Hi, I'm David Bercot, and tonight we're going to be continuing our discussion on discovering the Septuagint. This is the second message in a series of three messages. When we ended our discussion last night, we were looking at Old Testament quotations found in the New Testament. And I was giving examples where it is obvious even when we're reading the passage in English that the New Testament writer is quoting from the Septuagint, not the Masoretic Text.
Our first example tonight is from James, James 4:6, where he writes, " Wherefore he says God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble. " He follows the reading of the Septuagint there because Proverbs 3:34, which is what he's quoting, reads this way in the Masoretic text. Surely he scoffs at the scoffers, but he gives grace to the lowly. A true statement, but it's different from what James quoted.
Hebrews 11:21 says, " By faith, Jacob, when he was dying, blessed both the sons of Joseph and worshipped, leaning upon the top of his staff. " And that's exactly what the Septuagint says. But if you look up Genesis 47: 31 that the writer of Hebrews is referring to, it says this, " And he said to me, ' Swear unto me, and he swore unto him, and Israel bowed himself upon the bed's head. " So instead of it being his staff, it's on the head of the bed. Again, from Hebrews, Hebrews 13:6.
He says so that we may boldly say, " The Lord is my helper, and I will not fear what man shall do unto me. " However, the Masoretic text in Psalm 118:6, which is what the writer is quoting, says, " The Lord is on my side. I will not fear. What can man do to me? " Again, a very good thought, but it's not how the writer of Hebrews quotes it.
Sometimes the difference between the Septuagint and the Masoretic Text is that the Septuagint either has more text in a given verse than the Masoretic Text does, and sometimes it has less text. One example is Matthew 3:3, where Matthew is describing John the Baptist, and he says, " For this is he that was spoken of by the prophet Isaiah, saying, " The voice of one crying in the wilderness. Prepare you the way of the Lord. Make his paths straight.
" He's quoting from Isaiah as he says, and you can find that in Isaiah 40:3. But the Masoretic has a little bit more text there. It says, " The voice of Him that cries in the wilderness, prepare you the way of the Lord. Make straight in the desert a highway for our God. " And that's not how Matthew quotes it. Nothing about a desert and nothing about a highway. Now in a few places, the difference between the Septuagint and the Masoretic Text is significant as to what it says about the character of God.
One such place is the prophecy in Isaiah about the hard-heartedness of the Jews. This prophecy is found in Isaiah 6:10. Jesus quotes this prophecy to His apostles at Matthew 13:15 where He says, " For the hearts of this people have grown dull. Their ears are hard of hearing, and their eyes they have closed, lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears, lest they should understand with their hearts and turn so that I should heal them.
" Now, the way Jesus quotes that passage, the blame is squarely on the Jews. They themselves have closed their eyes and shut up their ears. They have refused to understand so that they could be healed. And that's the sense in which the Septuagint reads in Isaiah 6:10. It says, " For the heart of this people has become insensitive, and their ears hear with difficulty.
They have closed their eyes, lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and return, and I should heal them. " However, in the Masoretic text, Isaiah 6:10 reads, " Make the heart of this people dull, and their ears heavy, and shut their eyes, lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and return and be healed. " Now, for much of my life, I really struggled with that passage in Isaiah.
It makes it seem that God is preventing the Jews from believing because He doesn't want to have to heal them. And so, it was such a comfort when I discovered the Septuagint and read that passage in the Septuagint, which makes it clear that the problem doesn't lie with God, but with the Jews. Their unbelief keeps them from turning back to God and being healed.
Now, I didn't include this verse among the four passages quoted by Jesus that I spoke about earlier, where I said it makes a difference in meaning whether you go with the Septuagint or the Masoretic Text. I really should have, because there is a considerable difference in meaning here as to who is responsible for the Jew's unbelief. In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that the Apostle John quotes from this passage, and his quote is much more similar to the Masoretic text.
This is in John 12: 39 and 40. Now, it's not the same event as the one recorded in Matthew. In John, Jesus is not the speaker. Rather, the Apostle John is simply quoting this passage from Isaiah for the benefit of his readers. But the fact that his quote follows the Masoretic text more closely is further evidence of the textual situation that existed in the 1st century.
Although Jesus and His apostles heavily prefer the Septuagint over the Masoretic text in their quotations, they have no qualms about quoting from the Masoretic Text. In other words, neither text had the exclusive claim of being God's Word. It's a matter of which text is the better of the two for us to use. Henry Barclay Swete was a Distinguished Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University in the late 1800s and early 1900s. He wrote books on a number of biblical subjects, including the Septuagint.
Now, like everyone else in his day, he thought the Septuagint was a loose and sloppy translation of the Masoretic text. So in most of his writings, he's not very complimentary toward the Septuagint. Nevertheless, he acknowledged that most of the New Testament quotations of the Old Testament are from the Septuagint. Not only that, he recognized the tremendous influence the Septuagint had on the language and thought patterns of the New Testament.
In his book, " Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek, " he wrote this: " The quotations from the Septuagint by no means represent the extent of the influence exerted upon the New Testament by the Alexandrian version (that is, the Septuagint). The careful student of the gospels and of St. Paul is met at every turn by words and phrases which cannot be fully understood without reference to their earlier use in the Greek Old Testament.
The Alexandrian version of the Old Testament has left its mark on every part of the New Testament, even in chapters and books where it is not directly cited. It is not too much to say that in its literary form and expression, the New Testament would have been a widely different book had it been written by authors who knew the Old Testament only in the original, or who knew it in a Greek version other than that of the Septuagint. End quote. So even though Dr.
Swete thought that the Septuagint was this very imperfect translation, he couldn't help but notice the enormous influence it had on the New Testament. I want to give you just a few examples of what Dr. Swete is talking about. Most of us are not aware of the influence because much of the influence of the Septuagint is hidden to us when we read our Bibles in English. This is particularly so because our Old Testaments are normally translated from the Masoretic Text.
