Hi, I'm David Bercot, and for the next three nights, we're going to be talking about discovering the Septuagint. Has this ever happened to you? You're reading the New Testament, and the New Testament writer quotes from the Old Testament. So you look up the passage in the Old Testament, but you find that it reads differently from what you just read in the New Testament. Let me give you an example. Matthew 21:15 and 16. Here Jesus quotes the scriptures to the chief priests and scribes at the temple in Jerusalem.
We read, " But when the chief priests and scribes saw the wonderful things that he did, and the children crying out in the temple and saying, " Hosanna to the Son of David, " they were indignant and said to him, " Do you hear what these are saying? " And Jesus said to them, " Yes, have you never read out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants, you have perfected praise? " All right. Your Bible probably has a footnote showing that Jesus is quoting there from Psalm 8:2.
So you look up that passage in the Old Testament and read it. And you find that it reads, " Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings, you have ordained strength. " It doesn't say you have perfected praise. Wait a minute, the whole point of the quotation is that the babes and nursing infants would perfect praise. The way that verse reads in our Old Testaments completely misses the point. So why did Jesus quote the passage the way he did? Was he misquoting Scripture?
And why didn't the chief priests and scribes challenge him on this? You'd think they would have said, " The Scriptures say no such thing. " Or, " You're misquoting the Psalms. " Why didn't they object? Well, the reason the chief priests and scribes didn't challenge Jesus was because he wasn't misquoting Scripture. He was quoting from a different Old Testament text than we have in our Bibles today. Jesus was quoting from the Septuagint.
Psalm 8:2 in the Septuagint reads, " Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings, you have perfected praise. " Just exactly as Jesus quoted it. So what we're going to be looking at over the next three nights is the answers to questions that should be on our minds. Number one, what is the Septuagint? Number two, where did it come from? Number three, why did Jesus quote from it, rather than the Old Testaments we have?
Number four, if our Old Testament translations aren't taken from the Septuagint, what are they taken from? Further questions, what about the apostles? Did they quote from the Septuagint or from our Old Testaments? Another one, what Old Testament did the early Christians use during the first centuries of Christianity? And finally, perhaps the biggest, how come we have a different Old Testament than what Jesus was quoting from? Well, in the next three nights, we will be answering all of those questions.
First, I want to tell you about how I discovered the Septuagint. I stumbled upon it quite by accident while researching what the early Christians believed. Now, at the time when I was reading the early Christian writings, neither the Old Testament text nor the Septuagint were even on my radar. I was interested in learning what the early Christians believed about various theological doctrines, such as eternal security.
However, in the course of reading the pre-Nicene writings of the early Christians, that is from the first three centuries, I discovered that the Septuagint was THE Old Testament of the early Church. Not only that, but that the unbelieving Jews during the centuries of the early Christians in the second and third centuries that they were using a different Old Testament text than were the Christians. In fact, each side accused the other of using a corrupt text.
Now, before reading the early Christian writings, I had heard of the Greek Septuagint. I knew it was the first translation made of the Hebrew Old Testament. But that's about all I knew about it. So I decided that once I was finished reading all of the pre-Nicene early Christian writings, I was going to start doing some digging to learn more about the Septuagint. In fact, the first thing I did was to go out and buy a copy of it and read it for myself.
Let's talk for a minute about how God prepared a Bible for the Gentiles. As we all know, God foreknew and foreordained the coming of Christ. He knew that the gospel would be taken to all nations, beginning with the countries surrounding the Mediterranean. It appears that in preparation for this, God used the conquests of Alexander the Great to provide a setting where there would be one common language, that was Greek, that most people throughout the Mediterranean world and even beyond could speak.
That would aid the spread of the gospel that was going to be coming. God also prospered the Roman Empire, and through them created a situation where throughout the entire Mediterranean world, there was peace, stability, good roads, and safe travel on both land and sea. Again, this was necessary if the gospel was going to penetrate the Mediterranean world and beyond.
Even more, to prepare for the spread of the gospel, God providentially scattered the Jews throughout the Mediterranean world and far beyond, such that almost all major cities had a Jewish population and one or more synagogues with access to the sacred writings. Yet in all of this, can we possibly believe that God did not furnish the people of the Mediterranean world with a Bible that they could understand?
Did he make all of these other provisions for the spread of the gospel and yet at the same time kept his word locked up in Hebrew, a language that virtually no one outside of Judaism could read. In fact, at the time of Christ, the vast majority of Jews could not understand Hebrew themselves. But Greek was a different matter. During the first century, even after Rome had conquered the entire Mediterranean world, the most commonly spoken language throughout the Roman Empire was still Greek. It wasn't Latin.
So if God was going to make His Word available in a particular language, Greek was the obvious choice. Now I want to tell you about how God worked through a Gentile ruler to provide a Bible for the Gentile world. As we all know, God has often used Gentile rulers to accomplish His will. We see this in reading about Cyrus and Darius and Artaxerxes in the Old Testament.
So we shouldn't be surprised to find that God would work through a human ruler to provide a Bible for the Gentile world and for the multitude of Greek-speaking Jews. During the 3rd century BC, God moved the Greek ruler of Egypt, who was named Ptolemy II Philadelphus, to commission the Jewish sacred writings to be translated into Greek. This Ptolemy was a descendant of one of Alexander the Great's generals.
