Truth Unites - Rebutting Alex’s Rebuttal of my Rebuttal of his Rebuttal of Wes’ comments on Joe Rogan

Episode Date: February 16, 2025

How accurately has the book of Isaiah been copied over the centuries? Gavin Ortlund responds to Alex O'Connor, arguing that the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls was a remarkable confirmation of the prior Masoretic Text. See Sean McDowell's discussion with Anthony Ferguson: https://youtu.be/90_Mpiz1ons?si=crrtW1b7q5DNFKDWSee Wes Huff's discussion with John Meade: https://youtu.be/Mkc5JX5hcB8?si=JtylvnspnDFTq95mTruth Unites (https://truthunites.org) exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville.SUPPORT:Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunitesFOLLOW:Website: https://truthunites.org/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truth.unites/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlundFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/

This video is a response to Alex O'Connor's, was I wrong about Wes Huff, and the goal is to talk about and consider whether and how much the book of Isaiah in the Bible has been copied accurately over the centuries. Most of you are aware there's been a series of back and forths about this. Sometimes people get exasperated with rebuttals to rebuttals to rebuttals to rebuttals and so forth, which I completely understand, hence the title of this video kind of making fun of itself. I offered to do a dialogue with Alex. but he was too busy, which is completely understandable. He's a very high profile person.

He's very much in demand. If Alex ever wants to talk, my standing answer is yes. But this discussion is really valuable, and I was traveling, I got back home, I got sick for a while, then after I was better, I rewatched the video, and I thought, you know, there's some things I really want to say that, but actually some concessions I want to make as well. So I'll do that after the end of the first point,

but also just some things I want onlookers to understand with respect to the care and accuracy with which Isaiah has been copied. I think people really need to understand a few points that I regret maybe they wouldn't at this point. So let's talk it through. Let's ask two questions. Number one, how similar is the Isaiah of the Qumran scrolls to the Isaiah of the Masoretic text? And number two, is this a wow moment? And then we'll talk about how to move forward.

I won't be defining all these terms like the Maseretic text and so forth. Hopefully, you can either Google them or a lot of you. follow the discussion up to this point anyway. First, how similar is the Isaiah of the Masoretic text to what we discovered in the Dead Sea Scrolls discovery? And in my previous video, I talked about how the vast majority of these variants between the Great Isaiah Scroll, which is the largest scroll discovered among them, and the Masoretic text are tiny issues like spelling or tiny matters. Try to get my words exactly right. Tiny matters like spelling. But Alex is saying, this is flat out wrong and pointing to the

the huge amount of non-orthographic variants in his follow-up video. But the non-orthographic variants are in the majority of cases also tiny matters like spelling. Even those that are not spelling per se, but some of them are what we would colloquially think of spelling, and some of them are what other scholars would classify as orthography, which we'll talk about. But we're just going to walk through examples, because I think that's the best way to just make my point. We're just going to go through, it's a variant one, variant two, and look at some to show this point. Because there's some subjectivity in where you cut off orthography from textual variants. But these textual variants are tiny matters.

They're minuscule in the majority of cases. Okay, it could be a different form of a name, like the name Hezekiah, we'll talk about. It might be a different verb tense that doesn't even register. in an English translation because Hebrew verb tenses work differently and you wouldn't even notice it reading the Bible through in English. It might be a difference of word order. It might be little tiny errors like adding a letter or omitting a letter or something like this that doesn't affect meaning and is not discernible in translation. So when I spoke of tiny matters like spelling, I mean, full disclosure, try to be one of my goals in this video is to not be in any way defensive

and just try to transparently lay out my thought process. So I think I was drawing from R.K. Harrison and others, and I was, at that moment, I was just thinking of all the variance, orthographic, non-orthographic, all the, out of all the variants, the vast majority are tiny matters like spelling, orthographic and non-orthographic. And, you know, again, I don't want to be, I want to be as concessive as I can be here. But honestly, on this point, and I'll make some concessions, but on this point, I think what I said is simply true because the non-orthographic variants are mostly tiny matters that either some of them you could argue their spelling or they're like spelling. So let's talk through this. Alex is pointing

