Was the Masoretic Text altered to remove prophecies of Christ?
A viewer asks why Robert uses the Masoretic Text rather than Jerome's Vulgate, and whether the Masoretic has been altered to remove prophecies about Christ.
Answer
Many people claim that, but very few can prove it, and the proofs I have seen are more emotional than real. The Masoretic Text is not a translation; it is the Hebrew, collated around the ninth century AD by scribes who were as careful transcribing the letters as the original Hebrews were with Moses' words, because they believed they had to be faithful to God's word. The Vulgate is a good translation but not perfect, and the Old Latin before Jerome had many problems that Jerome tried to clean up, though he made his own mistakes. We have tools like the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia that compare the Masoretic with the Septuagint letter by letter and note the source problems. But I would put no substance in the claim that the Masoretic removes or alters verses that point to Christ. Take Isaiah 7, the Emmanuel prophecy Matthew quotes; the Hebrew is the Hebrew, and it lines up with the Greek Septuagint, with deviations only from ordinary human copying error, of which there are about twelve recognized kinds. To say there was deliberate change to deny Christ, I have found nothing like that in almost fifty years.