So we have no way of knowing that a given New Testament term or phrase has been borrowed from the Septuagint, unless we have a copy of the Septuagint ourselves to compare with. To illustrate, when most of us hear the word Church, we immediately think of it as a New Testament term. And indeed it is a New Testament term in our English Bibles. However, the Greek word ecclesia, which is translated as Church, actually is used 79 times in the Old Testament in the Septuagint.
Jesus and His apostles were not inventing a new term. They were merely using a term that was already familiar to Greek-speaking Jews. Another example is the word agape. As you know, agape is one of the Greek words for love. Now, many commentators go into profound discussions about the use of the word agape in the New Testament. They correctly state that this word was seldom used in the classical Greek writings.
However, they then go on to say that agape was therefore a special word for Christian love, a type of love the world doesn't know. Now when they make statements like that, commentators reveal their own ignorance about the Septuagint. The Greek word agape is the word the translators of the Septuagint normally used to translate the Hebrew word for love. They use agape for every kind of love, from romantic love to love of wrong things.
Jesus and his apostles were simply using a term the Greek-speaking Jews were very familiar with because of reading the Septuagint. Well, I could go on and on about the dependency of the New Testament on the Septuagint for its terminology. Words such as grace, angel, bishop, Presbyter, Hades were all terms the translators of the Septuagint had chosen to translate certain Hebrew words, even though they had other choices.
In fact, in inspiring the New Testament to be written in Koine Greek, instead of classical Greek, God was simply following the decision I believe he made when he providentially provided the Septuagint for the Greek-speaking world.
If we reject God's hand being behind the Septuagint, then we have to say that the Septuagint translators just happened to use the same style of Greek that the New Testament writers would later on use, even though it was an unheard of thing when the Septuagint was translated in the 3rd century BC. Another very important link between the New Testament and the Septuagint concerns the use of the divine name, Yahweh or Jehovah. It's written in Hebrew as four consonants, YHWH.
Now that name is used around 6,800 times in the Masoretic text, far more than any other name in the Old Testament. Yet the translators of the Septuagint made the decision not to try to come up with a Greek version of the Hebrew divine name. They simply used the titles " God or Lord " to replace it. Now, if that was simply a man-made decision, we would expect to find that Jesus would have set things straight when He came on Earth.
After all, He purposely ignored the human traditions of the Jewish religious leaders and condemned them for creating their own traditions. Yet we find that Jesus never uses the divine name, Yahweh, or any other version of it, nor do any of the apostles or New Testament writers. So it must not have been a human decision to switch from the name Yahweh to simply the titles of God and Lord. And it all began with the Septuagint. This is another reason why I believe the translation of the Septuagint was guided by God.
One of the strongest apostolic endorsements of the Septuagint is found in Paul's second letter to Timothy, where he writes, " From childhood you have known the holy scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. " All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.
That's a passage I think we're all familiar with. But have you ever thought about what Scriptures would it have been that Timothy would have known from childhood? Surely it was the Septuagint. Timothy was from the Roman colony of Lystra, which is situated in Greek speaking Galatia. Not only that, but his father was a Greek Gentile. That the Septuagint was the Bible used by the Jews in Galatia, is confirmed by the fact that Paul quotes from the Septuagint when he writes to the Galatians.
For example, in Galatians 3:13, he writes, " For it is written, cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree. " That is what the Septuagint says in Deuteronomy 21:23. However, the Masoretic text in Deuteronomy 21:23 merely says, " He that is hanged is accursed of God. No mention is made of a tree. " So when Paul told Timothy that all Scripture is given by inspiration of God, he was specifically speaking about the Septuagint, the only scriptures Timothy would have known.
Now in pointing that out, I'm not denying to the Masoretic text the title of the Word of God. As I've said before, both the Septuagint and the Masoretic Text are man's imperfect copies of God's Perfect Word. However, Paul not only used the Septuagint, but he gave it a very strong apostolic endorsement in his words to Timothy.
We've seen how the Christian Church embraced the Septuagint as their Old Testament, but we shouldn't forget that during the days of Jesus, and for most of the first century, the Jews fully embraced the Septuagint as well. How else could Paul and the other apostles have preached to the Greek-speaking Jews in Palestine and across the Mediterranean world? Moreover, the New Testament actually provides solid evidence of the high status of the Septuagint among the Palestinian Jews in Jesus ' day.
As I've mentioned, when Jesus read from Isaiah at the synagogue in Nazareth, he read from the Septuagint, showing that it was being used in the Greek-speaking synagogues of his day in Galilee. Not only that, but as I've mentioned, on two occasions when Jesus was rebuking the Jewish religious leaders, he quoted verses from the Septuagint to them. And he used those verses against them. In fact, his rebukes turned on the particular wording of the Septuagint.
Yet on neither occasion, do the religious leaders counter him by saying that what he's quoting isn't in the Scriptures. Now, if the religious leaders viewed the Septuagint either as corrupt or as having an inferior status to the Masoretic text, they surely would have said something. Furthermore, it would have hardly made sense for Jesus to quote the Septuagint to them if he knew they didn't accept it. A similar situation occurred again when Stephen was before the Sanhedrin.
In his long address to the Sanhedrin, where he goes through the history of unfaithful Israel, he quotes the scriptures to them repeatedly from the Septuagint. Now in many of the quotes, the Septuagint in the Masoretic texts read similarly. However, in other ones, the fact he's quoting from the Septuagint is very noticeable.
For example, in Acts 7: 42 and 43, Stephen tells the Sanhedrin, " Then God turned and gave them up to worship the host of heaven, as it is written in the book of the prophets: " Did you offer me slaughtered animals and sacrifices during 40 years in the wilderness, O house of Israel? " You also took up the tabernacle of Moloch and the star of your god Remphan, images which you made to worship, and I will carry you away beyond Babylon. " There Stephen is quoting from Amos 5:25-27 right out of the Septuagint.