to the discoveries in the Judean Desert volume 32, which distinguishes orthographic variants from textual variance and the textual non-orthographic variance that Dan McClellan counted were around 1930, 1,930 between the Great Isaiah Scroll and the Masoretic text. And this number was higher than I expected it to be, because I've always understood from the scholarship that most of the variants are orthographic. So I took a look into this, and it turns out most of these variants that these editors classify as orthographic turn out to be tiny matters that are inconsequential with respect to meaning and don't show up in English translation. They could be things like spelling. Again, we'll talk about how there's some dispute about where you cut off the boundary,

but about orthography technically. But let's just give examples. I think the best way, if you're lost at this point, you know, nerd alert, this video is going to get technical, but it'll be brief. It's going to be a short video. But just give a couple examples representatively because the best way to see this is just with examples and there's no way to give examples without it getting a little bit granular. But I think this can clarify the picture a little bit.

So let's just look at the first two verses of the book. Isaiah 1-1, Isaiah 1-2, okay? And these will give us some sort of flavor. We'll just work through what Dan had counted to be 1930 textual variants, non-orthographic variants, between the Great Isaiah Scroll and the Mazuritic text. So you can see here five variants right here in verse 1 and two more in verse 2. Now, numbers 1 and 5 in yellow we can skip. Those wouldn't go into Dan's 1930.

number. Those are just differences with the Septuagint. There is no difference in between the, with the Masoretic text there. Let's look at the second one in pink. Sorry for the squiggly lines here. I did this in Canva really quickly, trying to film this video quickly. You'll notice a bracket there. On the left side of the bracket is a Hebrew word and then one Q Isaiah A. That's the word listed in the great Isaiah scroll. On the right side of the bracket, you'll have the variant found in the Masoretic text and also in a text from Cave 4 at Kumran. Now the word in question here is simply the Hebrew word yom meaning day. It's in the plural. So days with a bet prefix, meaning in the days of. So if you look at either side of the bracket, you'll notice a slightly different wording. But in case it's unclear, I'll put this up on

the screen so you can take a look. And you can see the additional marking put by the great Isaiah scroll. For whatever reason, interesting, the scribe added a vav above the word there. And I was talking with my dad about this. My dad's an Old Testament guy. Kind of fascinating to think about why he would have done that and what's the thought process there. But the point for us to see is that this doesn't affect translation. This is a tiny matter like spelling, even if you wouldn't call this orthography. Either way, it's just in the days of. And you can see the translation there on the screen. Textual variance three and four are highlighted in green here. These are just names. Name three is a different form of the name Uzziah.

Uziah versus the Masoretic Uziah U. And name four is the name Hezekiah, which is, that's a name that comes up in a couple different forms throughout the book. Each one, where it's different, will be its own separate textual variant, okay? Number five, again, that's not relevant. That's just with the Septuagint. Variant number six here listed in verse two is in turquoise. This is also not a difference between the Great Isaiah Scroll and the Mazuritic text. They agree, but they differ with the text in K-4 at QMran, which lacks the Aleph.

Hebrew letter, but it doesn't affect the meaning at all. Variant 7 is in purple. This is the last color highlighter I could find in Canva. And here the great Isaiah scroll adds the definite article, Ha, meaning the, to the beginning of the word eretz, meaning earth or land, or territory. This is a word I've thought a lot about in connection to my arguments for a local flood. And what does that word mean? Cole, eretz, all the earth. Nonetheless, the Masoretic text on the right side of the bracket, lacks the definite article. Now, that is not consequential with respect to meaning. It's evocative noun, which can have a definite article or not. There's really no major significant difference here. Either way, you're going to translate this, listen, oh, land, or oh, earth, or something

like that. Now, of these seven major differences, not one of them is listed in the footnotes of the Bibliya, Hebraica, Stuttgartensia, which is a standard scholarly edition of the Hebrew Bible, which means the editors didn't even think these were worth mentioning. That's the book that's right there. I pulled it off my shelf and I already put it back. But point is, they don't even discuss these. They don't mention anything in the Kumram texts in Isaiah 1 until verse 8, where there's a question about whether to include a Vav, meaning and at the beginning of a word there. So if you keep going through these textual variants, you get to verse 3 and you just keep working through the book, this is what the majority of these textual variants are like. So, for example, you'll see other

forms of the name Hezekiah that are all their own separate textual variant. Now, even if these kinds of variants are not technically classified as orthography by the editors of the DJD 32, the majority of them concern tiny matters that are like spelling. They don't show up in English translation. They're inconsequential with respect to the meaning of the text. Not all. Okay, I'm not saying all of them. I'm saying the majority.

