01/31/2024 – How do we understand religion?

Did you know that when the New Testament authors and early church leaders read and quoted passages from what Christians now call the Old Testament, that wasn’t the same Old Testament modern Christians read today? It was a completely different version in a completely different language which begs the question, what language does God speak? Check this out. This is TenOnReligion.

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I recently read this great book by Timothy Michael Law titled, When God Spoke Greek, and this episode is largely “inspired” from that book. The main premise is the fact that the Old Testament translation of almost every modern English version of the Bible is based on the Hebrew Bible, but the form of scripture used by the New Testament authors and the early Church was a completely different set of documents collectively called the Septuagint. The later creation of the concept of an “Old Testament” by the New Testament authors and early Christians depended almost entirely on the availability of these scriptures in Greek for a Mediterranean world that was predominantly Greek speaking. Not only did most of the earliest Christians use the Septuagint, but also their theology was explicitly shaped by it and not by the Hebrew Bible. For example, Matthew’s virgin birth account and Paul’s epistle to the Romans were based on the Greek version of Isaiah and that’s why their quotations don’t match when one tries to look them up using the Old and New Testaments in the exact same Bible today. Why is this the case? Because our modern editions of the Hebrew Bible contain a text based on a form of Hebrew scriptures that was more or less established in the second century CE, but the Septuagint was first produced centuries before that.

So, what is the Septuagint? If you’ve never heard this term before, let’s take a quick step back and explain the situation. The Hebrew word torah means teaching or instruction which was used to regulate Judean society before, during, and after the Babylonian Exile. The editing and compilation of the first five documents of the Bible probably occurred somewhere between the years 450-350 BCE, when the area was controlled by the Persian Empire. The Hellenistic Age, or Greek period, started with the conquests of Alexander the Great in the 330’s and lasted all the way until the Romans took over the area around 30 BCE or so. Since the process of Hellenization was so widespread, (Hellenization was the near complete takeover of Greek language and culture throughout the entire Mediterranean region), the Jewish scriptural documents that existed in the Hebrew language at the time were translated into the Greek language, most likely during the 200’s. The Torah, or first five books later called the Pentateuch from the Greek penta (five) and teuchos (scoll), were translated first, and over the next century many other Hebrew scriptural documents were translated as well, including some documents that are not currently in the modern-day Hebrew Bible. This process occurred over the course of different centuries and in different places. Collectively these Greek translations of Jewish scriptures in Hebrew were called the Septuagint.

Why is the Septuagint so important? A few reasons. The people that Christians read about today in the Bible, like Jesus, Paul, Peter, James, and so on, did not have a Bible. The editing and compilation process of the both the Old and New Testaments did not occur until the time period of the 200’s to 400’s, centuries after they lived. Before the production of the Bible, both many Jews and later Christians used the Greek version called the Septuagint. Buttt…the Septuagint is much more than just a translation because in many places the words and messages in the Septuagint are different from what we have in the later Hebrew Bible. Because of the nature of copying texts along with the materials used, and the lack of availability of transportation and communication technologies we take for granted every day, there were many variations in the Hebrew scriptures. This means that sometimes the Greek translation in the Septuagint was produced from an alternative Hebrew text that has since been lost. You see, most English-language Bible versions of the Old Testament are based on a medieval edition of the Hebrew Bible called the Masoretic Text which is a group of manuscripts that have shared features edited between the 600’s all the way up to around 1100 CE. When they did this, the Masoretic scribes transmitted only one scriptural tradition out of a number of possibilities that existed before the second century CE.