Now the reason that Ptolemy wanted this translation was because he was assembling the largest library ever in existence. And he wanted to include in his library the wisdom of all the various peoples with whom the Greeks were in contact. And this included the Jews. Because the Greeks in Egypt had been in contact with the Jewish people in Palestine for quite some time. In addition, there was a large colony of Jews living in Alexandria at that time.
So Ptolemy asked the Jewish high priest in Jerusalem to send him men who could translate Hebrew into Greek, and to send with them the scrolls of the Jewish writings. The Jewish high priest was willing to do this, and he sent Ptolemy a group of 72 scholars to make this translation. Now, all of these events are described in a letter written by a man named Aristeas who lived during that time.
Now, according to his account, Ptolemy had the translators work on the island of Pharos, which is situated in the harbor outside Alexandria, because he wanted them to have a quiet place to work. Aristeas says that Ptolemy divided them into groups to translate independently of each other, so that there would be no collusion to perhaps hide the Jewish mysteries and laws from the Gentile world.
According to his letter, when the Jewish scholars finished translating, then Ptolemy compared their translations against each other, and he found that they all read exactly the same. And for that reason, their translation was viewed by the Jews and later by the Christians as divinely inspired. Now, I can well understand why an unbeliever would doubt the narrative of Aristeas, since it points to the providential hand of God in having a Greek translation made of the Old Testament.
However, there's nothing in this narrative that should be a problem for Christians. I mean, among the miracles that God has performed, this is certainly not one of the more spectacular. Actually, the narrative about the translation of the Septuagint has as much historical documentation as most other ancient non-biblical events. The account in the letter of Aristeas was believed by Philo, by Josephus, and by the early Christians.
I mentioned that, according to Aristeas, Ptolemy had these translators do their work on the island of Pharos. Now, Philo was a highly respected Jew who lived in Alexandria at the time of Christ. And his account of the translation of the Septuagint is very close to the narrative provided in the Letter of Aristeas. However, Philo furnishes some important historical information from his own time period.
He writes this, " On which account, even to this very day, there is every year a solemn assembly held and a festival celebrated on the island of Pharos, to which not only the Jews, but a great number of persons of other nations sail across, referencing the place in which the first light of translation shone forth and thanking God for that ancient piece of beneficence which was always young and fresh.
And after the prayers and the giving of thanks, some of them pitched their tents on the shore, and some of them laid down without any tents in the open air on the sand of the shore. " So if both Jews and Gentiles were visiting the island of Pharos and celebrating the anniversary of the translation of the Septuagint every year, well, the account of Aristeas hardly sounds like a legend.
In fact, Justin Martyr, when he was discoursing with the Greeks, around the year 150 AD, he was talking about the Septuagint and he said, " You men of Greece, this is no fable, nor have I narrated something fictitious. Rather, I myself have been in Alexandria and seen the remains of the little cottages on the island of Pharos, which are still preserved. And I have heard these things from the inhabitants of Alexandria, who had received them as part of their country's tradition.
I have told you things that you can also learn from others, and especially from those wise and esteemed men who have written of these things, like Philo and Josephus. So Justin Martyr offers his own proof that the account is no legend or fable. He said he had actually been in Alexandria and had been out to the island of Pharos, and had seen the remains of the cottages where those translators worked. Now I'd like to take just a few minutes to tell you about why the Septuagint was so remarkable.
The translation these Jewish scholars produced that I've been describing came to be known as the translation of the 70, 70 being a type of shorthand for 72. There were 72 translators. The word 70 in Latin is Septuaginta, and that's why their translation is known today in English as the Septuagint. When their translation was finished, it was placed in the Library of Alexandria, where it stood for centuries and was accessible to all people. The translation of the Septuagint was a momentous event in several ways.
Number one, it was the first translation ever made of any of the sacred scriptures. Number two, it was the first substantive work to be written in Koine Greek, the common Greek that the average person spoke. This is the exact same language that the New Testament was later written in. But in contrast, all of the pagan or secular Greek writings were written in classical Greek. So you have these two works, the Septuagint and the New Testament, that are written in Koine Greek.
Okay, third, copies of the Septuagint were quickly made, and very soon it became the Bible of the Greek-speaking Jewish world. The Jews viewed it not just as a good translation, but as an inspired translation, and it was used in the synagogues throughout the world. Finally now, the scriptures were available and accessible to the Gentile world.
In the centuries that followed the translation of the Septuagint, many Gentiles began attending Jewish synagogues where they could hear the scriptures read and discussed in their very own language, Greek. Finally, the Septuagint lay the groundwork for the gospel to eventually reach the entire Gentile world. Now I want to talk a minute about text families. In doing so, we need to ask some questions.
First, how were the Scriptures transmitted from the time of Moses and David and the prophets until the 3rd century BC when the Septuagint was translated? That's a period of about 1,200 or more years. Who actually copied the Scriptures from one generation to another? Who kept custody of them? We know that copies of the Scriptures, and perhaps some of the original manuscripts, were kept at the temple in Jerusalem.
But what happened to those scriptures when the Babylonians destroyed both the temple and Jerusalem itself? Who took the Scriptures to Babylon and preserve them there? Who brought the Scriptures back to Jerusalem, or copies of them, when a remnant of the Israelites returned to Jerusalem? The answer to all of these questions is, we don't know. We know virtually nothing about the transmission of the Old Testament text from the days of Moses to the time of the translation of the Septuagint.