In the Masoretic text, Amos 5:25-27 reads, " Did you offer me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? You also carried Sikkuth, your king, and Chiun, your idols, the star of your gods, which you made for yourselves. Therefore, I will send you into captivity beyond Damascus. " So you can see there's a considerable difference between how Stephen quotes that passage and how it reads in the Masoretic text.
Earlier in his address, Stephen had told the Sanhedrin, " Then Joseph sent and called his father Jacob and all his relatives to him, 75 people. " Now that's the number of people that the Septuagint states in Exodus 1:5 that went down to Egypt. However, in Exodus 1:5, the Masoretics says that there were 70 people who went down, not 75. Now, Stephen was on trial for his life.
He would have hardly quoted the Septuagint to his judges in the Sanhedrin if they were unfamiliar with the Septuagint, or if these Jewish leaders didn't accept the Septuagint as Scripture. The judges of the Sanhedrin flew into a rage at what Stephen said, but they never once said anything about his quoting false scriptures to them. What about the Ethiopian eunuch? When the Holy Spirit sent Philip to him, the Ethiopian was in his chariot reading from the Book of Isaiah.
Was he reading from the Masoretic Text, or the Septuagint? Well, the account in Acts lets us know. It says this, verse 32, " The place in the Scripture which you read was this: " He was led as a sheep to the slaughter, and as a lamb before its shearer is silent, so he opened not his mouth. In his humiliation, his justice was taken away, and who will declare his generation, for his life is taken from the earth? " That's Acts 8:32 and 33. The Ethiopian was reading from Isaiah chapter 53, verses 7 and 8.
Now verse 7 of Isaiah 53 reads very similar in both the Septuagint and the Masoretic text. However, verse 8 reads differently between the two texts. The Septuagint reads, " In his humiliation, his justice was taken away, and who will declare his generation? For his life is taken from the earth, " which is exactly how the Ethiopian read it. However, the Masoretic text reads, " He was taken from prison and from judgment, and who will declare his generation, for he was cut off from the land of the living.
" So the Ethiopian eunuch was obviously not reading from the Masoretic Text. Even though the Masoretic Text has a similar message in this passage, it differs in wording from what the Ethiopian was reading. Remember, at the time he was reading this, the Ethiopian was not a Christian. He was a Jewish proselyte, reading from the Septuagint, just as all of the other Greek-speaking Jews were doing. Most of us well remember the famous passage in Acts about the Bereans.
The scriptures say, " Then the brethren immediately sent Paul and Silas away by night to Berea. When they arrived, they went into the synagogue of the Jews. " These were far more fair-minded than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness, and searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so. And when it says the Bereans searched the Scriptures daily, have you ever thought about what Scriptures it's talking about? Well, Berea is located in Greece.
So without a doubt, it was the Septuagint that they were searching. There was no other Greek translation of the Old Testament. However, the New Testament isn't our only witness to the widespread use of the Septuagint by the Jews in the first century. Philo was a prominent Jew who lived in Alexandria during Jesus ' lifetime. Philo not only used the Septuagint, but as I described to you earlier, he corroborated its special origin as it's described in the Letter of Aristeas.
And all the evidence would show that the unbelieving Jews continued to accept the Septuagint right until the end of the 1st century. Josephus is a witness to this fact. He was not only an unbelieving Jew, but he was also a Pharisee. And he was a priestly descendant on his father's side. And not only that, he was a Jewish royal descendant on his mother's side. His most famous historical work, The Antiquities of the Jews, was written around A.D. 93 or 94.
In it, not only does Josephus quote primarily from the Septuagint, but he also affirms the historical account of Aristeas. Josephus states this about the Septuagint. After the translators had finished their work back there in the 3rd century BC, he says, " Moreover they all, both the priest and the most ancient of the elders, and the principal men of their people, made it their request that since the translation was happily finished, it might continue in the state it now was and might not be altered.
" And when they all affirmed that decision of theirs, they urged that if anyone observed either anything superfluous in it, or anything omitted, that he would take a view of it again and have it laid before them and corrected. This was a wise action of theirs that when the thing was judged to have been well done, it might continue forever. " So even at the end of the first century, the Jews continued to hold a high view of the Septuagint. But then everything suddenly changed.
Within just a few decades after the close of the first century, the Jewish religious leaders totally rejected the Septuagint. In fact, they commissioned a Jewish proselyte named Aquila to make a new Greek translation using the Masoretic text as its basis. Obviously, this isn't the same aquila as the one mentioned in the New Testament. But why would the Jews have done this? Why would they reject a translation that they had held in great esteem for nearly 300 years? Well, the answer is simple.
The Christians were nailing them with the Septuagint, particularly as to the Messianic prophecies. So many of the Messianic prophecies are found only in the Septuagint, not in the Masoretic Text. I'm talking about prophecies concerning the incarnation, the crucifixion, the deity of Christ, the Gentiles turning to God, and the virgin birth. Christians were successfully proving the truth of Christianity to both the Jews and the Gentiles based upon these Old Testament prophecies.
Let's look now at some of these prophecies that are found only in the Septuagint, not in the Masoretic Text. There will be normally a corresponding verse in the Masoretic Text, but it reads differently, and it misses the point of the prophecy. Let's start with the incarnation. The writer of Hebrews quotes a prophecy concerning the fact that God would prepare a body for His eternal Son. This is in Hebrews 10: 5.
It says, " When he came into the world, he said, ' Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you have prepared for me. ' " An enormously important prophecy. But the Masoretic text in Psalm 46 reads, " Sacrifice and offering you did not desire. My ears you have opened. " Totally misses the point. Likewise, the crucifixion was prophesied in Psalm 22:17. In the Septuagint, it reads, " For many dogs surrounded me, an assembly of evildoers enclosed me. They pierced my hands and my feet.
