In answer to the video "Jeremiah 8:8 - Scripture Twisting 101"
The Torah contains many harsh laws that were instituted on the Israelites because of their transgressions, and hard heartedness per the Quran, in order to contain them. Jesus in the NT alludes in certain places to this principle Mk10:5. This hypocrisy of the religious elite and treachery towards their divine revelations which Jesus tried rectifying, is mentionned in the Quran
2:44"do you enjoin men to be good and neglect your own souls while you read the Book; have you then no sense?".Throughout time and in order to escape these self-imposed heavy burdens, they went on hairsplitting each commandement further. Explicit punishements, such as death sentences were substituted for other punishements of their own inventions. They use (and still do) the excuse that the Temple must be standing for many laws to be applicable. This innovation is easily exposed through the fact that the Temple was never around at the time of Moses' execution of the Israelites found worshiping the calf, the institutions of death sentences for adultery, rebellious children, breaking the Sabath etc. In Numb11 Moses asked God to spare him the burden of prophethood on such rebellious people. He was so convinced as to their tendency to disobey, that in Deut31:25-29 he swears before heaven and earth they will find a way to corrupt the revelation.
Jeremiah condemned the scribes for their mishandling the law Jer8:8. Jeremiah here is accusing the scribes that they mishandled
"the law of the LORD"with their lying pens, not with their mouths. He's tellin them how can they claim to have it when they have handled it falsely, meaning that book they have in their hands isnt the original Law but one that has been tampered with. That tampering does not have to be absolute and neither does the verse say so. It speaks of partial corruption of the overall text. There is a reason why in the 2nd century, the early church father and messianic apologist Justin Martyr, accuses with explicit examples, the Jews of having physically altered passages of the HB, including within the book of Jeremiah, because they found them confusing. In his dialogue with a contemporary Jew named Trypho, Justin first alludes to the disagreement Jews had over the Septuagint Greek translation of the HB. A cursory reading of the text besides the Torah, reveals the Christian agenda of the unknown translators, especially within the books of Isaiah and Jeremiah. Christians in turn accused the Jews of shamelessly obscuring messianic passages in reference to Jesus. Justin tells Trypho;
“I certainly do not trust your teachers when they refuse to admit that the translation of the Scriptures made by the seventy elders at the court of King Ptolemy of Egypt is a correct one, and attempt to make their own translation. You should also know that they have deleted entire passages from the version composed by those elders at the court of Ptolemy, in which it is clearly indicated that the Crucified One was foretold as God and man, and as about to suffer death on the cross. But, since I know that all you Jews deny the authenticity of these passages, I will not start a discussion about them, but I will limit the controversy to those passages which you admit as genuine. Thus far, you have admitted the authenticity of all my quotations, except this, ‘Behold, a virgin will conceive,’ which you claim reads, ‘Behold, a young woman will conceive.’ And I promised to show that this prophecy was not spoken of Hezekiah, as you were taught, but of my Christ. This I now intend to prove.” “Before you do,” interrupted Trypho, “we would like you to quote some of the passages you claim were entirely omitted [from the elders” translation] “Since you asked,” I replied, “here is an example. They have deleted the following passage in which Ezra expounded the law of the Passover: ‘And Ezra said to the people: This Passover is our Savior and refuge. And if you have understood, and it has entered into your hearts, that we are about to humiliate Him on a cross, and afterwards hope in Him, then this place will never be forsaken, saith the Lord of hosts. But if you will not believe Him, nor listen to His teaching, you will be the laughing-stock of the Gentiles’. They have also expunged these words from Jeremiah: ‘I was as a meek lamb that is carried to be a sacrificial victim; they devised counsels against Me, saying: Come, let us put wood on His bread, and cut Him off from the land of the living, and let His name be remembered no more’ [Jer 11.19]. Since this passage from the words of Jeremiah is still found in some copies of Scripture in the Jewish synagogues (for it was deleted only a short time ago), and since it is also proved from these words that the Jews planned to crucify Christ Himself and to slay Him, and since He is shown, as was likewise prophesied by Isaiah, as led like a lamb to slaughter, and in accordance with this passage He is marked as ‘an innocent lamb,’ they are so confused by such words that they resort to blasphemy. Similarly have they removed the following words from the writings of the same Jeremiah: ‘The Lord God, the Holy One of Israel, remembered His dead who slept in their graves, and He descended to preach to them His salvation’ “Furthermore, from a verse of the ninety-fifth Psalm of David they have left out the short phrase, ‘from the tree.’ For they have changed the verse, ‘Say to the Gentiles: The Lord has reigned from the tree,’ to ‘Say to the Gentiles: The Lord has reigned’ [Ps 95.10]. [2] Now, no one of your people was ever said to have reigned as God and King over the Gentiles, except the Crucified One, who (as the Holy Spirit testifies in the same Psalm) was freed from death by His resurrection, and thus showed that He is not like gods of the Gentiles, for they are but the idols of demons. [3] To clarify this point, I will repeat the whole Psalm for you....“Only God knows,” remarked Trypho, “whether or not our leaders have deleted portions of the Scriptures as you say. But such an assertion seems incredible.”
What this passage of Jer8:8 establishes beyond doubt, is that there was at least some physically corrupted writings passed off as the real Torah, and Jeremiah exposed the authors of these documents. Elsewhere Jeremiah laments over the false prophets among them's oral misinterpretation of the Law
Jer23:9-36"They use their tongues and say, "He Says".What transpires from Jeremiah's repeated condemnations is that the Jews of his time and most probably before, mishandled both textually and orally the writings of the prophets. Some of these corrupted writings and their authors were exposed, thankfully to the prophets that were continuously sent among them in an almost uninterrupted manner, and the presence of righteous remnants among them, that kept the Torah. But this is far from solving the problem. Jeremiah appeals to the uncorrupted text available to them, urging them to abide by it despite and they majoritarily resist his calls, trying even to kill him Jer26.
The greater implication here is that when crimes are exposed at an advanced stage, that it is found out it is done on a large scale, even institutionalized as is the case with the corrupt scholars in the time of Jeremiah, it often means one is only dealing with the tip of the iceberg. No sooner would Jeremiah turn his back, or pass away, the criminals would continue doing what they did before and during his presence among them. As reflected by Moses when he predicted their future disobedience
Deut31:27"If you have been rebellious against the Lord while I am still alive and with you, how much more will you rebel after I die!"To further corroborate the corrupt leaders went as far as burning Jeremiah's scroll Jer36:23, and even though it was divinely re-writen later Jer36:27-32, something the text never says reoccured in Biblical history, it reveals the complete careless attitude of the comunity's most prominent figures towards sacred texts. There is a reason why Jeremiah says in Jer7:21 that even though God had spoken to them, they
"went backward and not forward".This shows their constant tendency to leave the right path. One cannot but question, how long would the fringe righteous remnants resist and be able to maintain the integrity of the inherited written and oral tradition in such a heavily corrupt environement? About 600 years later and after prophethood ceased for 400 years, meaning a very long period where these deceitful leaders and supposed maintainers of the scriptures were left on their own, Jesus rose and echoed Jeremiah's lamentations, probably in a harsher tone than any of their prophets. How could the Torah and the oral tradition be rightfully preserved when those very ones supposed to keep it and faithfully transmit it were rotten spiritually, like a tomb
Matt23"full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean"?After Jeremiah, who exposed the tip of the iceberg of corruption, and especially after 400 years where prophethood was interrupted up till Jesus' time, the scriptures in the hands of the Jews were only Torah and book of the prophets by name, not by contents. Although there still remained guidance and truth in these books, one cannot legitimately say their integrity was safeguarded.
