This is not a terribly inaccurate video, which is nice for a change.

A brief response to the video

I would contest a few things. Firstly, the depiction of Hebrew as the language only of elites in 1st century Judea is open to question. Yes, Hebrew was used primarily as a religious/scholarship language, but this doesn’t rule out that different types of ‘elites’ would have used it. For example, the Pharisees were on the whole non-aristocrats devoted to scholarship of the Torah and would have on the most part been literate in Hebrew. The actual ruling elite would indeed have also used Greek as a language, particularly in their actions with Rome; I don’t think ‘bridge language’ is really the right description for Koine Greek throughout the eastern Empire.

Secondly, the video suggests there was a now lost ‘Greek version’ that the NT writers drew upon. Given that the video is quite rightly pointing out that the LXX is a number of texts, and the Masoretic text is likewise not a single text, I’m not sure why they would hypothesise that the variety of NT documents drew upon a single revision. More likely, various NT authors utilised whatever Greek version they had access/were familiar with. Moreover, in some instances you can detect use/translation from a non-Greek source, possibly an earlier version of what became the Masoretic text, possibly an alternate Hebrew version.

Most Christians with an academic background are aware of these issues, even if most Christians in general are not. Are there translation ‘issues’? Of course. Are there cultural differences? Of course. Pseudepigraphical issues continue to be a matter of debate.

The greatest problem I have with this video that it makes a number of fairly standard academic observations about textual criticism and textual evidence and the issues of researching ancient literature, and then it makes a number of contestable conclusions on that basis. The jump from the primary questions about reading ancient literature, to the conclusions about insurmountable problems, is not itself a given.

Further Reading

The field of studies that deals with different versions / translations / manuscripts is called Textual Criticism. Some classic texts in the field for New Testament include Metzger's The Text of the New Testament: Its transmission, Corruption, and Restoration , as well as the more recent Aland and Aland, The Text of the New Testament: An introduction to the Critical Editions and to the Theory and Practice of Modern Textual Criticism ; for the Old Testament, I've used Brotzman and Waltke's Old Testament Textual Criticism as well as Tov's Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible.

Textual criticism is a much more objective, science-like field of historical studies,