" It would be hard to get a more clear prophecy about this crucifixion. However, in the Masoretic text, Psalm 22:17 reads, " For dogs have encompassed me, a company of evildoers having clothes me. Like a lion, they are at my hands and my feet. " Very similar wording, but it totally misses the point of the crucifixion. Now, the remarkable thing is that when the Septuagint was translated, those translators had no idea how these things would play out hundreds of years later in the life of Jesus.
That's what's so remarkable about them, and that's what, again, convinces me that the Septuagint was a project that God was behind, that God orchestrated and directed it. Another important Messianic prophecy concerns the deity of Christ. This prophecy is quoted again in the book of Hebrews in the first chapter, Hebrews 1: 6. The writer says, " But when he again brings the firstborn into the world, he says, " Let all the angels of God worship Him.
" Now, in some Bibles, the publishers don't even show that as being a quotation from Scripture. I wasn't aware for a long time that that was a direct quote from Deuteronomy. It's found in Deuteronomy 32:43 in the Septuagint, which says, " Rejoice ye heavens with Him, and let all the angels of God worship Him. Rejoice you Gentiles with His people. " But the Masoretic text in Deuteronomy 32:43 simply says, " Rejoice O ye nations with His people, for He will avenge the blood of His servants.
" Nothing said about let all the angels of God worship Him. It is totally missing in the Masoretic Text. Another important Messianic prophecy is that the Gentiles would trust in Jesus Christ.
Matthew 12:15 tells us, " And great multitudes followed Him, and He healed them all, yet He warned them not to make Him known, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Isaiah the prophet, saying, he then quotes from Isaiah 42 verses 1-4, ending with these words: " A bruised reed he will not break, and smoking flax he will not quench, till he sends forth justice to victory. And in his name, Gentiles will trust.
" So that is the big point of the prophecy that the Gentiles would trust in the name of the Jewish Messiah, something unheard of. But when you look that up in the Masoretic text, Isaiah 42, verses 3 and 4, it reads, " A bruised reed he will not break, and smoking flax he will not quench. He will bring forth justice for truth. And the coastlands shall wait for his law. " Again, there's similar wording, but the Masoretic text misses the big point of that prophecy that the Gentiles would trust in Jesus.
Again, something the translators of the Septuagint could not have foreseen 200 years before Christ was born. Another very important prophecy in his letter to the Romans, Paul rebukes the unbelieving Jews, and he quotes Isaiah 52: 5 to them, saying, " For the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you, as it is written. " There Paul is paraphrasing Isaiah 52: 5 as found in the Septuagint, which reads, " On account of you, my name is continually blasphemed among the Gentiles.
" So the key word there is on account of you, it's because of the conduct of the Jews that the Gentiles had stumbled over the truth. However, in the Masoretic text, the Jews aren't the ones who are the cause of this blasphemy. It simply says in Isaiah 52:5, " My name is continually everyday blasphemed. " So all blame on the Jews has been removed from that verse. As big and as important as all of these Messianic prophecies were, there was still one prophecy that irked the unbelieving Jews more than any of these.
It was the prophecy of the virgin birth found in Isaiah 7: 14. Matthew quotes this prophecy in chapter 1 of his gospel in verses 22-23, saying, " So all this was done that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the Lord through the prophet, saying, " Behold, the virgin shall be with child, and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel, " which is translated God with us.
Now, if you happen to have a copy of a Jewish Bible translated from the Masoretic text, such as the one put out by the Jewish Publication Society of America, you'll find that it does not say the virgin shall be with child, but rather the young woman shall be with child. Did the Jews deliberately change something here? Actually, no. The Hebrew word in the Masoretic text that is translated " young woman " is " Alma ". And indeed, the normal meaning of " Alma " is a young woman.
There's a masculine equivalent of Alma, which is normally translated as " young man " in the scriptures. Now, Jewish scholars say that " Alma " can refer to a young single woman who is a virgin, or it can refer to a young single woman who is not a virgin. It can even refer to a young married woman who is not a virgin, but who has not yet given birth to a child. That's what Jewish Hebrew scholars say today. And interestingly, the Jewish rabbis were saying the exact same thing back in the year 150.
Now, if Christians had remained steadfast in the use of the Septuagint through the centuries, this would be a non-issue to us. If the rabbis and scholars are explaining the term correctly to us, then it is simply further evidence that God was overseeing the translation of the Septuagint, and that He moved the 70 to translate the Hebrew word " Alma " as " virgin " in their translation. The Greek word they chose is Parthenos, which means a physical virgin.
Now, absent God's direction, saying a virgin would give birth to a son, would go against all logic and reason. However, since Western Christians eventually threw their lot in with the Masoretic text, they're now forced to insist that " Alma " is properly translated as " Virgin " in our Christian Old Testaments. Some very conservative Christians, usually non-scholars, insist that Alma primarily means a virgin in a biological sense.
On the other hand, most conservative Christian scholars will admit that alma doesn't necessarily mean a physical virgin, but it can. And that is true. They then go on to say, " Isaiah said that the birth of this child would be a sign. " But a young woman giving birth wouldn't be a sign, since it's an everyday occurrence. Therefore, alma has to mean a biological virgin in this passage.
I'm sorry, that argument just doesn't hold up, because if you read the entire passage, you'll see that there was more to the sign than simply the birth of a son. Reading now from the Masoretic text, Isaiah says, " Behold, the young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. Curds and honey he shall eat, that he may know how to refuse the evil and choose the good.
For before the child shall know to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land that you dread will be forsaken by both her kings. " Now, Isaiah was giving this prophecy to King Ahaz. So the big sign that King Ahaz would have been excited to hear was that the land that he dreaded, that is, his major enemy, would be forsaken by both their kings before this child would reach the age of accountability. There were other parts of the sign that the child would be named Immanuel, that he would eat curds and honey.