All we know is that the Scriptures were transmitted from generation to generation, and were still in existence in the 3rd century BC. We also know that when men copied the scriptures by hand, they didn't copy them perfectly. With regard to both the Old and the New Testament, there are variations between all of the hand-copied manuscripts, which is all we have until the invention of the printing press. As these variations developed, eventually there ended up being three different text families of the Old Testament.
First, there was the one the Septuagint was translated from. Secondly, there was the Proto-Masoretic text, which was the text family the unbelieving Jews eventually embraced after the time of the apostles, and it's the text family that our Old Testaments in most Bibles is based on. And three, there's the text family the Samaritan Pentateuch was translated from. Now, we won't be talking anymore about it as it doesn't really figure in our discussion today.
Now, in His Providence, God saw to it that the differences in these three text families of the Old Testament were all minor. All of these texts have the same people, the same events, and the same doctrines. In fact, most Old Testament verses read EXACTLY the same, regardless of which text family or which manuscript you're reading from. Now, hearing this may be startling to you, or even faith-shattering, but please don't let it be. I realize that it's not what most of us expected to discover.
It certainly isn't what any of us wanted to discover. When I first came across this, I have to admit that I had to wrestle with it for a number of years. It isn't what I wanted to find. How could this be? Why didn't God preserve His Word without any changes or variations? The answer is because God is a lot wiser than we are. I have no doubt that God could have preserved His Word without any changes whatsoever. However, then His Word would turn on the precise lettering of that original text.
And people would start worshipping the text instead of the message. They would also focus more on the text of the Word than on the God of the Word. In fact, that's the very thing the scribes and Pharisees did. Not only that, as soon as a copyist made an error, it would no longer be God's Word. More importantly, as soon as someone translated it into another language, then it would no longer be God's Word.
That's because you can never precisely convey every meaning, every nuance, every verb tense from one language to another. In fact, our language actually affects how we think about things. I first became aware of this years ago when reading instructions written for a product made in China, back when China was first getting into the world marketplace. I have no doubt many of you had a similar experience.
I remember reading the instructions, and obviously some translator convinced his or her boss that they knew English. And I don't doubt that they knew thousands of English words and that kind of thing. But it was obvious that their thought patterns were very different than how we think about things in English.
And so even though they knew all of these English equivalents to various Chinese words, what they ended up writing made no sense, because they were writing it how a Chinese person would think about it, not how an English person would. In virtually every language, many, if not most words, have more than one meaning. And sometimes the meaning can be very different. Most of the time, the correct meaning is clear from the context. However, many times, there is an ambiguity that isn't so clear.
Yet it can be hard to convey that ambiguity when translating that word into another language. For example, the Hebrew word Ruach means both spirit and wind. However, there is no common English word that can mean both spirit and wind. So when a translator translates Ruach into English, he has to make a decision whether to translate the Hebrew as wind or as spirit. His very fallible interpretation of the passage could mean that he introduces an error into God's infallible Word.
Of course, the translator could put a marginal note informing the reader that the word he has just translated as spirit could also mean wind. But it still isn't the same, because most readers don't stop and examine every marginal note when they're reading scripture. In fact, I just recently recorded two messages that addressed the whole issue of capitalization when translating the Bible. You see, there was no way to capitalize a letter in either ancient Hebrew or Greek.
Yet in 21st-century English, it normally makes a huge difference in meaning as to whether you capitalize or not. To illustrate all throughout both the Old and New Testaments, the word " spirit " could mean either " Holy Spirit " or " man-spirit. " And as we mentioned, it can also mean " wind. " And it can also mean the essence or sense of something, such as the spirit of the law.
Now, except through marginal notes, there's no way to address all of those ambiguities when translating God's Word into the English language. Once the translator decides to go with either a capital S or a lowercase S, he's changed an ambiguous expression in Hebrew or Greek into an unambiguous expression in English.
In short, unless God was going to lock up His Word in ancient Hebrew and Ancient Greek, he had to guide the transmission of His Word in such a way that it could be translated into other languages, into hundreds and thousands of other languages, and still be His Word. And to do that, it meant that His Word could not turn on every single syllable and vocabulary term. So I think he purposefully allowed Scribal errors and variations to come into the thousands of hand-copied manuscripts of His Word.
By doing this, He made it clear to us that His Word does not turn on every word and every syllable of the text. Again, if it did, we would have to leave His word untranslated from ancient Hebrew and Greek. At the same time, God has providentially worked things so that none of these variances in the thousands of manuscripts affect the overall message of the Bible or any of its commandments. God's Word is His message and His commandments, and His message and commandments have been preserved unchanged.
Interestingly, there are more than 40,000 denomination churches and sects around today, all of whom profess to be true Christians. Yet they teach many different and contradictory things. Yet, these differences are not because they use different Bible texts. Most of the time, they're using the same Bible text. In fact, back when virtually every English Christian used the King James Bible, there were still thousands of different churches and sects around.
Today, there are many people around who hold very similar views to mine on most of the key kingdom teachings. Yet many of those people embrace the Masoretic text exclusively. On the other hand, there are tens of thousands of people who embrace the Septuagint, but don't hold to these same kingdom teachings.
The truth is, I don't know of a single Christian lifestyle doctrine that turns on or is even affected by whether we use the Septuagint or the Masoretic Text, let alone whether we use this version of the Septuagint versus another version, or this edition of the Masoretic Text versus another edition. So it isn't going to make any changes in your Christian life or beliefs, whether you use the Septuagint or Masoretic Text. God has indeed preserved His Word.
