HistoricalChristian.Faith

Justin Martyr on the Rabbinic Corruption of Scripture

Dates: c. 165 · Wikipedia
Summary: The earliest and fullest patristic statement of the charge. In the Dialogue with Trypho Justin tells his Jewish interlocutor that "your teachers" both disparage the Septuagint of the seventy elders and have physically cut passages out of the Scriptures — specifically the texts that prove Jesus to be the crucified Christ — and that the excision was recent ("only a short time since they were cut out"). He names particular deletions (a Jeremiah logion, a descent oracle, "from the wood" in Psalm 96) and the most famous reading-dispute (Isaiah 7:14, "virgin" vs. "young woman"). It is an accusation of deliberate, anti-Christian tampering, the seed of the whole later tradition — though his own examples are weaker than his rhetoric, several being free-floating testimonia rather than texts the Jews ever held.

Claims & evidence

The Jewish teachers impugn the Septuagint of the seventy elders

"If therefore, I shall show that this prophecy of Isaiah refers to our Christ, and not to Hezekiah, as you say, shall I not in this matter, too, compel you not to believe your teachers, who venture to assert that the explanation which your seventy elders that were with Ptolemy the king of the Egyptians gave, is untrue in certain respects? For some statements in the Scriptures, which appear explicitly to convict them of a foolish and vain opinion, these they venture to assert have not been so written."

— Dialogue with Trypho, ch. 68, historicalchristian.faith. The opening move: the Jewish teachers no longer trust the very Greek translation their own seventy elders made for Ptolemy, and "frame another" reading wherever the Seventy's wording tells against them. Given the tradition that those seventy translators were divinely guided, this is already a charge of turning against an inspired text.

They "have altogether taken away many Scriptures" from the Seventy's translation — including reading Isaiah's "virgin" as "young woman"

"But I am far from putting reliance in your teachers, who refuse to admit that the interpretation made by the seventy elders who were with Ptolemy [king] of the Egyptians is a correct one; and they attempt to frame another. And I wish you to observe, that they have altogether taken away many Scriptures from the translations effected by those seventy elders who were with Ptolemy, and by which this very man who was crucified is proved to have been set forth expressly as God, and man, and as being crucified, and as dying."

— Dialogue with Trypho, ch. 71, historicalchristian.faith. The motive is stated plainly: the removed passages are precisely the ones that "expressly" proved the crucified Jesus to be God and man. In the same chapter Justin names the textual dispute that would become the standard proof-text of the whole controversy — Isaiah 7:14: "you contradict the statement, `Behold, the virgin shall conceive,' and say it ought to be read, `Behold, the young woman shall conceive.'" When Trypho asks for examples — "tell us some of the Scriptures which you allege have been completely cancelled" — Justin obliges in the chapters that follow.

Named excisions, "only a short time since they were cut out": Esdras, Jeremiah, and a descent oracle

"And from the sayings of Jeremiah they have cut out the following: `I [was] like a lamb that is brought to the slaughter: they devised a device against me, saying, Come, let us lay on wood on His bread, and let us blot Him out from the land of the living; and His name shall no more be remembered.' And since this passage from the sayings of Jeremiah is still written in some copies [of the Scriptures] in the synagogues of the Jews (for it is only a short time since they were cut out)… And again, from the sayings of the same Jeremiah these have been cut out: `The Lord God remembered His dead people of Israel who lay in the graves; and He descended to preach to them His own salvation.'"

— Dialogue with Trypho, ch. 72, historicalchristian.faith. Three specific deletions are alleged: a passover saying he ascribes to Esdras ("This passover is our Saviour and our refuge…"), the Jeremiah "lamb led to the slaughter / lay wood on His bread" logion, and a one-line oracle of Christ's descent to the dead. Justin insists the tampering is recent and incomplete — the Jeremiah passage is "still written in some copies… in the synagogues of the Jews," the cutting being only lately done.

"From the wood" cut out of Psalm 96:10 — and Trypho's incredulity

"And from the ninety-fifth (ninety-sixth) Psalm they have taken away this short saying of the words of David: `From the wood.' For when the passage said, `Tell ye among the nations, the Lord hath reigned from the wood,' they have left, `Tell ye among the nations, the Lord hath reigned.'"

— Dialogue with Trypho, ch. 73, historicalchristian.faith. Justin's most-cited single example: the alleged deletion of the words "from the wood" (read as a pointer to the cross) from Psalm 96:10. His Jewish partner does not concede the point. Trypho answers, "Whether [or not] the rulers of the people have erased any portion of the Scriptures, as you affirm, God knows; but it seems incredible" — and Justin grants it "does seem incredible," more horrible than the golden calf, yet presses the charge anyway.

The teachers would have deleted still more had they understood it; and they alter live readings

"…but from those which are even now admitted by you, which had your teachers comprehended, be well assured they would have deleted them, as they did those about the death of Isaiah, whom you sawed asunder with a wooden saw."

— Dialogue with Trypho, ch. 120, historicalchristian.faith. The charge is one of will, not only of deed: the teachers spare a Christological text only where they fail to see its force. And alongside outright deletion Justin alleges altered readings — in Dialogue ch. 137 he sets the Seventy's "Let us take away the righteous, for he is distasteful to us" against "what your version has: `Let us bind the righteous, for he is distasteful to us'" (historicalchristian.faith), quietly correcting the words he had first quoted in their form.

The same charge as wilful misreading — a refrain that runs across the whole Dialogue

"And especially when it was predicted that this would take place, do not venture to pervert or misinterpret the prophecies, since you will injure yourselves alone, and will not harm God."