So it did not take a virgin birth for this to be a sign. In fact, this accords perfectly with other places in the Old Testament when God gives a sign to the Israelites or to one of the Israelite rulers. I'll just give you a few examples. 1 Samuel 2:34. We read, " Now, this shall be a sign to you that will come upon your two sons on Hophni and Phinehas, and one day they shall die, both of them. " 1 Samuel 14:10, " But if they say thus, come up to us, then we will go up.
For the Lord has delivered them into our hand, and this will be a sign to us. " 2 Kings 19: 29: " This shall be a sign to you. You shall eat this year, such as grows of itself, and in the second year what springs from the same. Also in the third year, sow and reap. Plant vineyards and eat the fruit of them. In short, a sign did not have to be a dramatic miracle. Certainly, the fact that the land King Ahaz dreaded would be abandoned by both its kings was a sign indeed.
He didn't need a virgin birth for this to be a sign from God. Finally, I need to mention that there is a Hebrew word that specifically means virgin in the biological sense. That word is Bethulah. It specifically, as I said, means a virgin. Its special meaning, in contrast with the Hebrew word alma, is demonstrated in the passage in Genesis when Abraham's servant has gone to find a wife for Isaac. After he meets Rebecca, he later tells Laban what he had prayed for.
Now I'm reading from the Jewish translation of the Masoretic text in Genesis 24:43. And here Abraham's servant says, " Behold, I stand by the fountain of water and let it come to pass that the maiden that comes forth to draw to whom I shall say, " and then he goes on to explain his prayer. Now, the word translated there as " maiden " is " Alma. " Again, it means basically a young woman. Now, Abraham's servant is certainly using Alma in the sense of a young, unmarried woman.
But I don't know that this woman had to be a virgin. Her virginity obviously would be prized, but not necessarily essential. However, in the same chapter, we read this about Rebecca. Now I'm reading from Genesis 24:16. Again, from the Jewish translation, it says, " And the damsel was very fair to look upon. A virgin, no man had known her. " Now, in that verse, it is specifically saying first that she was a very beautiful young woman or damsel. But then he goes on to say that she was a virgin, a physical virgin.
No man had known her. Now, this time, when it's talking about the fact that no man had known her, it calls her a Bethulah, not an alma. So when it wanted to distinguish that not only was she a young woman, an alma, but that she was also a virgin, then it uses Bethulah. So we would expect Isaiah to have used Bethulah in Isaiah 7:14 if he was wanting to make it clear that it was a virgin who would give birth and not just a young woman.
And that is why I feel the rendering of Alma in Isaiah 7:14 in the Septuagint was through divine providence. If Alma obviously meant virgin in Isaiah 7:14, why would Matthew have quoted it from the Septuagint and not just simply have quoted it from the Masoretic Text? I mean, after all, Matthew quotes from the Masoretic Text a higher percentage of the time than any of the other New Testament writers. Yet when he quotes Isaiah 7:14 here, he quotes it from the Septuagint, not from the Masoretic text.
He did that because the Septuagint renders the Hebrew word alma by the Greek word Parthenos, meaning a biological virgin. As I said, I think this passage was the prophecy that irked the Jewish rabbis the most. And because of this prophecy, coupled with the other Messianic prophecies in the Septuagint, the Jewish religious leaders decided to just jettison the Septuagint. These rabbis would stop at nothing to silence the gospel. After all, it was their very forefathers who put Jesus to death.
These were the rabbis that Jesus refers to in Revelation 3:9 as a synagogue of Satan. So they ordered the Greek synagogues to quit using the Septuagint. And as I've previously mentioned, they commissioned the Jewish proselyte Aquila to make a new Greek translation of the Old Testament, but this time from the Masoretic text.
The subject of Isaiah 7:14 in the prophecy about the Virgin comes up a couple of times in the early Christian writings, showing that there was a continual conflict between the Christians and the Jews concerning this prophecy. In addressing the Jews, Justin Martyr writes, " But you and your teachers venture to declare that in the prophecy of Isaiah, it does not say, " Behold, the virgin will conceive, but behold, the young woman will conceive and bear a son.
" Furthermore, you explain the prophecy as if it referred to Hezekiah, who was your king. Therefore, I will endeavor to discuss shortly this point in opposition to you. He wrote those words around the year 150. Later, another Jewish proselyte, Theodotion the Ephesian, made a second Greek translation from the Masoretic text. About twenty years later, Irenaeus says this about both translations. He said, " The Lord Himself saved us, giving us the sign of the virgin.
But it is not, as some allege, who are now presuming to expound the Scripture as, " Behold, a young woman will conceive and bring forth a Son, as Theodotion the Ephesian has translated, and Aquila of Pontus, both Jewish proselytes. " So simply by dropping the Septuagint and switching to the Masoretic Text, the unbelieving Jews were able to wipe out this prophecy about the virgin birth, plus many other prophecies that were fulfilled in Jesus.
Before leaving this subject of Isaiah 7:14, I want to mention that if you look up Isaiah 7:14 in the King James Version, or in practically any English Bible, you'll find that it does read Virgin there, not young woman. This is because this prophecy is such an extremely important one that most Christians would never tolerate a translation that said " young woman.
" So even after Western Christians switched from the Septuagint to the Masoretic text, they continued to follow the Septuagint in translating Isaiah 7:14 with the words " The Virgin shall be with child, " or " The Virgin shall conceive. " So what we witnessed from the middle of the 2nd century on is that the Septuagint remained the Old Testament of the Church, and the Masoretic Text became THE Old Testament of the unbelieving Jews.