So don't be intimidated to face up to the fact that there are variations in all of these ancient Bible manuscripts. Now, some of you may be thinking, but David, didn't Jesus say that not a jot or tittle of the law would pass away before it was all fulfilled? Yes, he did. And I hope that, like me, you believe that the law was fulfilled with the death of Christ. Nevertheless, we're going to talk about that particular objection in more detail in the third message of this series.
And we'll see then that Jesus was not talking about the textual manuscripts. He was talking about the commandments of the law. Now, moving back to the 3rd century BC, we have to ask the question. I mentioned there were three families of Old Testament manuscripts in existence. Which of those Old Testament text families was the best? The reason why I used the word " best " is that it wasn't a contest between the one pure, unadulterated Word of God versus two text families that were worthless.
Most Jews in the 3rd century BC had no choice. Few, if any, Jews would have owned copies of the Old Testament scrolls personally. They went to the synagogue to hear the scriptures read every Sabbath. In most places, they probably didn't even have a choice of synagogue. There was only one in their geographic area. So whichever text family they happened to have at that synagogue, that's what they heard read every Sabbath. But again, the overall message was the same regardless. However, God did have a choice.
I mean, personally, I find it impossible to believe that the Gentile world ended up with a Bible they could read only through happenstance. That is, a pagan ruler wanted to have the best public library possible in his city, and through this accident, the Old Testament was translated into Greek. And it just happened to be there for the Christians to start using it to spread the gospel. I'm sorry, but I simply cannot believe that.
The Bible was available to the Gentile world and to the Greek-speaking Jewish world because God planned it that way. Yes, God had to decide which text family to go with, and he chose to go with the family that the Septuagint was translated from. Now, for me, that seals it. What other evidence do I need? God has made the choice for me. However, for the sake of argument, let's suppose that God was not behind the translation of the Septuagint.
It was simply the product of Ptolemy's idea about a library coupled with the cooperation of the Jewish leaders. In that case, then, the Jewish High Priest and other leaders are the ones who made the choice. Which one would they have chosen? Wouldn't it have been the text that they considered to be the best one? I mean, after all, if they didn't want to cooperate with Ptolemy, they could have made excuses for why it wasn't doable.
At a minimum, if they weren't wanting to cooperate, they could have sent only two or three translators. Ptolemy didn't request a team of 72 translators. That was the idea of the Jewish leaders. So the Jews were obviously wanting to cooperate with Ptolemy. So naturally, they would have chosen the text that they thought was the best. Either that, or there was only one text type being used in Jerusalem in the temple at that time, and that's what they furnished to Ptolemy.
Now, if they had nothing else to go on and the Jewish leaders had a choice, they would have likely favored the text that they did because it contains fewer difficult passages than the Proto-Masoretic text. Let me give you some examples. But before I do, I want to explain that for the sake of simplification, I'm going to be referring to the Proto-Masoretic Text as simply the Masoretic Text. Now, just so we know, the Masoretic Text is a product of the Jewish scribes who lived in the Middle Ages.
The Text family that existed before those scribes is properly designated as the Proto Masoretic Text. But with that understanding, it'll just make it simpler to say Masoretic Text. Beyond a doubt, one of the most difficult passages in the Masoretic Text is the account of Saul and David. We read about this in 1 Samuel 16 verses 18 through 22.
It says, " Then one of the servants, this is of Saul, answered and said, ' Look, I have seen a son of Jesse, the Bethlehemite, who is skillful in playing, a mighty man of valor, a man of war, prudent in speech, and a handsome person, and the Lord is with him. ' Therefore, Saul sent messengers to Jesse and said, " Send me your son David, who is with the sheep. " And Jesse took a donkey loaded with bread, a skin of wine, and a young goat, and sent them by his son, David, to Saul.
So David came to Saul and stood before him, and he loved him greatly, and he became his armor bearer. Then Saul sent to Jesse, saying, " Please let David stand before me, for he has found favor in my sight. " As you remember, Saul was having these fits of rage and all of that is why they sent for somebody who could play the harp. And it says that Saul loved David greatly, and he had a couple of dealings with Jesse. He knew whose son David was.
Yet in the very next chapter, in the Masoretic text, when David volunteers to fight Goliath, Saul doesn't even know who David is. Let's look at 1 Samuel 17. It's the next chapter going through 1 Samuel. Verses 55 through 58. It says, " When Saul saw David going out against the Philistine, he said to Abner, the commander of the army, " Abner, whose son is this youth? " And Abner said, " As your soul lives, O king, I do not know. " So the king said, " Inquire whose son this young man is.
" Then, as David returned from the slaughter of the Philistine, Abner took him and brought him before Saul with the head of the Philistine in his hand. And Saul said to him, " Whose son are you, young man? " So David answered, " I am the son of your servant Jesse, the Bethlehemite. " Now, did Saul have brain surgery between Chapter 16 and Chapter 17 of 1 Samuel? Is it believable that Saul would not even know who David is? David was personally playing the harp for Saul. He was Saul's special armor bearer.
It says that Saul loved him. Yet in chapter 17, Saul doesn't even address him as David. Rather, he says, " Whose son are you, young man? " David doesn't reply, " Oh, king, surely you know me. I'm David, the one who has played the harp for you. You know who my father is and where I come from. " No, David answers him like it's a perfectly natural question. I realize that commentators come up with inventive ways to try to make that passage make sense, but there is no reasonable way to do it.
