The Old Testament was accurately recorded.1 Every individual letter was numbered by the Jewish scribes who were of the Tribe of Levi and made overseers of the Scriptures by God. When it became necessary to recopy the parchments or scrolls, the scribes had to use a particular kind of ink on a special type parchment, write in so many columns of a specific size and so many lines. Within thirty days, it had to be examined and compared to the original. If four errors were found on one parchment, the examination went no further and the whole was rejected. Each time they wrote God's name (the tetragrammation "YHWH" from which we later coined the word "Jehovah") they cleaned their pens and washed their bodies if perspiring. When the scrolls were worn out, they were officially and solemnly buried or burned so they would not be profaned, torn into fragments, or altered.

The Old Testament precisely as we have it was endorsed by Jesus when He appeared in the flesh on the earth fifteen hundred years after Moses. Jesus accused the Jewish leaders of His day of many sins but, among all the evils He charged, not once did He intimate they had in any degree corrupted the canon, either by addition, subtraction or alteration. If books had been omitted from the canon Jesus certainly would have said so and He would have added them to the Old Testament. Furthermore, had there been books in the canon which should not have been included, the Lord Jesus would have marked and/or deleted them. To the contrary, every statement He made with regard to Scripture confirmed the canon as it had come down to His day. The Lord did charge that they had developed a system of oral traditions which had come to take precedence over the Word of God, but He said the Scriptures themselves could not be broken (that is, they would come to pass - they would be preserved). It is an amazing phenomenon that our modern critics, in their arrogance, deny to Christ the very insight which they claim to possess.

THE APOCRYPHA

These books are mainly the product of the last three centuries B.C., a time during which written prophecy had ceased. They were accepted as part of the sacred literature by the Alexandrian Jews and, with the exception of the Second Book of Esdras, are found interspersed among the Hebrew Scriptures in the ancient copies of the Septuagint or LXX.2 The godly Jews under Ezra rejected the Apocrypha as having been inspired by the LORD when they formed the Old Testament canon. Josephus (c.100 A.D.) confirms that these books were not considered as "divine" in his day. He informs us that the canon was closed c.425 B.C.33 The Apocrypha gradually rose in esteem in the apostate Roman (Western) Church until the Council of Trent (1546 A.D.) affirmed the canonicity of the greater part. In making this decision the Catholic Church sided with the Jews of Alexandria Egypt in considering the Apocrypha sacred. Remember that it was in Alexandria that Mary was

1 Josh McDowell, Evidence That Demands A Verdict, Vol. I, (San Bernadino, CA: Here's Life Publishers, Inc., 1990), pp. 53-55; also Pache, Inspiration and Authority of Scripture, op. cit., p. 187.

2 Jones, Floyd Nolen, The Septuagint: A Critical Analysis, op. cit., pp. 10-52. The reader should, in all fairness, be apprised of the fact that very nearly all references in the literature which allude to the Septuagint in fact pertain to Origen's 5th column. That is, the real LXX from all citation evidence as to N.T. references - indeed, for all practical purposes - the Septuagint that we actually "see" and "use" is found to actually be only two manuscripts, Vaticanus B and Sinaiticus a. This is especially true of Vaticanus. Although this fact is difficult to ferret out from among the vast amount of literature on the subject, it may be verified by numerous sources. Among them, the reader is directed to page 1259 in The New Bible Dictionary op. cit., (Texts-Versions) where D.W. Gooding admits this when he relates that the LXX of Jer.38:40 (Jer.31:40 in the MT) as shown in figure 214 has been taken from the Codex Sinaiticus. Thomas Hartwell Horne is even more direct in An Introduction to the Critical Study and Knowledge of the Holy Scriptures, 9th ed., Vol. II, (London, Eng.: Spottiswoode and Shaw, 1846), fn. 1. p. 282 and fn. 3 p. 288. It has been established that both were produced from Origen's 5th column. Thus, the Septuagint which we actually utilize in practical outworking, the LXX which is cited almost ninety percent of the time, is actually the LXX that was written more than 250 years after the completion of the New Testament canon - and by a "Catholicized Jehovah's Witness" at that! Moreover, it must be seen that the testimony of these two corrupted manuscripts is almost solely responsible for the errors being foisted upon the Holy Scriptures in both Testaments by modern critics!

3 Josephus, Against Apion (Contra Apionem, ), I, 8).

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