Now there’s a lot of great stuff in this book that is not going to make it into this video, but here’s the super interesting part. Before the Hebrew Bible was more or less finalized and while the New Testament documents were being written and circulated, roughly the five-hundred-year time period between 300 BCE and 200 CE, there was no real fixed text of any kind and different versions of different documents could have the same “authority.” Anyone talking about inerrancy of the scriptures or thinking that something like an “original text” exists is a completely modern invention. Different editions of the same biblical books coexisted in the same community back then, and guess what – they didn’t even care! The entire process was very fluid and in flux for hundreds of years. When one compares the Hebrew and Greek versions, they are often quite similar but sometimes quite different. Even at its best, a translation can never capture the sense and occasionally not even the meaning of the original. Poetry, for example, is notorious for this. Hebrew poetry cannot be communicated accurately in ancient Greek nor modern English. Even in prose or written narratives, when there is an obscure expression in the original document and the translators find no acceptable counterpart in the translation language, but they have to write something to “translate” it so they are forced to devise some alternative, often inventing something and thus creating something new which is basically rewriting the original. It’s now not a translation but a different document. And since the Septuagint was composed in different places, the translators would have had access to different Hebrew texts according to when and where they worked.

The Old Testament in modern Bibles is a translation from the Hebrew Bible, but the writers of the New Testament used almost exclusively the Greek Septuagint. Sometimes the New Testament authors quote the Septuagint’s mistranslation of the Hebrew, thinking it was the original because they did not know it was a mistranslation. So I guess that means they are not really “wrong” for doing so. In the first century there was no complete canonical Bible as we might think of it today in our editions and translations and there’s a lot of plurality going on. This textual plurality allowed New Testament authors to choose whichever reading best suited their purposes to open up new avenues for biblical interpretation with no indication of a debate about this. Again, the idea of an “original text” didn’t exist and even if it did it certainly was not a priority. Since a biblical canon did not yet exist, we find the New Testament authors shaped by, and sometimes quoting from, works not from the later-determined canon. For example, the Prologue of the Gospel of John shares many similarities if not outright dependence on a popular document at the time called the Wisdom of Solomon. Jesus’ title “Son of Man” comes from both the book of Daniel and what’s called the Book of Parables from 1 Enoch chapter 37-71 [see especially 1 Enoch 48:3 and 62:7]. The author of Hebrews’ development of the idea of “rest” depends on a formulation in Greek, not Hebrew. Hebrews 4:3-5 borrows the concept of rest from Psalm 95 and Genesis 2:2. The Hebrew terms for rest in Psalm 95:11 and Genesis 2:2 are different from one another, so readers would not have made the connection if they were reading Hebrew alone because in Greek the same word is used for “rest.” Later, in Hebrews 8:8-12, the covenant promises of God (berith in Hebrew) were translated in the Septuagint with the word diathēkē. In classical Greek diathēkē had meant “last will, testament,” but in the Septuagint it is the chosen equivalent for God’s covenant with his people. The author of Hebrews plays on the double meaning just like Jesus did in Luke’s version of the Last Supper when Jesus says to his disciples, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood…” Luke 22:20. This means that even the very distinction between the Old and New Testaments is based on the Septuagint’s language. Like, seriously.

How the Gospel writers chose to represent Jesus’ use of the scriptures is fascinating, for in these accounts they present Jesus teaching mostly from the Greek Jewish scriptures, even though his native language was Aramaic. Jesus likely would have known at least enough Greek to engage in basic conversation, but most of the words which were originally written in Greek were probably spoken in Aramaic. Why is this so ironic? One of the most important claims of Christianity was that Jesus fulfilled the Jewish scriptures. But since most of the Mediterranean world in the first century spoke Greek, they were told in Greek that Jesus fulfilled the Greek Jewish scriptures, the Septuagint. Think about that for a minute. What language does God speak? For a period of about 500 years, for both Christians and Jews, God spoke Greek. But quite a bit farther south in the 600’s God spoke neither Hebrew, nor Greek, nor Latin, but Arabic. But that’s a story for another video.

So, what do you think about the example of the Septuagint and how language affects how we understand God? Leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Next time we’re going to continue on this topic a little more and ask how did we get the Bible? It’s a big question and many Christians today have no clue what the answer is. Until next time, stay curious. If you enjoyed this, support the channel in the link below, please like and share this video and subscribe to this channel. This is TenOnReligion.