If that episode appeared in the apocrypha, everyone would point to it as proof that the apocrypha has errors and is not inspired, because there is no way to make sense of the passage. What about the Septuagint? There is no problem there because that entire difficult passage isn't even found in the Septuagint. It appears only in the Masoretic Text.
Another example of a textual difficulty in the Masoretic Text is 2 Samuel 6:23, where we read, " Therefore Michal, the daughter of Saul, had no child until the day of her death. " However, later in 2 Samuel, we'd read, " So the king took Armoni and Mephibosheth, the two sons of Rizpah, and the five sons of Michal, the daughter of Saul. " And that doesn't make sense. First, we read she had no children, and then later in the same book, we read that she had five sons. The Septuagint doesn't contain this contradiction.
It simply reads, " So the king took Armoni and Mephibosheth, the two sons of Rizpah, and the five sons of Merab, the daughter of Saul. " So there's no contradiction there. They were the five sons of Michal's sister, Merab. I will give you one more example, this one from 2 Chronicles. In chapters 21 and 22, we read in the Masoretic text, Jehoram was 32 years old when he became king. He reigned in Jerusalem eight years, and to no one's sorrow, departed.
However, they buried him in the city of David, but not in the tombs of the kings. Then the inhabitants of Jerusalem made Ahaziah, his youngest son, king in his place. For the raiders who came with the Arabians into the camp had killed all the older sons. So Ahaziah, the son of Jehoram, king of Judah, reigned. Ahaziah was 42 years old when he became king, and he reigned one year in Jerusalem. Well, we have a serious problem here.
If Jehoram died when he was 40 years old, his youngest son could not possibly have been 42 at the time. Once again, this difficulty doesn't exist in the Septuagint. It reads that Ahaziah began to reign not when he was 42, but when he was 20 years old. Another problem that appears in the Masoretic text is not apparent to most English readers. It concerns Psalm 145, which is an alphabetic acrostic poem. In this type of poem, the initial letter of each verse or each section follows the Hebrew alphabet in sequence.
Psalm 119 is an example of such a poem. However, in the Masoretic text, for Psalm 145, there's no verse beginning with the letter nun, which is equivalent to the English letter N. There should be such a verse between verses 13 and 14 in our Psalm 145. Now it's hard to believe that the Psalmists would go through the entire Hebrew alphabet, yet leave out one of the letters. Thankfully, the missing verse is there in the Septuagint.
And interestingly, one of the Hebrew manuscripts of the Psalms that was found among the Dead Sea Scrolls also contains this missing verse, and it reads the same as that verse in the Septuagint. So at one time, that verse was there in the Hebrew. So just for the sake of argument, if the decision of which text to use was solely that of the Jewish priests and Jewish leaders, and not God's decision, they would have likely chosen the text they did because it didn't contain as many difficult passages.
Again, we're only discussing which of these two text families was the better of the two. In saying I believe the Septuagint was made from the better of the two text families, I'm not saying the Masoretic Text is not the Word of God. Think of it this way. Through the centuries, there have been a number of translations made of the Bible into English. For the moment, I'm not even talking about the modern translations of the 20th and 21st centuries. First there was the Wycliffe Bible.
Centuries later, there was the Tyndale translation. Some of the other translations that followed that were the Coverdale Bible, the Great Bible, and the Geneva Bible. Now, all of these Bibles contain the same basic message. However, there are differences in wording that affect the meaning of specific verses. Do we believe that Wycliffe and the Lollards after him were reading God's Word? I think most of us would say yes.
But what about when the Reformation ideas reached England and people started using Tyndale's translation? Were these new Protestants not using God's Word? I think we would all say that they were using God's Word. Yet there are numerous differences between the Wycliffe Bible and the Tyndale Bible. Later, other reformers in England used the Coverdale Bible. Eventually, the Great Bible was used by a large percentage of the English population. But the Puritans used their own Geneva Bible.
Now, were some of these people using God's Word and others weren't? What about when the King James Bible came along in 1611? If these other translations were God's Word, could it also claim to be God's Word? You may or may not know that the Puritans and pilgrims rejected the King James Bible, and they and their descendants stuck with the Geneva Bible until sometime in the 1700s. Can you see my point now?
Even if there was a perfect manuscript type for the entire Bible, which there is not, there would still be differences every time someone translated the Bible into a new language. Yet they would all be versions of God's Word. Even for those generations of Christians who have used the King James Bible, their Bible has changed over time. People who use the King James Bible today are normally using the revised edition of it that was put out by Oxford University in 1769.
As I've discussed in two recent messages of mine, one entitled capital error and the other one, the difference between the spirit and the soul, there are some significant substantive changes between the original 1611 version of the King James Bible and the 1769 revision that is being used today. Are both versions God's Word? Or did no one have God's Word until 1769? Now, none of this even takes into account the numerous modern versions of today, or the various versions of the Bible in other languages.
As I said before, in His wisdom, God providentially provided that His Word would not turn on this specific term or THAT specific term. His Word is the basic message contained in all of these versions over the centuries. So back in the 3rd century BC, those Jews who had the Septuagint, or the Hebrew texts from which it was taken, they were not in sole possession of God's Word. The other Jews who were using scrolls within the family of the Masoretic Text still had God's Word as well.
