thing. And this is a tendentiousness I see a lot among apologists on the internet. And I've talked about this many times in the past. Even talked about how N.T. Wright has fallen victim to this on multiple occasions. The claim is, "Oh, skeptics of the Bible used to think this thing wasn't true. And then we discovered this artifact or this manuscript or this inscription and now everyone agrees that thing is true." And as I've pointed out, the overwhelming majority of the time when apologists make those claims, it's made up. It's something that no one ever actually published. It's something that skeptics of the Bible didn't actually think. And again, even people as prominent as N.T. Wright have said these things. And the problem is they heard someone else say them or they read it on the internet and they just repeated it. And then somebody else heard that apologist say it and because they trusted that apologist, they're going to repeat it. And it's going to go on and on and on and on and on. And somebody's going to say, "Oh, N.T. Wright said it." "Oh, okay. Well, that's good enough for me." Except N.T. Wright is just repeating something he heard someone else say because if you try to track these claims down, they always disappear. There's no evidence that these things are true. It's somebody making it up or wildly misunderstanding and misrepresenting something that is actually reasonable. And in this case, I think it's probably just someone exaggerating the fact that there were people who were like, "Hey, you've been fiddling with that version of Isaiah 53 like Christians did when they said the Septuagint is better and look, those Jewish people have been fiddling with the Hebrew. They changed it to sound less Messianic or something like that." When in reality, the Hebrew was more reliable as we decided at the end of the 4th century, beginning of the 5th century. I think someone just exaggerated claims like that until they became oh, they said Isaiah 53 didn't exist and was just made up and added to the text in the medieval period in the Masoretic text. And Jeremiah saw somebody make that claim and just ran with it without bothering to verify, which is part of Jeremiah's tendentiousness. He doesn't bother to go verify things, look up the data. Because I found a handful of websites that make this claim and then they always refer to like F.F. Bruce or Gleason Archer or some other website that documents this, but then when you go to that website, it also just says, "Oh, this is from F.F. Bruce or Gleason Archer and by the time you get to somebody who has actually documented something, it's a completely different claim. It's the claim that we discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 and they changed our thinking about the transmission of the biblical text. It's something a lot less entirely fabricated, but it has nothing to do with the claim that we started out researching. And it seems to me that Jeremiah just read this on the internet and decided to repeat it on a podcast without having the foggiest idea whether or not it's true. And it's not. Also, it doesn't date to 200 BCE. The Great Isaiah Scroll most likely dates to about 125 BCE. And also, Isaiah 53 is not a prophecy. It's a song, the suffering servant. It's about a personification and an abstraction from the nation of Israel. The servant is repeatedly and explicitly identified as Israel in Deutero-Isaiah. And also, Isaiah 53 comes from the exilic or more likely the post-exilic period. It was not written by Isaiah, the 8th century prophet. It's written much later and it's talking about the past. It's not talking about stuff in the future. There's no need to argue that people have been fiddling with things or that something didn't exist. We can just engage the text on its own terms and arrive at a perfectly rational and reasonable conclusion without injecting our own dogmas into what's going on here. So, as Jeremiah himself and many other apologists have done many times in the past and will continue to do in the future, he's spreading misinformation. He heard something that tickled the tuning fork in the loins of his dogmatism and he decided to repeat it publicly. And now other people are going to repeat that and he will not take responsibility for sharing misinformation. He never has, at least. I don't know if that will change in the future, but he never has because what's true is not important. What's important is the apologetics. What's important is making people feel good about their dogmas so that they come to you as the source for information about feeling good about their dogmas. That's the priority. It's certainly not finding out what's true. It's certainly not ensuring that people can trust you are sharing what's true. It's ensuring that people are made to feel good about their dogma, so they will continue to come back to you. So, you can get the clicks, so you can get the revenue, so you can get the little digital pats on the butt from the likes and the shares and the comments and things like that. It's certainly not about the truth. That's not what apologetics is for. And the fit for this video has been Frog and Toad., Skeptics Used to Say This About Isaiah, Dan McClellan, 01kvp7bkdq481dm3pfq6e7ha1s.