This comes up in yesterdays daf (Sanhedrin 22) and I have a long post about it What כתב was the Torah given in?.
I would like to reiterate what I said there. IMHO, this is the best proof that the Tannaim/Amoraim had no mesora. According to Chazal the second Beis Hamikdash lasted 420 years and the Tannaim lived a little before and after the destruction of the second Beis Hamikdash. In other words, the dispute in the Gemara in Sanhedrin took place no more then 550 years after Ezra and yet they have no idea what really happened at the time of Ezra, did he change the כתב or not. This is not some minor dispute, this is a major dispute with huge historical ramifications. This is also not a dispute about which can be said אלו ואלו דברי אלקים חיים because this is a dispute about historical facts. According to R' Yosi all Sta"m during from the time of Matan Torah through the period of the first Beis Hamikdash were written in כתב עברית and only at the time of Ezra the כתב was changed to אשורית. This is major change. Every pair of tefillin, mezuza, sefer Torah needed to be rewritten in a new script. The whole nation had to be taught to read and write a new script that they had never seen before. And yet, we have R' Elazar Hamodai who denies that ANY of this happened. He believes that the Torah was given in אשורית and nothing ever changed. From Matan Torah until his day the only script used was אשורית. How can there be such a big dispute about simple historical facts? The only answer is that the Babylonian exile caused such an upheaval that the Jews forgot everything and therefore the Tannaim and Amoraim had to basically make things up as they went along.
I wrote about the hebrew scripts and their evolution in my post Proof of G-d From Hebrew. http://altercockerjewishatheist.blogspot.com/2015/05/ My two cents: Parts of Torah were first written in something like Old Hebrew and some probably in even earlier writing systems. As the Torah was being compiled over hundreds of years parts are added, deleted and edited. So it was actually compiled and written in several different scripts and recording systems including Old Hebrew and Square Hebrew over hundred of years. It was all probably finally redacted into Square Hebrew.
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