"The Law and the Prophets were "until John" -- they witnessed to the Christ."
Not to change the subject, but this reminds me of an interesting difference in Shem Tov's Hebrew Matthew 11:13. As Nehemia Gordon notes (The Hebrew Yeshua vs. the Greek Jesus pg. 43-44):
If I were Shem-Tov writing a polemic against Catholic Christianity I would have brought this verse as my first argument. Here in black and white the Greek Matthew says that the Tanach was not talking about Yeshua; the Tanach only prophesied up until John the Baptist while Yeshua's ministry was not foretold by the Tanach. That's what it says in the Greek Matthew! The Hebrew Matthew, though, has a slight but highly significant change. The Hebrew says, 'For all the prophets and the Torah spoke concerning John' ... This Hebrew text makes more sense. The Hebrew is saying that throughout the Tanach there are references to a prophet such as John the Baptist ... In Greek the words for 'until' and 'concerning' are substantially different [heos vs. peri] but in Hebrew the difference is only a single letter [ad vs. al] ... If Shem-Tov's Hebrew Matthew is just a translation from Greek, why would the Hebrew translation make more sense than the Greek original? It would have been in Shem-Tov's interest to preserve this Greek reading which lays the groundwork for a solid argument against Catholicism, which, after all, was his stated goal.
Dalet and lamed (in ad and al) look similar and would have been easy to confuse if the Greek Matthew was translated from Hebrew, similar to the possible vav/yod error in Mt. 23:2 regarding whether Jesus said to obey the Pharisees ("they" in the Greek) or Moses ("he" in the Hebrew).
