Antithesis.
Antithesis.
§ 325. Those who defend corruptions of the Hebrew source divide themselves into two classes. Some make the claim: “Because of their hatred of the Christian faith, the Jews purposely corrupted and perverted many passages of the Scriptures.” This is what is taught by Jacobus de Valentia, bishop of Christopolis, in his preface to the Psalms; Melchior Canus (Locor. theol., bk. 2, c. 13); Lindanus (De optimo genere interpret., bk. 1, c. 1); the Englishman Wilhelmus Rainoldus; Gordonus Huntlaeus (Controvers. 1, c. 8), etc. Some, on the other hand, declare: “The Hebrew Scriptures actually were not completely corrupted by the malice of the Jews; nevertheless they are not totally whole and pure but have some errors of their own that crept in partly because of the neglect and carelessness of scribes, because of a similarity of letters, and partly because of the ignorance of the rabbinic scholars who added the vowel points.” This is taught by Johannes Driedo (De eccles. dogmat. et Script., bk. 2, c. 1) and by Bellarmine, who in De verbo Dei, bk. 2, c. 2, turns from the opinion of the first group to the moderate conviction of Driedo when he attributes to the prior group a “good zeal” that is nevertheless not “according to knowledge.”
Both parties confirm their opinion: (1) With certain rational arguments or, rather, conjectures. (2) With the testimonies of the rabbinic scholars and certain fathers. (3) By bringing in several examples or passages of the Scriptures in which a corruption appears obvious. To all this, Mr. Salomon Glassius, professor of Hebrew literature and our beloved friend, responds sufficiently in his Philologia sacra, which he wrote and published at our encouragement and which will be able to offer much help to students of sacred and Hebrew literature. Here we shall merely bring in brief observations with which we shall be able to satisfy the arguments of the Papists and according to which we shall consider the examples of corruption that Bellarmine has adduced.
§ 326. Against the general reasons or conjectures with which they try to make it probable that the Hebrew sources were corrupted by the malice of the Jews or the carelessness of scribes, observe: (1) As we shall see in the following chapter, it is a false hypothesis that the vowel points are a recent invention of the Jews. Therefore one cannot prove from this the corruption of the Hebrew text.
(2) Even if the Jews really had wanted to corrupt the Hebrew text because of their hatred of the Christian religion—and it has not yet been proved that they dared to do this—this still would not at all be injurious to divine providence, which could preserve the integrity of Scripture against both the contrivances of the Jews and the persecution of tyrants.
(3) 
, “the corrections of the scribes,” about which Galatinus says much (De arcan., bk. 1, c. 8), do not prove that any corruption has been brought into the text. As Bellarmine correctly points out (De verbo Dei, bk. 2, c. 2):
Either by chance it is not true that any emendation of the Bible was made by the scribes (because in neither Talmud is there mention of such a tikkun; and Josephus, Contra Apionem, bk. 1, claims that no letter was ever changed in the Law by Hebrews, his countrymen; and because neither Epiphanius nor Jerome mentions this correction), or if the tikkun sophrim is not a fable, then it is not a corruption but a true emendation made not by some scribes but by Ezra and the other men of the Great Synagogue, namely, the holy prophets who, after their return from the Babylonian captivity, revised the sacred books and placed them into a certain order.
Buxtorf claims that those sophrim were the holy writers themselves (Moses and the prophets) who never wrote anything other than what we read today as their writing. More sagacious knowers of Hebrew, however, noting a certain inconsistency in those passages, wrote that those authors ought to have spoken in a different way and ought to have written in this or that way according to the coherence of the text, but for this purpose they preferred to write in this way and bring it out in that way, as it is in the text today. Consequently, Rabbi Aben Ezra pokes fun at the sagacious for several passages, saying that there was no need for tikkun, that is, what those “sagacious wise men” thought that the author ought to have spoken or written there in a different way is nothing. Marcus Marinus, preface to Arca Noae: “The Jews, who have a different opinion (from that of Galatinus) concerning these tikkun sophrim, laugh at the entire matter, for it is firm and certain to them that Holy Scripture, written by the prophets as we now have it, was never changed.”
(4) One cannot immediately infer from the corruption of one or two manuscripts in a vowel point, accent, letter, or even a whole statement—whether it happened because of carelessness or by intent—that the Hebrew text of the Old Testament is corrupt completely and in itself, because that error can be corrected from an inspection of other proven and unchanged copies.
(5) Corruption of the Hebrew text cannot be proved from an irregular writing or pointing of the Hebrew words, the Masoretic note and correction of which are usually added in the margin. You see, those Masoretic notes either observe a merely grammatical anomaly or a mystery or a variance in the reading; or if any errors crept into the elements of the letters because of the carelessness of scribes, they correct them. In this way they establish rather than overturn the integrity of the text.
(6) From the version of the Septuagint translators, that no longer exists uncorrupted today, one cannot prove that any mutilation of the Hebrew text occurred, for this would be wanting to judge on the source from the streams, on the norm and rule from the square that the norm and rule have drawn [ex normato de norma et regula], though one must rather advance in the contrary order.
§ 327. We must turn this subject toward the testimonies of certain rabbinic scholars and fathers. (1) Rabbi Benchaiim Tunetanus distinctly disapproves of the opinion of those who claim that the copies of the Bible were corrupted during the Babylonian captivity. He says:
Their opinion is far removed from me, for I cannot be persuaded to believe and confess with my lips that the scribe Ezra found the book of the Law and the books of the prophets dubious, corrupt, and confused. In fact, my opinion is rather this: that Ezra and his colleagues found the sacred books whole and unharmed and that Ezra knew, according to his own judgment, which books were written by that excellent wisdom and why certain letters were written but not others and even why some foreign words were written. These he put into the actual text just as they had been written, adding something like a gloss in the margin to explain the nature of the foreign word.
(2) With its clear testimony, the Masorah refutes the opinion of those rabbinic scholars who claim that some corruption was made in the Hebrew text.
(3) Justin, Origen, and Eusebius speak not about the Hebrew text but about the Greek Septuagint translation when they write that the Jews corrupted the text of the Bible. Justin, Dialog. cum Tryphon., p. 231: “I want you to know that your teachers have removed many—even entire—passages of the Scriptures from the translations of the elders who were with Ptolemy, passages in which the declaration is shown to have been made that the one who was crucified is God and man, that He was hanged on the cross and died.”
(4) Chrysostom (homily 5 on Matthew) and Jerome (Epist. ad Augustinum, which is eleventh among the epistles of Augustine) speak about the Jewish translators Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion, saying that in their translations from the Hebrew into Greek they set many things incorrectly to develop hatred against the Christian faith and to cast aspersions upon the Septuagint translation. This, however, does no harm at all to the integrity of the Hebrew text.
(5) If one were to examine in particular the passages that Justin says were corrupted by the Jews, it will appear that he spoke from suspicion rather than from knowledge, since he was not so skilled in the Hebrew language.