The Two Old Testaments

During the last year I’ve had a question about the Scriptures that has stumped me. I’ve asked nearly everyone who I thought might have an answer and have in one way or another received the same answer. “I don’t know.” Well today I finally have an answer. But first a little background. Well maybe more than a little.

Quite often when someone hands us a Bible we don’t spend much time thinking about what has gone into what has gone into it. We might know that the Bible isn’t one book, but a collection of books. The list of what books are considered authoritative is what is known as the ‘canon’ a word meaning ‘rule.’ Almost all Christians agree on the 27 books that comprise the New Testament. Where there is disagreement is over the canon of the Old Testament. Protestants and Catholics have different canons for the Old Testament. The Protestant canon has 39 books while the Catholic canon includes those 39 books and 7 more which we call Deuterocanonical and Protestants call Apocryphal. Those books are Tobit, Judith, 1 & 2 Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach, and Baruch as well as additions to Daniel and Esther. The Protestant canon is identical to the current Jewish canon. Here is where we come to the Two Old Testaments.

Sometime in the third century BC the Ptolemy II had a group of 70 Jewish scholars translate the Scriptures from Hebrew into Greek. Hence we call this version the Septuagint from the Latin septuaginta (seventy), often abbreviated as LXX. At least that’s how the legend goes. Why was an Egyptian pharaoh so interested in a translation into Greek? Because he himself was basically Greek. His father was Ptolemy I one of the Successors to Alexander the Great. Alexander had conquered most of the known world from Greece to India to Egypt. One of the most important legacies of the Alexandrian Empire was the spread of Greek as the common language through out his empire. The language that spread was not the classic or ‘Attic’ Greek, but a simplified version called ‘Koine’ or common Greek. And thus we have an Egyptian pharaoh having the Old Testament translated into Greek. And this is the version used by many Jews outside of Israel who had lost knowledge of Hebrew. The Septuagint was so widely spread that more than 3/4 of the citations of the Old Testament used in the New Testament were from the Septuagint. And Koine was so widespread that most if not all of the New Testament was originally written in Koine Greek.

The Septuagint was the Bible for the early Church. It included all of the books as found in the Catholic canon and some others such as Psalm 151, 3 & 4 Maccabees and more. Some of these books in various groupings are accepted as canon by various Orthodox, Coptic, Ethiopian, and other Christians. There was no set canon of the Jewish Scriptures before the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD. Beginning some time after 100 AD the Pharisees began the process of codifying a canon. Only those books that were originally in Hebrew were admitted which meant that the Deuterocanonicals were left out. This version is known as the Masoretic Text and the current version of the received text dates to work that was done between the 7th and 11th centuries. But there were versions in existence well before then. One of the more disputed questions is whether the Septuagint or the Masoretic Text is more faithful to the original texts. We can not really know as the original texts are lost to us. Although we do know that the Septuagint is older, but we cannot say authoritatively that it is more faithful.

With this background I can now get to the question that I have had. Currently most Christian translations (in the West) of the Old Testament rely on the Masoretic Text as the base translation with reference to the Septuagint for clarification or used in some disputed verses. Those disputed verses and differences between the Septuagint and the Masoretic Text is well beyond the scope of this post. With the Septuagint being the primary Scriptures used by the early Church then why do we rely on the Masoretic? Finally I have an answer which can be found in the article When God Spoke Greek at First Things. The short answer: St. Jerome.