The Jews completely abandoned the Septuagint, and Greek-speaking Jews began using newly made translations into Greek of the Masoretic Text. Three different Greek translations of the Masoretic Text were made in the 2nd century and endorsed by the Jewish rabbis. I've already mentioned two of these, that of Aquila and Theodotion. There was a third one made by Symmachus, the Ebionite. The early Christians talk a lot about this phenomena of the Jews suddenly rejecting the Septuagint and endorsing these new translations.
For example, in speaking to Trypho the Jew, Justin Martyr said, " I am far from putting reliance on your Jewish teachers who refuse to admit that the translation made by the 70 elders who were with Ptolemy of the Egyptians is a correct one. I wish you to observe that the Jewish teachers have altogether taken away many scriptures from the translation made by those 70 elders who were with Ptolemy, and by which this very man who was crucified is proved to have been set forth expressly as God and man.
In that same work, he says, " Shall I not, in this matter too, urge you not to believe your Jewish teachers who venture to assert that the translation given by your 70 elders who are with Ptolemy, the king of the Egyptians, is untrue in various aspects. " So the Jews were saying that the Septuagint was false and corrupt, and the Christians were standing behind the Septuagint. The Septuagint had now been around for about 350 years.
The Greek-speaking Jews and later the Christians had been using the Greek text of the Septuagint for so long that nobody any longer realized that it had come from a different text family than the Masoretic text. Now the leading rabbis knew or should have known this. As far as anyone knows, the Hebrew text family from which the Septuagint had been translated was still around in the first century. In fact, it's quite possible that the scrolls kept in the temple were of this text family.
If that is the case, the destruction of the temple in AD 70 would have made it easier for the scribes and Pharisees to abandon this Hebrew text at the end of the 1st century. We know that there were still Orthodox Jewish Christians around in the middle of the 2nd century, but we don't know if any of them were Hebrew speaking. There was a heretical sect in existence known as the Ebionites. These were professing Jewish Christians, but they accepted Jesus only as the Jewish Messiah, not as the Divine Son of God.
One of the Ebionites, a man named Symmachus, made a Greek translation of the Masoretic text, as I mentioned a few minutes ago. By the mid-second century, there were no Hebrew-speaking Gentile Christians that we know of. By then, Hebrew was nearly a dead language, spoken primarily by the Jewish rabbis and by some Palestinian Jews.
So the argument used by the Jewish rabbis in the middle of the 2nd century was this: " They, the Jews, were in possession of the " original Hebrew, " represented by the Masoretic text, and the Septuagint contains a lot of prophecies and other material that is not in the, quote, " original Hebrew. " Now, some of the unbelieving rabbis of the second century probably believed this. I think, however, that other rabbis knew the truth that there had been another Hebrew text family.
However, the Christians certainly did not know the truth. They couldn't read Hebrew. So all they could surmise was that if the Hebrew text of the 2nd century did not contain the Messianic prophecies found in the Septuagint, then the Jewish religious leaders had removed these prophecies purposely from the Hebrew text. Now, because of the Dead Sea Scrolls, we know today that the Jewish rabbis didn't have to remove these prophecies from the text.
They were able to eliminate a whole handful of key Messianic prophecies simply by discarding the Septuagint and any corresponding Hebrew manuscripts and making the Masoretic Text the one and only text accepted by Judaism. Continuing our story, during the 2nd century and beyond, the Jews heaped scorn on the Christians, accusing them of using a corrupt Old Testament. In turn, as I said, the Christians accused the Jews of altering the Scriptures.
Around the year 170 or 180, Irenaeus wrote in support of the Septuagint and against the translations of Aquila, Theodotion, and Symmachus. This is what he said, speaking pretty much for the entire Church. He said, " These scriptures, that is, the Septuagint, have been translated with great fidelity and by the grace of God, and from these scriptures, God has prepared and formed our faith towards His Son.
He has preserved to us the unadulterated scriptures in Egypt, where the House of Jacob once flourished, fleeing from the famine in Canaan. This is also where our Lord was preserved when he fled from the persecution set in action by Herod. Furthermore, this translation of the Scriptures was made prior to our Lord's descent to earth. It came into being before the Christians came into existence. Accordingly, these men are proved to be truly impudent and presumptuous, who now desire to make various new translations.
They have done this because we refute them out of these Scriptures, that is, the Septuagint, and force them to acknowledge the coming of the Son of God. But our faith is steadfast, honest, and the only true one. It has clear proof from these scriptures that were translated in the way I have related. The preaching of the Church is without addition to the Scriptures.
For the apostles are of more ancient date than all these men talking about Aquila, Theodotion, and Symmachus, and they agree with this translation that is, the Septuagint. This translation harmonizes with the tradition of the apostles for Peter, John, Matthew, and Paul, and the rest in turn, as well as their followers, quoted all prophecies just as the translation of the seventy elders contains them. End quote.
Around the year 198, Tertullian spoke for the whole church when he wrote, " We read that every Scripture is suitable for edification and is divinely inspired. " So it appears to have been rejected by the Jews for that very reason, just like they have rejected nearly all the other portions of Scripture that speak of Christ. Nor, of course, is this fact surprising. Of course, they don't receive some Scriptures that speak of Him whom they did not receive.
For they did not receive Jesus even when He was here in person, speaking in their presence. " So there was little doubt in Tertullian's mind of why the Jews were rejecting the Septuagint. And interestingly, he too understood Paul's words to Timothy to be talking specifically about the Septuagint. Origen, who lived between the years 185 AD and 254, was the greatest scholar of the early Church. He was also the first Christian textual scholar of all time.
He was constantly comparing different texts of the New Testament, as well as different texts of the Old Testament, in order to try to get back to the purest text. Since he lived in the time period when the Jews were attacking the Christian Old Testament, he took it upon himself to learn Hebrew so he could read the Hebrew text the Jews were using in his day. In connection with this, he prepared an enormous work known as the Hexapla.
