From the Sept/Oct, 2024 issue of *Touchstone*

bible

The Scriptures’ Greek Nuance

by Patrick Henry Reardon

It is a plain fact of history that the Old Testament did not pass from Judaism to the Church in its original Hebrew. To understand the transmission of biblical authority, it is important to give this thesis its proper weight. From the perspective of history, there was no unmediated transition from the Hebrew Old Testament to the Greek New Testament. It simply did not happen that way. There exists not a single manuscript of the Hebrew Bible copied by a Christian hand. The Old Testament handed on by the Jews to the Christian Church was a Greek body of literature, chiefly (but not exclusively) the Septuagint.

This Greek translation came from the world’s largest community of Jews in the third century before Christ, the synagogue at Alexandria in Egypt. The title of this translation, “Septuagint” (LXX), from the Latin word for “seventy,” is based on the legend that seventy(-two) Alexandrian scholars, commissioned by Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285–247), translated the Bible from Hebrew to Greek. Current opinion holds that the whole process took a bit longer, perhaps a whole century, and it seems more probable that the translation was authorized by the Alexandrian synagogue itself; it was produced to serve for the synagogue readings, much like the Aramaic paraphrases of the Bible used in the Holy Land (the Targums).

When the Old Testament is quoted in the New Testament (and such quotations were almost always made from memory;speakers and writers did not normally look up passages on a big scroll), the quoted text is most often that of the Septuagint. That is to say, the Septuagint was the Old Testament version used by the apostles. It was the Old Testament text as the Church received it.

A Uniquely Greek Concept

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Patrick Henry Reardon is pastor emeritus of All Saints Antiochian Orthodox Church in Chicago, Illinois, and the author of numerous books, including, most recently, Out of Step with God: Orthodox Christian Reflections on the Book of Numbers (Ancient Faith Publishing, 2019).

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