Septuagint and Jesus

The best way would be to compare the quotations with both the Septuagint and the Masoretic text and see which one it more closely follows. Of course it would be better if you could do this in the original languages, but even looking at the English translations of the different texts will reveal which text family the quotes are from.

Hello, dear brother Erik. I am not a Greek expert (I know enough to be dangerous!) and I basically know nothing about Biblical Hebrew, but I have picked up some knowledge in this area listening to dear brother Bercot and others speak about this subject.

Probably the first point to bring up is that approximately 20% of the time the Septuagint and the Hebrew Masoretic text match up either exactly or very, very, closely.

So 20% of the time, there is no way to determine which one was quoted by Jesus or the apostles since they both produce the same Greek in the New Testament.

As long as we are not dealing with one of those 20% cases, it is fairly easy to determine whether or not Jesus or the apostles are quoting from the Greek Septuagint.

If the Greek from the Septuagint either exactly matches, or very, very, closely matches, the Greek in the New Testament, then the quote came from the Greek Septuagint and not the Hebrew Masoretic text (again, as long as we are not dealing with one of those 20% cases where the Septuagint and the Masoretic text match). This is simply an exercise is comparing Greek to Greek, so it is an "apples-to-apples" comparison.

If the New Testament Greek does not match the Greek Septuagint, then the next step is to find a good Greek rendering of the Hebrew Masoretic text. If the Greek produced by translating the passage in the Hebrew Masoretic text either matches exactly or is very, very, close to the New Testament Greek, then you can be fairly certain that Jesus or the apostles are quoting from the Hebrew Masoretic text.

Of course, for most of us finding a good Greek rendering of the Hebrew Masoretic will be difficult, so probably the best thing we can do is to compare a careful English translation of the Hebrew Masoretic text with a careful English translation of the Greek Septuagint.

One final complicating factor here is that there is a small number of quotations of the Old Testament in the New Testament that appear to have come from a text family that is neither the Septuagint nor the Masoretic text family.

Most likely these quotations came from a text family that has been lost.

If you want to learn more, there is dear brother who hosts a Youtube channel entitled "Post-Apostolic Church". He has a playlist of nine messages entitled "Septuagint Series". These are fairly short videos (the longest in this series is 28 minutes and 11 seconds, and most are only half that long).

In the last five videos in this series, this brother goes through all of the quotations from the Old Testament found in the first 22 chapters of the Gospel of Matthew, and he keeps a running count of how many quotations came from the Septuagint, how many came from the Masoretic, and how many belong to both. In addition, he points out the quotations that cannot be tied back to either the Septuagint or the Masoretic text families.

He uses English translations to make his determination (the Authorized Standard Version as an accurate English translation of the Hebrew Masoretic, and the Brenton Septuagint as an accurate English translation of the Greek Septuagint). Since the ASV and the Brenton Septuagint were produced within 60 years of each other, they use very similar English. Keep in mind that out of all the New Testament writers, Matthew by far utilizes the Hebrew Masoretic text the most.

The link to the playlists on this brother's Youtube channel is: https://www.youtube.com/user/PostApostolicChurch/playlists . Look for the playlist entitled "Septuagint Series".

I hope this helps!

May the Lord richly bless your seeking first of His kingdom and His righteousness.

My post here may be a bit out of topic, but I believe the question is really important;

Do you have evidence that Philo of Alexandria quoted from the so called "Apocrypha"? It seems he advocated the Septuagint atleast, but if we can see actual quotes from those books it would seem like a strong case for 51 and not only 39 OT books.

Blessings