The Greek Old Testament?

Last updated on: September 15, 2024 at 1:03 am by Ben Witherington

The Greek Old Testament? 2024-09-04T13:45:17-04:00 Ben Witherington

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I was reading away in a book entitled The Bible in Greek Christian Antiquity which is a translation of some essays originally in French, with the first of the essays about the Septuagint by Paul Lamarche. In this essay he stresses that of course the Septuagint is not in its origins a Christian collection of translations of the Hebrew OT, plus some added material, but rather a Jewish creation, with the first part, namely the translation of the Pentateuch likely completed in the 2nd century B.C. At the same time he was busily reminding us that because the majority of Jews lived outside the Holy Land, for most of them Greek was their spoken language, especially so in places like Egypt or the various Roman provinces north and west of Israel itself. And for them the Greek Bible was their Bible in the main, even though it was a translation of the Hebrew and Aramaic. Not only so, he stresses that when it came to the composition of the NT, overwhelmingly the form of the OT cited was some form of the Greek OT, whether the LXX or some other Greek translation, with very rare exception. He then goes on to point out that the by the time the majority of the church was Gentile, and not Jewish, which is to say, already in the 2nd century A.D. what in became for them the OT was the Greek OT, not the Hebrew one, again with rare exception. It is the Greek OT that is cited, alluded to or echoed, again and again, not only in the documents that became the NT, but by the Greek-speaking church fathers ranging from Clement to Ignatius, to Irenaeus to Chrysostom and much more. Not only so, but when we get to the codifying of a Bible for the church in the 4th century— what did it look like? It it involve a Hebrew OT or a fresh translation of the Hebrew OT? No it did not. The Bible commissioned by the Emperor Constantine in about 325 A.D. and which was compiled and produced in multiple copies by ‘the father of church history’ namely Eusebius is probably what we find in Codex Vaticanus. Also in Codex Sinaiticus we have some form of the Greek OT. In short, The Bible of the church was originally all in Greek….. or in the West it was translated into Latin by Jerome and others. It is true that Jerome dealt with the Hebrew OT in his production of the old Latin Bible (and later the Vulgate), but again, in neither the East or the West, did the Bible of Christians really involve a Hebrew OT, with rare exception. It is understandable then why many Jews in the 2nd and following centuries even in the Diaspora, abandoned the LXX, and turned back to mainly focus on the Hebrew Torah.

The question for us today is— why are we Christians not following the example of the writers of the NT and the earliest post-apostolic Christians in the OT we study and rely on? This is precisely the sort of question I was asked one day by a Greek Orthodox student at Ashland Seminary, who pointed out that Matthew’s account of the virginal conception was not based in the Hebrew text (which says an almah will conceive and give birth to a child— meaning a nubile woman, with her virginity assumed, but not focused on compared to the LXX which has parthenos ‘virgin’, clearly enough. He was also questioning why modern English translations are based primarily if not exclusively on a Hebrew OT. Why are Protestant and Catholic seminaries basically teaching the OT based on the Hebrew OT, not the Greek and occasionally an LXX class?

These are actually good questions– but there are some answers to these questions. In the first place, there is the question of origins— what was the original inspired Word of God written in, in the case of the OT? The answer is surely Hebrew and some Aramaic, NOT Greek, and so if the job of the translator is to go ‘ad fontes’ back as far as we can to the original source texts inspired by God’s Spirit, they do not involve the Greek translations of the OT, even though a myth or legend of origins about the Greek translation called ‘the Seventy’ (LXX) was dreamed up and reported by Aristeas sometime before the NT era. Secondly, as a result of the Renaissance there was a strong cultural impetus to go back ‘ad fontes’ for all sorts of ancient Greek, Latin and other classic texts as we can see in Petrarch and many others, and this movement had a strong effect on the Christians caught up in the Lutheran and then the Swiss and English Reformations. And ever since then, most Christians, apart from the Greek Orthodox tradition, were insisting that translators focuses on the original Biblical language texts for their translating into what ever language.

This story is long, and convoluted in many ways, but I would say that essentially this was the right move, for those who who hold to a high view of Scripture as inspired in its original language texts. Nevertheless, the writers of the NT make clear that they view the Greek OT as close enough to the original inspired text in many cases so that it can be used as a faithful rendering of the original. The caveat however is if we ask— are they using the OT they have in a strict contextual exegetical manner, or are they using it in a more loose homiletical way? Sometimes clearly it is the later, and sometimes they are even using the OT in an allegorizing manner (see Gal. 4).

In short, this whole situation is complex.

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