Part One

Most talk about the text of the Bible focuses on the New Testament.  The Old Testament is much larger and yet there is less variation in extant copies of the Old Testament than the New.  As well, more Christian scholars know the Greek than the Hebrew, and when they know the Hebrew, they also know the Greek better.

Scripture teaches the preservation of all of scripture in the original languages, the languages in which scripture was written.  Even if the conversation mainly centers on the New Testament, God preserved the Old Testament perfectly too.  In recent days, some are talking more about the Old Testament again.  Our book, Thou Shalt Keep Them, addressed the preservation of the Old Testament and the variation of a Hebrew critical text.

No Translation Above Preserved Hebrew Text

I think you would be right to detect hypocrisy in many of those who wish to alter the preserved Hebrew text of the Old Testament with a Greek, Latin, or Syriac translation.  Not necessarily in this order, but, first, it flies in the face of “manuscript evidence.”  It’s not because there isn’t evidence — around three hundred extant ancient handwritten copies of the Hebrew Masoretic text exist.  Second, critical text advocates savagely attack those who identify preservation in a translation.  I don’t believe God preserved His words in a translation, but they actually do in their underlying Old Testament text for the modern versions.

In a related issue, the same critical text supporters most often say that Jesus quoted from a Greek translation of the Old Testament, “the Septuagint.”  As someone reads the references or mentions of the Old Testament by Jesus in the Gospels, he will notice that there are not exact quotations of the Hebrew Masoretic text.  Even when you compare the English translation of the Hebrew in the Old Testament passage and compare it with the English translation of the Greek in the New Testament, they won’t match exactly most of the time.  What was happening in these passages?  Is this evidence that we don’t have an identical text to them?

View of the Septuagint

It is a popular and false notion that Christians in the first century used a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, called the Septuagint, as their scriptures, so they quoted from it.  All the New Testament “quotations” of the Old Testament have at least minor variants from the various editions of the Septuagint in all but one place:  a quote in Matthew 21:16 is identical to a part of Psalm 8:3 in Ralf’s edition of the Septuagint.

When you read the New Testament and find the 320 or so usages or allusions to the Old Testament in it, you will see that they are not identical.  Some might explain that as a translation of a translation, that is, the Old Testament, Hebrew to English, and the New Testament, Hebrew to Greek to English, differences will occur by a sheer dissipation of a third language.  Online and in other locations you can compare an English translation of the New Testament quotations of the Old Testament with an English translation of one edition of the Septuagint and one of the Hebrew Masoretic to compare the latter two with the first.

I see value in the Septuagint, whichever edition, since there are several.  Those various editions give larger sample sizes of Greek usage for meaning and syntax for understanding the Greek biblical language of the New Testament.  They can help with the study of both the Old and New Testaments.  As an example, Jewish translators translated the Old Testament Hebrew word almah in Isaiah 7:14 parthenos, which is the specific Greek word for “virgin,” not “young woman.”  All of this answers the question, “How would people have understood the word, phrase, or sentence who heard it in that day?”

What Did New Testament Authors Do?

The mentions of the Old Testament in the New are most often not verbatim quotations of the Hebrew.  That’s not what the New Testament authors were doing.  They were serious about the preservation of the Old Testament as seen in the regular use of the words, “it is written.”  This is a perfect passive verb that says passage continues written.  The writing of the passage was complete with the results of that writing ongoing.  This communicates the preservation of scripture.

The New Testament authors knew the Old Testament well, so they didn’t need a Greek translation of it.  The New Testament writers could do their own translation of a Hebrew text.  They most often, however, did a “targum,”  some quoting and some paraphrasing from memory and also deliberately using the words of the text to make their theological or practical point from the Bible.  Preachers continue to do this today, sometimes quoting directly from a translation and other times making an allusion or reference to the passage.

Reliance on the Septuagint?

What I’m explaining about “targumming” is the explanation of John Owen and others through history as to the variation between the Old Testament Hebrew and the Greek or English translation.  Some references to the Old Testament are closer to an edition of the Septuagint than the Hebrew Masoretic text, sometimes almost identical.  Were the scriptural authors relying on a Septuagint, which predated the New Testament?

If New Testament authors relied on what we know of the Greek Septuagint today, then they depended on a corrupt edition or version of scripture.  Some give this as an argument for the validation of a corrupt text.  They say that God doesn’t care about the very words of the Bible, just its message.  Instead, God kept the message very intact, but not the exact words.  In addition, they often say that the Septuagint is evidence for the acceptance of something short of a perfect text.   These approaches to the Septuagint are mere theories founded on faulty presuppositions.

John Owen also referred to this similarity between the usages of the New Testament authors with a translation of the Greek Old Testament, such as the Septuagint.  He said that the likely explanation was that Christians adapted the text of the Septuagint to the New Testament quotations out of respect of Jesus and the New Testament authors.  Others have echoed that down through history.  Owen wasn’t alone. It is a possibility.

John Owen

In Owen’s first volume in his three thousand page Hebrews commentary, he spends a few pages speaking on the Septuagint and the concept of quotations from it.  Owen writes (pp. 67-68):

Concerning these, and some other places, many confidently affirm, that the apostle waved the original, and reported the words from the translation of the LXX. . . . [T]his boldness in correcting the text, and fancying without proof, testimony, or probability, of other ancient copies of the Scripture of the Old Testament, differing in many things from them which alone remain, and which indeed were ever in the world, may quickly prove pernicious to the church of God. . . .

[I]t is highly probable, that the apostle, according to his wonted manner, which appears in almost all the citations used by him in this epistle, reporting the sense and import of the places, in words of his own, the Christian transcribers of the Greek Bible inserted his expressions into the text, either as judging them a more proper version of the original, (whereof they were ignorant) than that of the LXX., or out of a preposterous zeal to take away the appearance of a diversity between the text and the apostle’s citation of it.

And thus in those testimonies where there is a real variation from the Hebrew original, the apostle took not his words from the translation of the LXX. but his words were afterwards inserted into that translation.

Theories of Men Versus the Promises of God

Theories of men should not upend or variate the promises of God.  God’s promises stand.  He promised to preserve the original language text.  We should believe it.  No one should believe that Jesus or one of the apostles quoted from a corrupted Greek translation.  That contradicts the biblical doctrine of the preservation of scripture.  Other answers exist.

Whatever position someone takes on the Septuagint, it should not contradict what God already said He would do.  There is no authority to historical theories based on no or tenuous evidence at best.  The best explanation is one that continues a high view of scripture.  One should not rely on one of the editions of the Greek Septuagint for deciding what scripture is.  It should not correct the received Hebrew text of the Old Testament.  Instead, everyone should believe what God said He would do and acknowledge its fulfillment in history.