All of our translations and versions are man's imperfect renderings of God's perfect, infallible Word. As I've mentioned, the issue here wasn't between two Old Testament manuscripts, but between two families of Old Testament manuscripts. By that, I mean that there were variations between the Hebrew manuscripts within the Septuagintal family, and there were variations between the Hebrew manuscripts within the Masoretic Text family.
Not only that, in those centuries, there were no restrictions on who could make a handwritten copy of God's Word. So people started making copies of the Septuagint almost right away, so it could be used in Greek-speaking synagogues around the world. Hebrew-speaking Jews continued to make copies of both types of Hebrew texts. Sometimes the Hebrew copyists seem to have even intermingled texts from both families.
By Jesus ' day, there wasn't just one version of the Old Testament in Hebrew, nor was there just one version of the Septuagint. But what I'm saying isn't based on speculation. This is the exact situation we find in the Qumran library, the collection of scrolls known today as the Dead Sea Scrolls that were used by the Jewish sect, who were probably the Essenes.
Being situated in Judea, just a few miles from Jerusalem, it's not surprising that most of the Old Testament manuscripts among the Dead Sea Scrolls would fall into the Masoretic Text family. However, these people also had Hebrew manuscripts that fell into the Septuagintal family. Not only that, but some of the scrolls that were found there partially followed the Masoretic Text Tradition and partially followed the Septuagint text tradition, all within the same manuscript.
So well-read Jews who lived in Palestine in Jesus Day would likely have been familiar with both text types as well as hybrids that contain some of both. During the Middle Ages and the Reformation period, Bible commentators and church leaders thought that most Jews in Palestine, in Jesus ' day, spoke Hebrew. However, when biblical archaeology became a science in the 1800s, scholars found strong evidence that in Jesus ' day, far more Jews spoke Aramaic than they did Hebrew.
These scholars eventually concluded that the New Testament expression, Hibradi Dialecto, refers to Aramaic, not to Hebrew. It literally means the dialect of the Hebrews, and the dialect or language most Hebrew people spoke at that time was Aramaic. Aramaic is a Semitic language, and Hebrew is related to it. However, current archaeology has also demonstrated the widespread use of Greek by ancient Jews. Some 1,600 Jewish epitaphs from the Mediterranean world have been uncovered, dating from 300 BC to 500 AD.
About 70% of these Jewish epitaphs are in Greek. Only 18% of them are in Aramaic or Hebrew combined. Even in Palestine, about two-thirds of the epitaphs are in Greek. This is strong evidence that the greater part of the Jewish population in ancient Palestine spoke Greek as their daily language. This fact is corroborated by other archaeological findings. For example, a number of ancient synagogues have been unearthed in Palestine during the past century.
Of these synagogues, 67 have inscriptions in Greek, 54 have inscriptions in Aramaic, but only 14 have Hebrew inscriptions. Yet this evidence was there all the time in our New Testaments. Peter and John, unlearned and ignorant men from Galilee, they wrote their letters in Greek, not in Aramaic or Hebrew. Likewise, James and Jude, the half-brothers of Jesus, wrote their letters in Greek, despite the fact that James ' ministry was limited almost exclusively to Jews. And as far as we know, he never left Jerusalem.
Given this evidence, this is what we would expect to find about Jesus ' ministry. One, He would have encountered many Jews who spoke Greek and many who spoke Aramaic. He would have also encountered numerous Greek-speaking Gentiles. To effectively preach to all these people, he would have needed to be bilingual speaking both Greek and Aramaic. As he went in and out of synagogues up and down Palestine, he would have been in some that were Greek speaking, and some that were Aramaic speaking.
He might even have been in some of the synagogues that were Hebrew speaking. In the course of this, he would have encountered various versions of the Old Testament. He would have certainly heard the scriptures read from the Septuagint, particularly there in Galilee where there was a large Greek-speaking Jewish population. He may have heard the scriptures read in Hebrew from texts similar to the Septuagint, but in Hebrew.
He almost certainly would have heard the scriptures read in Hebrew from texts of the Masoretic Text family. Finally, he almost certainly would have also encountered in many synagogues the situation where the scriptures were read in Hebrew from either one of the text families, but then translated orally and discussed in Aramaic in the synagogue. As far as we know, there was no Aramaic written translation of the Bible in his day.
In short, among the mixture of his hearers, these hearers would have heard the Old Testament read and quoted in a variety of wordings. Of course, the big question is, do Jesus ' quotations from the Old Testament support this scenario that I've just laid out? Well, to find out, I went through the four gospels and examined each of Jesus ' quotations from Scripture, where Jesus directly quotes from the Old Testament saying, " It is written, " or where he uses similar language.
I found 31 such passages in the four Gospels, not counting duplicate quotes found in more than one of the synoptic gospels. In 26 of the 31 quotations, there's no difference in meaning between the Septuagint and the Masoretic Text. This corroborates what I said earlier that the overall teaching is the same whether you're using the Masoretic Text or the Septuagint. I should explain that my survey was done using English translations.
I was comparing the English translation of the New Testament as found in the King James and the English of the Old Testament as found in the King James versus the English of the Septuagint. Now, ones who've done this same survey comparing the Hebrew of the Masoretic text and the Greek of the Septuagint with the Greek of the New Testament, invariably find that the quotes are obviously coming from the Septuagint, even when in an English translation, they look the same.