Now, that doesn't mean they're not interesting. I'm not saying they're insignificant in every sense. they don't change the meaning. And honestly, a lot of people would classify some of these as orthography. This is part of the issue here is, you know, there's a level of subjectivity in what is constituted as orthography. And his recent book, 2020 Brill book, Donald Perry writes, many of the readings that scholars have identified as textual variance may be no more than orthographic deviations. And he gives a couple of examples. So this is one of the things that's going on here that is going to cause some fluctuation in the numbers you will get, like Anthony

Ferguson's helpful video on Sean McDowell's channel where he comes to a much smaller calculation of the number of textual variants. Or you can see this is a point that John Mead made very well on Wes Huff's channel in their recent video. Check that out. I'll put both those in the video description. I think people might find them both useful. But whatever you use to determine the boundary marker between orthography versus these other textual variants, still the majority of the variance, even if you include the non-orthographic variants are very small matters. So many of them are minuscule that they're not going to show up in translation and they are inconsequential with respect to the meaning of the text.

Either way, it's like in the days of, you know, even if you've got a Vob or something. Now, there are some that are more significant for, you know, some will have a larger chunk of text, but in some cases there will be relatively easy to see how the error happened, to describe might have skipped over a little bit or something like that, so we can with relative confidence discern what the original text was. And then in other cases, there are a few textual variants that do affect meaning and do potentially show up in translation. So the million-dollar question is, how many? Right? How many of these are there? One good way for an average onlooker to get a sense of how significant the textual variants are in discussion is to look at English

translations. And this can give you a sense of proportion. Because if you, if you you you you're translating a text that is from the Middle Ages, and then you find a previous copy of the same book that goes back a thousand years earlier before the time of Christ himself. And yet, the earlier discovery hardly makes a dent in your translation that tells you something, right? So take the NRSV, which is a translation that can't be accused of having a conservative bias. the NRSV cited with the Qumran text over and against the prior Masoretic textual tradition 19 times in its translation of the book of Isaiah. Out of over 25,000 words, I know there's some subjectivity in how we count these words,

but in the entire book, there's only 19 occasions where the discovery of the Qumran text actually texts actually altered the translation that we already had. And furthermore, most of these 19 occurrences are relatively small. Here are a few examples where you can see where the NRSV cited against the Masoretic text in its translation, which is in the parentheses and in red. So you can see a different verb form of a test in Isaiah 8, 2, or take pity on rather than rejoice over in 917, or De Bonn versus Demone in 15, 9, or And His Tomb, rather than and in his death in Isaiah 53, 9, and so forth. If you want to look these up, here are the other 15 or so I can locate. I hope I don't leave any off.

You know, you're always paranoid in these discussions. If you make one mistake, someone's going to zap you and then blow it way up and so on and so forth. So I had some friends look over this and make sure I'm not off base here. So again, there are a few cases where there are these more significant very, that really do bring issues of meaning into question, but they're relatively small. And where they are, we just acknowledge them and work at them. You know, that's not some major colossal problem. The big one that has come up is Isaiah 2, 9, and 10. And here, some viewers derived the impression from Alex's video that I was being sneaky or dishonest in leaving out

a quote about Isaiah 2, 9, B, and 10. Because I'd put up this passage where the part that's in red, I had emboldened and I was trying to make a point about that, but I neglected to include the part at the end in blue. And it honestly didn't occur to me to include that. I was not trying to be sneaky here. I was just focused on the point that I was making in that juncture in the video, which, where I'm responding to the claim that Isaiah 2, 9 through 10 are missing, quote, from the Dead Sea version, end quote. And I'm saying, wait a second, there's multiple scrolls in the Kuman Caves. We can do 10. text criticism from them all to more accurately target the original text. The great Isaiah scroll has gotten so much of the focus because it's so complete and full. And so we need to distinguish