It was a six-column edition, parallel edition of the Old Testament, where Origen listed side-by-side the following six texts. The first column was the Masoretic Text in Hebrew. The second was the Masoretic Text, but transliterated into Greek characters. The third column was the version of Aquila. The fourth was the version of Symmachus. The fifth was the Septuagint. And finally, the sixth column was that of Theodotion.
This way Origen could quickly compare exactly where the Septuagint varied from the Masoretic text and these other translations that were based on the Masoretic text. After carefully comparing them all, he wrote this: " In many of the other sacred books, I sometimes found more in our copies, that is, in the Septuagint, than in the Hebrew. " And of course, the Hebrew was the Masoretic text. " Sometimes I found less.
" He goes on to say, " When we notice such things, are we to abruptly reject as spurious the copies in use in our churches? Should we command the Brotherhood to put away the sacred books that are currently used among them? Should we coax the Jews and persuade them to give us copies that will be free from tampering and forgery?
" Are we to suppose that the providence that has ministered to the edification of all the churches of Christ in the sacred Scriptures had no concern for those who were bought with the price, the ones for whom Christ died? End quote. So Origen had all of the information before him, and he never wavered one iota in his support for the Septuagint, the Bible of the Apostles and of the early Church.
Ironically, in many supposedly scholarly books and articles published today, theologians say that Origen prepared the Hexapla because he could see the deficiencies of the Septuagint, and he recognized it as a defective text. All I can say is that those men are revealing that they have never actually read Origen's writings. Origen was instead a strong defender of the Septuagint, not a critic of it. He prepared the Hexapla so he could argue more effectively when addressing the unbelieving Jews, as he said.
Origen argued that if the Church was founded on the wrong set of Scriptures, then the Holy Spirit must not have had much concern for those whom Christ bought with His blood. When I read Origen's argument for the first time many years ago, I realized that he was right. It sums the whole matter up, and in my opinion, is unanswerable. Let's expand Origen's argument a little further. Point one, either God did or did not prepare a Bible for the Gentiles.
We all know that God foreknew and foreordained the coming of Christ, and He foreknew and foreordained that the gospel would be taken to all nations, beginning with the countries surrounding the Mediterranean. Now, either God did, or He did not, prepare a Bible for those Gentiles. There's not really a middle ground here. We know that there ended up being a Bible that the Gentiles used. It was the Septuagint.
And we know that the apostles used the Septuagint to reach the Gentiles, and to reach the Jews who lived outside of Palestine, and in fact, to reach the majority of Jews living in Palestine. So the only questions are, one, was the translation and spread of the Septuagint simply a man-made affair, and Jesus and the apostles used it because it was their only option.
Or number two, was it a translation prompted by God and provided by Him to the Gentile world and the larger Jewish world, in preparation for the coming gospel? Now you already know where I stand on the matter. So I would like to read to you what the other side is saying. Talking about scholars who recognize that Jesus and the apostles primarily quoted from the Septuagint. These scholars recognize that the Church was founded upon the Septuagint as its Bible.
Yet they do not believe that the Septuagint was providentially made available to the ancient world. Instead, they believe that it was an inferior, man-made translation that happened to be there when Jesus and the apostles came on the scene. One such scholar who held this view was Gleason Archer. He was a Professor of Biblical Languages at Fuller Theological Seminary from the years 1948 to 1965, and from 1965 to 1986, he served as a professor of Old Testament and Semitics at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.
Now, he was a strong believer and defender of the inerrancy of Scripture. In fact, if you have very many conservative evangelical reference works lying around your library, you'll probably find his name as one of the contributors in several of them. Now, as I mentioned before, Gleason Archer was one of the authors of the book Old Testament quotations in the New Testament.
Archer was a strong supporter of the Masoretic text, and like everyone else in his day, he thought the Septuagint was a loose, defective translation of the Masoretic text. Now, he did a painstaking comparison of every Old Testament quotation in the New Testament, doing it looking at the original languages, Hebrew and Greek, not looking at the English. And from this painstaking study, Archer readily acknowledges that Jesus and His apostles nearly always quote from the Septuagint. Yet this is how he explains things.
Listen to this: " The very reason for using the Septuagint was rooted in the missionary outreach of the evangelists and apostles of the early Church. " The Septuagint translation of the Old Testament had already found its way into every city of the Roman Empire to which the Jews of the dispersion had gone. It was virtually the only form of the Old Testament in the hands of Jewish believers outside Palestine. And it was certainly the only available form for Gentile converts to the Jewish or Christian faiths.
The apostles were propagating a gospel that presented Jesus Christ as the fulfillment of the Messianic promises of the Old Testament. Their audiences throughout the Near East and Mediterranean world were told that they only had to consult their Old Testament to verify the truth of the apostolic claims that Jesus and His person and by His work had fulfilled the promises of God.
Had the New Testament authors quoted those promises in any other form than in the wording of the Septuagint, they would have engendered uncertainty and doubt in the minds of their readers. For as they checked their Old Testaments, the readers would have noticed the discrepancies at once and would have objected, but that isn't the way I read it in my Bible.
The apostles and their Jewish co-workers from Palestine may have been well-equipped to do their own translation from the Hebrew original, but they would have been ill-advised to substitute their own more literal rendering for that form of the Old Testament that was already in the hands of their public. They really had little choice but to keep to the Septuagint in all of their quotations of the Old Testament. So basically, those are the two views, and as far as I know, the only two options before us.
One, God was behind the Septuagint, and He guided both the selection of the Hebrew text that was used and the translation of it into Greek, or to, as Gleason Archer believed, it was a man-made work that just happened to be there, and despite its shortcomings, the apostles had little choice but to use it to reach the Gentile world. Now, which one makes more sense to you?
Do you think God didn't foresee the need for a faithful translation of the Scriptures in Greek if Christianity was going to be taken to the Gentiles? Or do you think that God foresaw the need, but He decided not to do anything about it and just let matters take their own course. In fact, to me, the early Christian view and the original Jewish view is the only one that makes any sense.
