What is the Bible, really

It looks like a settled question. It isn't. The book most people picture, Greek New Testament plus a reordered Hebrew Old Testament, hides a much stranger history.

“WHAT actually is the Bible? The question is harder to answer than it first seems.”

The early Church read Greek

Most Christians assume the Old Testament came to them from Hebrew. In the first centuries, both testaments were Greek. That Greek Old Testament is the Septuagint.

Not a translation, a revelation

The early Church did not treat the Septuagint as a rough draft that better Hebrew scholarship could improve. They treated it as God's word itself.

It holds older text

Timothy Michael Law's argument: the Septuagint preserves versions of Hebrew scripture that predate the closing of the Hebrew canon. Older, not just different.

Seventy translators, one legend

Septuaginta means seventy. The name reaches us through Josephus, who wrote about the translation's origins in his Antiquities of the Jews.

The Letter of Aristeas

It claims a Greek pagan wrote it in the third century BCE. King Ptolemy II invites 72 Jewish scholars to Alexandria, six per tribe, to put the Torah into Greek for his library.

Seventy-two days, no revisions

The scholars work on an island and finish the Torah in 72 days. Alexandria's Jews approve it, Ptolemy approves it, and the text goes into the library sealed against edits.

The letter was propaganda

Scholars now think a Jew wrote it a century later, in the second century BCE, to advertise Jewish wisdom and keep diaspora Jews loyal to Ptolemaic rule. Josephus trimmed 72 to 70.

A project, not an event

The Torah came first, Alexandria, early to mid third century BCE. The histories, prophets and wisdom books followed across the second century, in Egypt or Palestine or both.

Scripture is not canon

In the first centuries CE no canon was fixed, Jewish or Christian. Communities shared some books, disputed others, and ordered them differently.

Nobody had a Bible

A single bound book containing everything waits on the printing press in the 15th century. Even now canons differ: Ethiopian Orthodox Christians count I Enoch and Jubilees, as Qumran seems to have.

A Greek-speaking world

After Alexander beat Darius III in 330 BCE, the Middle East ran on Greek coins, Greek buildings, Greek books and a common tongue, Koine. That is the language of the Septuagint.

What the apostles quoted

Koine was spoken across the Holy Land in Jesus's lifetime. When the Gospel writers and Paul reached for scripture, they quoted the Septuagint, not the Hebrew.

“It was the age, as Law writes, "when God spoke Greek."”

Origen and Jerome start comparing

Origen set the Greek beside the Hebrew in the third century. Jerome went further and retranslated into Latin, producing the basis of the Vulgate that Catholic teaching rests on.

Augustine pushed back

He argued the Septuagint was authentic revelation and had been the Church's Bible for centuries. He doubted Jerome's Hebrew and warned a new translation would split Christendom.

Style won the argument

Educated Roman Christians cringed at the old Latin Bible's clumsy prose. The Vulgate replaced it, and the Septuagint's authority in the West went with it.

The Dead Sea Scrolls changed everything

Until 1947, the oldest complete Hebrew Bible was the 11th century Leningrad Codex. The scrolls were far older, and where they diverged from the received Hebrew, they often agreed with the Greek.

The received text is a revision

That agreement forced a conclusion. In places the Hebrew Bible we inherited revises something earlier, and the Septuagint keeps fragments of what came before.

A warrior or a peacemaker

Exodus 15:3 in Hebrew reads "The Lord is a warrior." The Greek reads "The Lord, when he shatters wars." In Psalm 9:21 the Hebrew gives the nations fear, the Greek gives them a lawgiver.

“The original translator does not wish us to see God as a warrior but as a peacemaker.”

Paul chose the Greek

In Romans 9:25-26 he follows the Greek Hosea because it lets God's promise stretch to the Gentiles. If Paul was inspired, the Spirit pointed him at the Septuagint. Law's book is the first to open all this to readers outside the guild.