between what we learn from that scroll and the discrepancies between that, I should say that text and the Masoretic text versus the cumulative yield of all the Dead Sea Scrolls, which have more than 20 copies of the book, even though most of them are fragmentary. The Great Isaiah Scroll is a bit more, you could say, maybe sort of free-handed. People call it a more vulgar text or something like this. The scribe, who copied the Great Isaiah Scroll, you could say, took a little bit more liberty with modernizations and harmonizations and so forth. But we have to consider all the texts, and then we do text criticism from them all. Now, whether the results of that text criticism mean that Isaiah 2, 9, and 10 are in the original, or they're in a later port, or they're

a later edition, that really was not the point, and it didn't occur to me to go into that there. But since it's come up, let's talk through this. And the assumption on the table seems to be that this blue section of the quote that I neglected to go into is a sort of settled fact. And it is a common view. It's stated by that website. It's reflected in this authoritative book, for example, though the authors say that 2.9, B, and 10 is most likely a later edition. It's not certain. but it needs to be pointed out that other scholars don't follow that conclusion. Paulson Pulikotel argues that the absence of 2-9b-10 is an omission, and he's discussing whether it's a deliberate omission or an accidental omission, and he argues it's a deliberate omission,

and he makes his case for that. Robin Perry discusses those who think it's an accidental omission and expresses his own belief in that view. and John Mead discusses some others in his discussion with Westhoff, so you can see a few other examples of that as well. Now, who's right and wrong about this? I'm not sure. I don't have an opinion on that, but onlookers need to know that whether Isaiah 2.9 through 10 is in the original is a contested point, and yet it's being portrayed as though that's sort of a settled fact. Now, having said that, I need to make some concessions here, because if I could go back in time to my

original video, I would definitely do some things differently. First of all, I should have been clearer about the Digital Dead Sea Scrolls website and its own opinion on the originality of these two verses. It honestly didn't occur to me. I'm just focused on what I'm trying to say at that moment. But if I'm going to bring up a point about the inclusion of these other two verses in another text, at that point, I really need to go into the text critical issues. And I think there's also a concern there of I cut off one of Alex's clips a little too quickly there. That's why I'm not showing any clips in this. I don't want to cut someone off or anything to feel like a gotcha or anything like that.

I really regret the way these discussions can kind of escalate, especially the way people in the comments can amplify that too. Don't be nasty in the comments, anyone. Anyway, my bad on this. I'm not even sure how fully to criticize myself, but I'm sure I should have handled that better. Hopefully what I've said here is enough just to give people enough information. You can say, okay, I'm aware this is an issue in the scholarship, and you can just look into it and come to your own conclusion. A second concession, though, I want to make is I think part of Alex's concern is, and this come up from others as well in the comments, it's just, you know, why don't you just plainly admit that word for word is just wrong? And so I've been thinking about that and trying to think, have I been, you know, maybe in my zeal to defend my brother Wes, because I'm so proud of how he did on the Joe Rogan podcast and so sympathetic to what I took to be his larger point.

Maybe I should have just been more plain to say, you know, because I said, well, I don't know. what Wes meant by word for word, and I'll leave that for him to clarify. And I guess I was trying to be gracious and knowing he was going to speak to that as well. Maybe it'd be helpful for me to is to say so we can just move on, even though this has been conceded a couple other times as well already, word for word is not correct. Okay, between the great Isaiah scroll and the Masoretic text, it's not word for word. And again, I keep saying this, but it's totally understandable to misspeak on something like this. And Wes has clarified this subsequently. I feel a little bit dismayed that sometimes it seems like people seize upon this one little granular error

and really focus on that. And the concern I'm about to get to is the missing of the forest for the trees. I think one of the reasons for this is part of the concern that's come up is that Joe Rogan really latched on to the word for word comment. But I can tell you, Wes has shared with me that he has personally clarified that with Joe as well over a month ago from the time of my recording this. And that didn't seem to slacken Joe's enthusiasm about the broader point here. So no one needs to worry about the word-for-word comment going uncorrected. Let's look at the big picture. You know, if it's not word-for-word, what is it exactly? Right? That's the more interesting thing to talk about. And what's the cash-me?