That view is that the Septuagint was a providentially directed translation, and it was intended by God to be a faithful and authoritative translation, worthy to be used by the apostles to found Christ's Church, and to take the gospel to the whole world. But for a moment, let's assume that the Septuagint is a corrupted version of the Old Testament as critics such as Gleason Archer claim. I'll call this the archer theory, although certainly he isn't the one who initiated this view.
Alright, this would mean that the Greek-speaking world, both Jews and Gentiles alike, had a defective Bible during the two centuries before Christ. But if that were the case, we would naturally expect that when Christ came, he would set things straight. I mean, surely either he or his apostles would have provided the Greek-speaking world with an accurate translation based upon better Hebrew texts of the Old Testament if the Septuagint is based on inferior ones. However, they never did.
The gospel was preached to the first century world using the Septuagint. If it is corrupted, then the Church was founded with a corrupt Bible. Is that believable? This is particularly strange since when the Jews decided the Septuagint was proving to be too useful to the Christians, they authorized a new Greek translation to be made from the Masoretic text. So why would God not have arranged for something like that to have been done before Christ came? Let's move a step further.
If it is believable that Christ would have founded His Church with a corrupted Bible, I would at least expect to find that Jesus and His apostles would have made it clear to their hearers that the Septuagint was a faulty text. I would expect to find that when they quoted from Scripture, they were always careful to quote from the Masoretic text, not the Septuagint. Otherwise, their listeners and readers would obviously think that the Septuagint was the correct Old Testament text to use.
However, as we have seen, it's the exact opposite. When Jesus and His apostles quoted from Scripture, the vast majority of the quotations are from the Septuagint. Now, Archer says, well, this is because they had no other choice. That was the only Bible out there for Greek-speaking Jews and Gentiles. But Jesus and His apostles would have had to have known that by quoting so often from the Septuagint, they would be giving the impression that it was a reliable text.
They would be giving the impression that they were endorsing the Septuagint. And indeed, the writings of the early Christians show that that is exactly what happened. The Christians said, " Look, the Septuagint was endorsed by the apostles because they always quote from it. " Now, is it believable that God would have allowed all of this to happen if He didn't want Christians to be using the Septuagint?
The next point, if the archer theory is true, since God chose not to provide the Greek-speaking world with an uncorrupted Old Testament, well, we would then expect to find that Jesus and His apostles established schools to train men in Hebrew, just like our seminaries do today. This would have enabled the church leaders to teach directly from the Hebrew Old Testament. However, neither Jesus nor any of the apostles established schools to train men in Hebrew.
In short, the Gentiles and Greek-speaking Jews had no choice but to use a corrupt Bible, if the archer theory is correct. It's not like they had a choice and they stubbornly chose the Septuagint over the Masoretic text. They simply had no choice. For the only Greek Old Testament was the Septuagint. Again, is it believable that God would leave His people in such a situation? However, the problem doesn't stop with all of these things. Not everyone in the ancient world spoke Greek.
So as the gospel spread to other people, the early Christian missionaries translated the Bible into other languages, such as Latin and Ethiopic. However, since the only Old Testament available to the early Christians was the Septuagint, they had to use it as a basis for their Old Testament translations.
As a result, the translations of the Old Testament, made by the Christians in the second all the way to the 9th centuries into Latin, Coptic, Ethiopic, Slavic, Armenian, Gothic, Arabic, Georgian, and other languages. They were all from the Septuagint. So because God did nothing to correct the error before Christ came or during the time of the apostles, then with each century, the problem only got worse. The Septuagint kept spreading now in other languages through Christian missionaries.
Now, in his foreknowledge, God knew all of this would happen. Yet under the archer theory, He did nothing to prevent it. Is that believable? Now, a friend of mine with whom I discussed a lot of these matters asked me, " Well, David, how is that different than saying, well, if God didn't want a union of Church and State, He wouldn't have allowed Constantine to come into power and bring the Church and State together.
" Or if Luther and Calvin were wrong in their view of free will and salvation, well, why did God allow it? Why didn't He stop it? Well, those are excellent questions. And I think all kingdom Christians would agree that God's providential care for the Church does not prevent Christians from later drifting into many errors. In fact, we would believe that the vast majority of the Church drifted into errors. But with regard to the situation of the Septuagint, it's an entirely different matter. Let me explain.
If the Septuagint is defective, it's not a matter that the Church later drifted into error. It's a matter of the Church starting off in error. It would mean that God let the apostles and the first Christians plant Christianity using a corrupt Old Testament because they had no other choice. You see, that's a huge difference between allowing Christians to abandon apostolic teaching and go off into various errors. In this case, it was the apostles planting the error in the church from day one.
Well, not only that, under the archer theory, as we said, God never authorized the Old Testament to be translated into Greek. They're having to say that before the coming of Christ, God wanted the Old Testament preserved in Hebrew alone. Or else He would have done something to get it translated into Greek or other languages. Yet then, for some reason, in the first century, God completely changes His course. With the coming of the gospel, He now wants everything presented in Greek.
The New Testament was written in Greek. Everything that Jesus taught, we know only in Greek, except for a few Aramaic utterances that He made. The teachings of the apostles are all presented in Greek. Even James, who never left Jerusalem and who ministered almost totally to Jews, he wrote his letter in Greek. During the first century, Greek was now the medium for God's message to reach the world.
Yet if the Septuagint critics are correct, during the New Testament period, God was still keeping the Old Testament locked up in Hebrew. So during the first century, under God's direction, the two portions of the Bible were in two mutually exclusive languages. There were only a few people in the first century who could speak both Hebrew and Greek. So we're saying those few people were the only ones who could read an unadulterated Bible. They'd be reading the Old Testament in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek.
Again, is this believable?