— Dialogue with Trypho, ch. 84, historicalchristian.faith. Alongside the charge of physical excision (chs. 71–73, 120), Justin levels a second, milder version of the same accusation again and again: that the teachers misread the text they still possess. The word he keeps reaching for is "venture." In ch. 43 he says "you and your teachers venture to affirm that in the prophecy of Isaiah it is not said, `Behold, the virgin shall conceive,' but, `Behold, the young woman shall conceive…' and [since] you explain the prophecy as if [it referred] to Hezekiah, who was your king"; in ch. 83, "your teachers have ventured to refer the passage, `The Lord says to my Lord, Sit at my right hand…' to Hezekiah"; in ch. 84 the same Isaiah dispute, "you in these matters venture to pervert the expositions which your elders that were with Ptolemy king of Egypt gave forth"; and in ch. 112 he charges them with expounding the signs "in a low and sordid manner, while they never venture either to speak of or to expound the points which are great and worthy of investigation," calling them "blind guides" (historicalchristian.faith). The tampering charge, in other words, is not a single accusation parked in chs. 71–73 but a running refrain with two prongs — excision of texts and perversion of the texts that remain — and most of the loci involve no claimed deletion at all, only a disputed reading (Isaiah 7:14's "virgin," Psalm 110's "my Lord").

Notes

• The charge vs. the evidence. Justin frames the divergences as deliberate, recent, anti-Christian excision ("only a short time since they were cut out"). But his concrete examples are uneven: Isaiah 7:14 "virgin/young woman" is a genuine translation dispute (LXX parthenos against the Hebrew almah), while several "excised" texts — the Jeremiah descent oracle especially — appear in no Hebrew or Greek manuscript and have the look of free-floating testimonia rather than passages any synagogue ever held. The modern account (divergent Hebrew Vorlage, not malicious cutting) is weighed at the doctrine's master argument.
• "From the wood" runs the other way. Justin's flagship example — that the Jews cut "from the wood" from Psalm 96:10 — is, on the text-critical evidence, the reverse of what he charges: the clause is absent from the Hebrew and from the mainstream Greek tradition and surfaces only in Christian-transmitted copies, so it is a Christian addition to some Septuagint manuscripts (read as a prophecy of the cross), not a Jewish deletion from the Hebrew. Trypho's "it seems incredible" registers the implausibility. The point is set out on the master argument.
• Cross-link. The "descended to preach… in the graves" oracle Justin says the Jews cut from Jeremiah is weighed in its own right on the Intermediate State doctrine — The "excised" descent-prophecy — a genuine early witness to the descent, or an apocryphal logion? (assessment: plausible) — which finds it a genuine early witness to how scriptural the descent already felt, reflecting a real divergence between the Jewish and Christian texts, though not in fact an established excision of this verse.
• A recognized scholarly pattern. Modern study of the adversus Judaeos literature treats Justin's tampering charge as a fixed, recurring topos rather than a handful of stray complaints. The editors of the standard history of the Septuagint legend note that the accusation that the Jews "were either wilfully misinterpreting Scripture or maliciously tampering with its text" recurs in the Dialogue saepissime ("very often") — listing Dial. 43.8; 68.7ff.; 71.1; 72.3; 83.1; 84.3; 112.1ff.; 120.4f. — and is marked by a settled Greek vocabulary of excision: anaireîn, periaireîn, paragráphein, ekkóptein ("take away," "remove," "strike out of the text," "cut out") vel sim. (A. Wasserstein & D. J. Wasserstein, The Legend of the Septuagint: From Classical Antiquity to Today, Cambridge, 2006, ch. 5). The same observation anchors the older surveys the note cites: A. Lukyn Williams, Adversus Judaeos: A Bird's-Eye View of Christian Apologiae until the Renaissance (Cambridge, 1935), p. 33f., and Marcel Simon, Verus Israel (Eng. trans., Oxford, 1986), p. 158 and p. 461 n. 17, both gathering further patristic examples of the charge.
• Is "Trypho" Rabbi Tarfon? — a contested minority identification. A minority line of scholarship, beginning with Heinrich Graetz (1854), has identified Justin's interlocutor with Rabbi Tarfon, a leading Tanna and colleague of Akiba — resting partly on the near-homophony Tryphōn/Tarfon and on Eusebius, who calls Trypho "a most distinguished man among the Hebrews of that day" (Eusebius, Church History IV.18.6). Were it accepted, it would be tempting to lodge Justin's excision charge inside Akiba's own generation and circle. But most scholars reject the identification, and the chronological objection is decisive on its own terms: Tarfon, a priest active before the Temple's fall in 70, would have been far too old to sit for the Dialogue's dramatic date (after the Bar Kokhba war), so the Jewish Encyclopedia judges that he "would have been too old at the alleged time of the Dialogue to have taken part in it," and suggests Justin simply borrowed the celebrated rabbi's name. Timothy Horner's Listening to Trypho (2001) instead reads Trypho as a literary, largely pre-rabbinic Diaspora figure rather than a named Tanna, and the handbooks generally treat him as a representative Jewish interlocutor of Justin's own composition (overview). So the identification settles nothing about dating: even if granted it would only sharpen, not establish, the "recent" charge — and that recency claim rests on Justin's own words, which are narrow. Justin dates only the Jeremiah "lamb led to the slaughter" logion as lately cut ("it is only a short time since they were cut out," Dial. 72); elsewhere in chs. 71–73 he speaks of present-tense opponents who "attempt to frame another" translation. Placing the whole charge in "Akiba's generation" is a reasonable inference from that, not a phrase Justin himself supplies.
• Justin is a verse-less witness here: the Dialogue argues over whole passages and the integrity of the Septuagint, not a single verse, so he anchors the timeline by date (c. 165) rather than by a commentary verse.