value, right? What does all this mean? Is this a wow moment? Is the discovery of the kumran text a wow moment? My answer to that, second part of this video, is yes, it is totally a wow moment. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls was a remarkable confirmation of the prior history of the textual transmission of Isaiah and the painstaking care with which the book was copied by the scribes. It totally undermines the ideas that you can hear about the telephone game happening to the biblical text over the centuries. Just think about this. We went back in one leap from a medieval manuscript to a pre-Christian manuscript with minimal revision to the book of Isaiah. And it shows how carefully this book was copied. And so to get to this missing the forest for

the tree's concern, although the great Isaiah scroll is not word for word, it's, and this is the point I took West to be making is that it's an unbelievable, not unbelievable. Let me treat the adjectives right here. It's a remarkable, it's got to cut something out and run with it. It's a remarkable confirmation of the prior textual transmission. And looking at all the Dead Sea Scrolls especially, and this is the larger point that I'm trying to reiterate for the audience. And the reason I wanted to make this video is not to just go back and forth indefinitely. Yeah, I don't want to do that. it's because even this idea is now being disputed. The remarkable confirmation idea is being disputed. And you'll hear that, you know, I think Kip Davis was making this point in Alex's video,

that these biblical manuscripts are kind of just like in the other manuscripts. And viewers, I regret, may even get the impression that the remarkable nature of the textual transmission and the proximity between what we had and then what we found. It's just something that Christian apologists are making up, right? So it's worth just looking at scholarly reactions to the Dead Sea Scrolls. We can go all the way back to the 1950s as their first being studied. Miller Burroughs was an early authority on the Dead Sea Scrolls and a professor at Yale Divinity School.

His conclusion was, it is a matter of wonder that through something like 1,000 years, the text underwent so little alteration, as I said in my first article on the scroll, herein lies its chief importance supporting the fidelity of the Masoretic tradition. This is not an evangelical apologist. Here's how David Friedman, another Dead Sea Scrolls scholar, spoke of Burrough's early work. You can read that quote on the screen. Now, as the decades have rolled forward, the picture definitely has, in some respects, gotten more complicated. These early studies didn't have access to all the Isaiah texts in the

various caves. They didn't have access to digitized forms of the text that allow for electronic searches. So in a more recent work, Eugene Ulrich, who's kind of a chief authority on these questions, and definitely not an evangelical apologist, notes. So he'll talk about, you know, there's slightly more variance, for example, in one Q Isaiah B than the earlier reports, but it's still remarkably close to the Masoretic text. And the idea that the discover of these scrolls is a remarkable confirmation of the prior textual transmission is still frequently observed in the scholarship. Here's how Ellis Brotsman put it.

While there are many small differences between the Masoretic text and the various Qumran documents, the overall agreement between them is striking. The Qumran scrolls, while being much earlier than the Masoretic text, generally supported the fidelity with which the Masoretic text was copied. He's writing that in the 90s, and in context he's a great.

agreeing explicitly with Burrough's early assessment, and he ties this claim specifically to the book of Isaiah. Even Ulrich can speak of the impact of the Dead Sea Scrolls as showing that the traditional Hebrew Bible has been amazingly, accurately preserved, and he speaks about the scribes doing a first-rate job. Now, one of the things I am sensitive to now is if I ever quote a scholar who says one thing that someone's going to say, oh, but look what they said over here, you didn't include this other thing, and so you're being disingenuous, and this kind of thing. So just to be clear, the second of the points that he goes on to make, as what he calls a complementary fact,

is that there are multiple forms of the biblical text. Nonetheless, the point I'm documenting here is accurate with respect to amazingly accurate preservation. Now, since I was not able to read that entire article, so I've been reading a lot of other things from Ulrich to make sure I'm representing his point of view, and he is more restrained in other passages. Let me just give one other example to try to give readers,