In the Greek, it's obvious that the Bible writer is quoting from the Septuagint because you can look at the actual Greek words used. But here's the exact rundown. In 13 of the quotations, Jesus ' quote does not fit either the Septuagint or Masoretic text, word for word, but it is closer to the Septuagint in wording than the Masoretic text. In three of the quotations, Jesus quote does not fit either the Septuagint or Masoretic word-for-word, but it is closer to the Masoretic text than the Septuagint.
In 10 of the quotations, it either exactly matches both Septuagint and Masoretic Text, or more commonly, it differs equally from both in very minor ways. These are usually either short quotations or indirect quotations. In four of the 31 quotations, the difference between the Septuagint and the Masoretic Text is meaningful, and Jesus ' quotations follow the Septuagint. Now in two of these, he's responding to the Jewish religious leaders, and the point he's making depends upon the language of the Septuagint.
One of the two was the example I gave at the beginning of this message from Matthew 21:16, where Jesus quoted, " Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants, you have perfected praise. " The other is Matthew 15, verses 8 and 9. Here the scribes and Pharisees had complained that Jesus ' apostles were not following their traditions. Jesus rebukes them saying, " You have made the commandment of God of no effect by your tradition.
" He then quotes from Isaiah 29:13, which ends with the words, " In vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men. " Now this is how Isaiah 29: 13 reads in the Septuagint. However, in the Masoretic text, it says instead, " Their fear toward me is taught by the precept of men. " Something quite different. Now included in this group of four of the passages where the difference is notable is the long quotation from Isaiah that Jesus read in the synagogue in Nazareth.
His reading includes the words and recovery of sight to the blind. And those words don't appear in the Masoretic text, but they do appear in the Septuagint. We all know that Jesus restored sight to the physically blind a number of times, so this is a significant messianic prophecy. Interestingly, the text Jesus read in the synagogue also included the phrase " to set at liberty those who are bruised. " And that phrase doesn't appear in either the Septuagint or the Masoretic text.
Finally, in one of the quotations, Matthew 26:31, Jesus ' quotation follows the Masoretic text more closely, and the difference between the Septuagint and Masoretic Text is significant as to the application Jesus is making, where he said, " Smite the shepherd and the sheep of the flock shall be scattered. " The Septuagint says in the Old Testament passage, " Smite the shepherds plural and remove the sheep. " So the Septuagint doesn't fit the application of how Jesus was quoting it. So what are we to conclude?
Well, to me, it fits exactly the picture I've been painting. If indeed the Septuagint was brought about through the hand of God, then we would expect that Jesus would have had no hesitancy to quote from it. And obviously, he didn't. He favors it over the Masoretic text. Yet he doesn't object to quoting from the Masoretic text. He treats it as the Word of God as well. His use of both texts fits what we see elsewhere. As I said, both Hebrew text types have been found among the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Although Josephus mainly quotes from the Septuagint, it appears that some of his quotes are from the Masoretic text as well. It's quite possible that most well-read Jews of the first century were used to hearing Scripture quoted from both text types. The existence of two text types doesn't seem to have bothered them. Another very important point is that the vast majority of the time, the meaning is exactly the same between the Septuagint and the Masoretic Text.
The wording might be slightly different, but the meaning is the same. In short, it's a win-win situation for both the Septuagint and the Masoretic Text. Out of Jesus ' 31 quotations, only five have a meaningful difference between the Septuagint and the Masoretic Text. And as I've mentioned, in those situations, four of the five times Jesus follows the Septuagint and once He follows the Masoretic Text.
Finally, we should all take note of the fact that most of the time, Jesus ' quotes don't match either the Septuagint or Masoretic text, word for word. This is significant for those who think Jesus is talking about the text of the Bible when He says neither a jot or tittle would pass from the law before it was fulfilled. Almost without exception, there is far more than a jot or tittle difference between his quotes and the text of the Masoretic Text, or for the Septuagint for that matter.
So Jesus quoted from the Septuagint most of the time when he quoted scripture, but not always. What about the apostles? Jesus had told them to go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you. Now, if a large number of the Jews in Palestine spoke Greek, what would be the situation when his apostles and disciples took the gospel message to the entire Mediterranean world?
Obviously, they would have to use the Septuagint, the only Greek Old Testament in existence. And there was no New Testament in existence at that time. Again, as I said earlier, you can believe that God was not behind the Septuagint. You can believe that it was a man-made product, and the apostles ended up using it because they had no other choice. In other words, God made no scriptures for the Gentile world, and so the church was planted with a corrupted Bible. Now, that to me is an unthinkable conclusion.
In the early 1980s, two evangelical scholars, G. Archer and GC Chirichigno, compared all of the New Testament quotations of the Old Testament with both the Septuagint and the Masoretic Text. In 1983, they wrote up their findings in a book entitled " Old Testament Quotations in the New Testament: A Complete Survey. " Now, these men were not liberals, they were evangelicals. Their book was published by Moody Press.
Out of the 340 quotations from the Old Testament that they found in the New, they concluded that 307 are from the Septuagint. There are only 33 quotations in the entire New Testament that are clearly from the Masoretic text rather than the Septuagint. And many of those quotations are found in the Gospel of Matthew. This isn't surprising for the early Christians stated that Matthew originally wrote his gospel in the dialect of the Hebrews, whether that means Aramaic or Hebrew, I'm assuming Aramaic.
The early Christians said that he then later translated his own gospel into Greek. So it isn't surprising that he doesn't follow the Septuagint as much as the other New Testament writers. Still, most of his quotes are from it, not the Masoretic text. Independently of Archer and Chirichigno, other scholars have come to the same conclusion. I'll just read you some of the examples, the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia.
