As the brackets show, the Latin text is considerably more corrupt than the German, possibly because German was better known to Jews of the period. Some of the corrupt Latin spellings, such as santo, crucifisus, and asendit may be due to the way Latin was pronounced in the place where NY was compiled, compounded by the vagaries of Hebrew transliteration. Further corruption is evident in the fact that the line unicum dominum nostrum qui conceptus est de spiritu sancto natus ex Maria virgine was evidently dropped in transmission, and thus omitted from the Hebrew and German translations. It was subsequently restored to the Latin text, but with the (incorrect) "explanation" that it was an "additional statement," only said by some people. In fact it was an essential and inseparable part of the text, found even in the earliest witnesses.¹³

However, shortened forms of the creed do turn up elsewhere in the Jewish anti-Christian polemical literature;¹⁴ they may have been used deliberately by Christian polemicists in order to simplify their message. Since the missing section of the creed in NY mentions the Virgin Birth, it is possible that some Christian apologist deliberately omitted it to avoid getting sidetracked into discussion of a doctrine particularly disliked by Jews. If so, then once again it would be evident that the NY text of the Creed became known to its Jewish compilers through citations in Christian polemic, not through direct knowledge of Christian worship. At a later stage, as NY grew closer to its extant form, the omission was re-supplied editorially, with the disclaimer that not everyone said it—a disclaimer that could only be believed by people who were themselves unfamiliar with Christian practices.

Did the German text, too, ultimately come from Christian missionaries, or was it made by the Jewish compilers of NY? The fact that the language is called "Ashkenaz" implies that it is meant to be Yiddish, and the presence of some Yiddish traits (e. g. "oyf," "un'") may suggest a Jewish writer.

The most extreme case of corruption occurs in the next passage:

They say the following daily in their Prima prayers: Christe fili Dei vivi, mi<s>erere nobis. <Qui sedes ad dexteram Patris,> miserere nobis.¹⁵ Offerimus tibi Domine calicem salutari<s>secundum ordinem Melchisedek et secundum ordinem Moysi et Aaron <in> sacerdotibus eius et Samuel inter eos qui invocant nomen Domini. That is what they call Stillmesse; they teach it only to those who are ordained as priests, and those priests whisper it silently in their house of prayer. The following is its German [Ashkenaz] translation: Christus des lebende<n> Gottes Sohn, erbar<m>dich über uns, der sitzt zu der rechten Seiten seines Vaters, erbarm dich über uns. Wir offeren dem Herrn dankenlich der salbet A<har>on in ihr Priesterschaft un' Samuel der Ruf' in Namen Gottes. Now, how can you say that this is God when the priest himself says that it is just an offering and when you yourself made the wine and baked the bread? How can you say that this made you, established you, formed you, and created you?

Here a number of unrelated passages have been run together to look like a single prayer, though they really are not. From a Christian viewpoint they do not even make sense together, for a prayer addressed to "Christ the Son of the living God" could not continue with "we offer you, O Lord, the cup of salvation," words that could only be addressed to the Father.¹⁶ Thus we need to separate out the individual units within the series.

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