readers, viewers, a balanced sense of his perspective. I won't take the time to read this, but you can read it through yourself to get another sense of his view. Here's how another Hebrew scholar, Drew Longacre, puts it, with few possible exceptions, for example, to 9b through 10 and chapter 40 verse 7, the Great Isaiah Scroll, 1Q Isaiah A, does not generally attest to an earlier text form or stage of development than the Masoretic text. You can look into this and find this sentiment over and over and over. I'm trying to give a few representative examples. You can look at biblical commentaries, not just evangelical ones, like what I mentioned in my first

video, and I'll put on the screen. You can Google this and find all kinds of articles talking about this, not that I would put much stock in just anything you might read there. But the point is, this is an extremely common opinion. It's not just Christian apologists who speak. of the similarity of what we had in the Masoretic text tradition and what we discovered in the Kumran caves as a matter of wonder and striking and amazing

and astonishing and so forth. So let me just share my heart here at the end of this video. When people, when Christian apologists emphasize this point, we're not trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes. Sometimes the dialectic is framed like, the counter-apologists are scholarly, but the Christian apologists, are just operating from bias. And, you know, unfortunately, sometimes that is true. You can find

that out there for sure, which is unfortunate. But at the same time, the counterapologists will, of course, face their own temptations of bias. For example, in this dispute, they may be tempted to minimize the significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls. And at their best, Christian apologists are motivated by what we sincerely believe is true. Speaking for myself, I'm very jealous that people following this discussion and understand just how cool this is. The Dead Sea Scrolls are an amazing find, and they really do highlight the carefulness with which a book like Isaiah has been transmitted.

And I think Wes did a, I think Wes did a fantastic job in the Joe Rogan interview, and on this point, I think if you just step back and say, okay, what I understood is he was just misremembering a Gleason Archer quote, something I've done a zillion times, but the point he was trying to make is true and needs to be made and so forth.

So last question is kind of where do we go in this discussion from here? Well, I just think the more interesting things to now focus on would be the content of the book. Talk about the forest versus the trees, you know. People talk about Isaiah as the fifth gospel because of its remarkable portrayal of the good news of Jesus Christ. And the book of Isaiah, the basic message, once you get, you know, stepping back from all the tiny little scribal issues, you see the big picture. it conveys the message that I think is consonant with the entirety of Scripture. There is a God. We need him.

We have sinned against him. That sin is a major problem. But God has worked in history to solve that problem. And the book of Isaiah even speaks of this figure who will come to bear our sins on our behalf. This is, of course, Isaiah 53, the man of of sorrows who has borne our grief. He was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray. We have all turned everyone to his own way, and the Lord

has laid on him the iniquity of us all. I remember going through this passage in seminary, and my professor saying, this is as rich an atonement theology, meaning a theology of how we're reconciled to God, as you'll find anywhere in the New Testament. In other words, the most sort of evocative portrayal of what actually happened when Jesus died on the cross doesn't even come in the New Testament. It came before Jesus was ever born, arguably. Now, of course, the big question here is, well, is this talking about Jesus? And that's the kind of question I think would be more interesting to talk about and to focus upon.

I'm not blaming anybody who's been talking about these other things as well. But I'm just saying, for where we go, I think, in the dialectic between Christian, and non-Christians about the book of Isaiah, that's the kind of stuff I want to talk about. Because I think these prophecies are pretty interesting. I put out a video on fulfilled prophecy, and I would say that this argument is not overpowering, but I think it's suggestive because of the cumulative weight of all these different Old Testament prophecies. So that's one thing I think we should focus on more. All right, I said it'd be a short video, so let me stop it there. One final thing in my first video I put up this graphic, sorry to my British friends. I can't

believe how badly I butchered that both in putting an error on the screen. It was supposed to say American spelling. And then I just completely butchered the delivery because I was distracted while I was trying to say, anyway, wow. Talk about, you know, scribal errors and little errors. All right. Thanks for watching. More discussion about all these things, hopefully. See you in the next video.