What if the Old Testament as we know it today has been manipulated to misdirect modern day Christians and Jews?

That's an interesting thought, but the idea that the Old Testament has been manipulated to misdirect modern Christians and Jews is not widely supported by scholars. The Jewish rejection of Jesus as the Messiah is based on theological differences and interpretations of scripture, rather than deliberate manipulation of the text.

It's important to recognize that the Old Testament was established as a sacred text long before Jesus' birth. The Hebrew Bible was already well-established and widely respected within Jewish communities by the time of Jesus. The preservation of the Hebrew Bible has been a meticulous process among Jewish scribes and scholars, with strict measures in place to ensure accurate copying and transmission of the text.

While variations exist among ancient manuscripts, the core teachings and narratives of the Old Testament remain consistent across different versions and translations. So, while it's natural to question and explore the complexities of religious texts and interpretations, the idea of a deliberate manipulation to misdirect regarding Jesus requires substantial evidence and scholarly consensus, which is currently lacking.

Super-long honest answer, and I'm not trying to sound like a know-it-all, but you're venturing into rabbit holes I often dwell in.

(TLDR: Well sure there's something going on! 2,000 years of human history.)

While it was certainly a rocky start, between the period of Jesus' death and the Fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD, the Pharisees and the Messianic Jews worshipped together in the same Temple, read the scriptures together, prayed together, kept Torah/the Law, etc... The "jews" and the "christians" were still essentially just two denominations of the same religion; one who believed Yeshua/Jesus was the Messiah and the other did not.

At the time of the Roman siege of Jerusalem, the Pharisees rallied around a military leader and declared HIM to be the messiah (I forget and could look this dude's name up, but I don't care to).

This, of course, wasn't accepted by the Messianic Jews, who already knew who the true Messiah was, so they instead followed the words of Yeshua who had essentially prophesied that when they see armies surrounding Jerusalem, they should flee to the hills. Over time afterwards, they basically dispersed into the surrounding gentile nations and into the various Christian communities already started by Paul and other evangelists.

And thus the split between "Jew and Christian" was complete. Jerusalem was decimated by the Romans. The surviving Phariseeical Jews at the time never forgave the Messianics whom they saw as traitors and cowards, and they set out in the aftermath to build a completely NEW religious system (because their old system was all built around priests and sacrifices at the Temple, which was utterly laid to waste now).

Thus, the Pharisees turned to the Talmud, full of its Babylonian mysticism, as well as their own commentaries on the Scriptures. This is how they are, to this day, able to teach from the TALMUD and their own writings, rather than the ACTUAL BIBLE, and they are able to pick-and-choose, and add-to and take-away from scripture, etc... And so, what we today call "Rabbinical Judaism" was born.

And so, today, you can be raised Jewish, and spend your life in religious studies, and yet still never have stumbled across the Messianic prophecies that more blatantly point to Jesus such as, say, Micah 5:2 or Isiah 7:14.

This really isn't necessarily to bash just the Jews. Because as for Christendom, the Roman Catholic church eventually proceeded to conquer the entire idea of being a follower of Christ, and then it set out to hide or burn all translations of the Bible that weren't in Latin, and ensured that only their Priests were capable of reading the Bible for the next 1500 years or so. Then to top it off, they declared the Pope to be ruler in Christ's absence, and thus positioned their own Priesthood as higher authorities than the scripture... Until, of course, the Protestant Reformation happened and the Bible began to be translated into European languages around the 1600s.

As for corrupted Bible translations.... I am sad to say that, yeah, there has been a ton of manipulation, in both the Old and New Testament, over the years. I personally prefer the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament that Paul the Apostle himself used) and I keep it handy when reading the Bible, because there are all sorts of hidden jewels that are lost in translation.

And even today, new discoveries in this field are taking place. Right now, for instance, scholars are only re-discovering that much of the New Testament was actually originally written in Hebrew (a very contentious and debated subject right now, but doesn't it make sense that the Jewish disciples of Jesus would have written in Hebrew? Especially something like "the Book of Hebrews"?)

Anyways, thankfully, I've found that the vast majority of theology and over-all narrative of the Bible doesn't seem that different when comparing the different translations. Maybe if you're having an inter-denominational debate on specific Christian dogma or something, but whether I'm reading the Greek Septuagint or the King James version, they both point to Jesus as the Messiah.