After describing the use of the Septuagint in the Jewish writings of Philo and Josephus, it says, " Then came what was probably the most momentous event for the Septuagint. It was taken over from the Jews by the Christian Church. " The Septuagint was THE Bible for most writers of the New Testament. Not only did they take from it most of their express citations of Scripture, but their writings, in particular the Gospels and among them, especially Luke, contain numerous reminisces of its language. End quote.
The Zondervan Pictorial Encyclopedia of the Bible says this about the Septuagint. " It was the Bible of the diaspora, and as such, became the Bible of the Church. " This is evident when the quotations from the Old Testament which abound throughout the New are examined. End quote. The book The Grammar of Septuagint Greek says this: " We are familiar with the constant appeal made by the writers of the New Testament to Scripture, an appeal couched in such words as it is written or as the Scripture sayeth.
" In the great majority of cases, the Scripture thus appealed to is undoubtedly the Septuagint. Seldom, if ever, is it the Hebrew? " The scholarly book Backgrounds of Early Christianity says this: " Most of the New Testament citations of the Old Testament follow the Septuagint. The Bible of the early Church, except for some Jewish believers, was the Greek Old Testament.
The Septuagint was the most important literary event, perhaps the most important single development of any kind in the Hellenistic period for the background of early Christianity. " One more, the book " Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek " says this: " It may at once be said that every part of the New Testament affords evidence of a knowledge of the Septuagint, and the great majority of the passages cited from the Old Testament are in general agreement with the Greek version. " End quote.
Now one of the points I've tried to get across my books and recordings is never rely upon secondary and tertiary sources. Just because a Bible commentary or Bible encyclopedia says something doesn't mean that it's necessarily true. The only reason that I've quoted to you from these secondary sources is so that you'll know that what I'm sharing with you isn't some new discovery that I have made. It's what the scholarly world already knows. I discovered it independently of them, but it wasn't anything new.
It was something they had known all along. The problem is that these scholars don't do anything with the knowledge they have. They still follow man's traditions and prefer the Masoretic text. I mean, those quotations I read to you, you're probably thinking, " Oh, those men are all big, strong advocates of let's go back and use the Septuagint. " No, they're not.
Not a single one of the sources I just read from advocate that we use the Septuagint in our Bible instead of the Masoretic Text, even though they acknowledge that that's what the New Testament quotes from. In fact, some of the sources from which I just read to you, those men are actually quite hostile to the Septuagint. So the fact that they acknowledge that Jesus and the apostles mainly quote from the Septuagint is astounding.
You may be wondering if they all acknowledge that the apostles were quoting from the Septuagint, why don't they endorse the Septuagint? Well, the reason is that most of these authors view the Septuagint as merely a man-made work. And most of them were living at a time when most people thought that the Septuagint was just a loose translation of the Masoretic text. Actually, this is an area where nobody has to rely upon a secondary source.
It's a fairly easy matter to go through the New Testament and examine the quotations from the Old Testament. It involves a bit of time, but it's something that anyone can do, assuming you have a copy of the Septuagint, and it's not hard to get a copy of one. One of the things you'll find is that in about half of the quotations, the meaning is the same in both the Septuagint and the Masoretic Text. They are both witnesses of God's infallible Word.
If you're comparing those quotations in English, you may find you can't discern if the quotation is from the Septuagint or the Masoretic text. However, as I said before, when scholars compare the New Testament Greek to the Septuagint Greek, it's quite apparent that the New Testament writer is quoting from the Septuagint. Furthermore, in nearly half of the quotations, there is either a difference in meaning between the Septuagint and the Masoretic Text, or there is extra language included in one of those two texts.
That makes it easy, even in English, to see what text the New Testament writer is quoting from. I'm going to give you some examples. In doing this, I'll first read to you the quotation as found in the New Testament. I'll then tell you where that passage is found in your Old Testament. Finally, I'm going to read to you the Old Testament passage, as it reads in the Masoretic Text, as translated in either the King James Version or New King James version.
You will easily be able to see that the New Testament writer is obviously not quoting from the Masoretic text. However, in each of these examples, the quotation I will give you fits the Septuagint to a T. We'll start with Romans 9:27. We read, " Isaiah also cries out concerning Israel. Though the number of the children of Israel be as the sand of the sea, a remnant shall be saved. " Now he's quoting from Isaiah 10:22.
But in the Masoretic text that reads, " Though your people Israel be like the sand of the sea, yet a remnant of them will return. " Definitely different language. Paul's point turns on the language of the Septuagint. Another example, 1 Peter 2:22. Talking about Jesus, he says, " Who committed no sin, nor was deceit found in his mouth. " Peter there is quoting from Isaiah 53:9, as it reads in the Septuagint. In the Masoretic text, it says, " He had done no violence. Neither was there any deceit in his mouth.
" Now, it's fairly similar in meaning, but there is a huge difference when we're talking about Jesus Christ. A lot of people here on earth have done no violence, but there has been only one man who committed no sin, and that was Christ. Another one from Peter. This is 1 Peter 4:18. He said, " If the righteous scarcely be saved, where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear? " He's quoting from Proverbs 11:31, as it reads in the Septuagint.
However, when you look it up in the Masoretic text, it says, " Behold, the righteous shall be recompensed on the earth, much more the wicked and the sinner. " The meaning isn't at all the same, and it totally misses the point that Peter is getting across.