When God Spoke Greek

By Scott Ferrier, MJ • Phoenix, AZ

Many of us who are students of Sacred Scripture might be surprised to learn that the canonical Old Testament Bible of the very first Christians was Greek, not Hebrew. The Septuagint is the translation of the Hebrew Old Testament into koine Greek. This was the language of the inspired writers of the New Testament, the early Church, and the Byzantine world. Saint Paul, for example, uses the Septuagint of Isaiah in his Letter to the Romans.

It is theorized that the Septuagint version was translated by Israelites from Hebrew into Greek about 200 years before the birth of Christ — probably for the reason of maintaining the Old Testament’s relevance to an increasingly Greek-speaking Israelite people. In contrast, the Masoretic text, canonized by the rabbinic Jews circa 250 A.D., is the version used in most modern bibles today, including the King James Version, and the numerous translations since.

There are some substantial differences between the Greek and the Hebrew versions we are unable to detail here. The later Masoretic version suppressed many references to Christ, which are present in the Greek; also, it eliminated the Tetragrammaton, the Divine Name, Yahweh, which appeared in some or all of the OT quotations in the NT when the New Testament writings were first penned. There is also evidence of a lack of reverence for the figure of Moses and other prophecies relating to the Messiah. The Septuagint version is certainly worthy of rediscovery today, if we desire to hear what God spoke to His ekklesia when He spoke Greek, that we may be transfigured by His word.

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran demonstrated that the Septuagint accessed Hebrew manuscripts older than the sources in the rabbinic Hebrew. More significantly, Jesus and His disciples quoted the Greek Septuagint. The writings of most of the Apostolic Fathers are filled with citations from the Septuagint when quoting the Old Testament, well into the fourth century.

Many of the Church Fathers considered the Septuagint to be, not a translation, but the revelation of God to His Church. St. Augustine stood by the authority of the Septuagint, as against Jerome’s Hebrew-to-Latin Vulgate. He rightly prophesied that Jerome’s Bible would lead to a schism between the Eastern and the Western churches. He believed that the Septuagint text was the one first inspired by the Holy Spirit and should be retained because of “its greater harmony of purpose and spirit.”

(Recommended: The Lexham English Septuagint, Second Edition, published in 2019)