Adventures in the Bible of the Apostles
Updated August 12, 2023
The Apostles had a Bible that looked very different from the one that is found in
most churches today. Most notably, they used and read the Septuagint, a
pre-Christian translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek. The Septuagint left an
indelible imprint on the New Testament and the early Church, and is still the
version of authority in the Eastern Orthodox Church. In each 8-week course, we will
explore what the Bible of the first century looked like, and closely compare (in
English translation) the Hebrew and the Septuagint versions.
Each class will have two parts. The first half will provide a brief overview of some
aspect of Biblical culture in antiquity. In the second half, a discussion leader
(volunteers will be assigned early in the course), will identify three or more
passages that reveal some interesting insights into the Septuagint version. The
volunteer will also look at the New Testament quotations or allusions to the
assigned block of chapters, and reflect on how the New Testament interacts with the
Septuagint or the Hebrew. We will read and discuss these passages. Participants are
encouraged to bring and use their Bibles, in a variety of translations or versions.
Discovery requires hands-on experience, so come prepared to participate, even if
just a bit.
Our study will in no way be exhaustive. We will be discovering some exciting things,
and guess what, what we touch on is just the tip of the iceberg. Although we will be
engaging with very good scholarship, the class is not focused on academics. Our goal
is to read the Septuagint to better understand, and therefore better fulfill, the
Apostolic Tradition.
Resources
There are four complete English translations of the Septuagint:
- The most readily-available English translation of the Septuagint is Brenton's, made in the 19th c. It includes a facing
Greek text that is rather eclectic, drawing from a few important but select
manuscripts. Brenton's translation is an excellent starting resource, but it
should not be relied upon for detailed study. This translation can be found many
places on the Internet.
- The New English Translation of the Septuagint (NETS|) is a scholarly translation
created in 2007, and is marked by an attempt to capture the text as it might
have been read in the pre-Christian world. The base translation is the New
Revised Standard Version, thoroughly revised to reflect the Göttingen edition of
the Septuagint, where available, and Rahlfs's Greek edition otherwise. The
translation is also available as read-only PDFs.
- The Orthodox Study Bible is an ecclesiastical translation by Eastern Orthodox
clergy and laity published in 2008|. The base translation is
the New King James Version, thoroughly revised to reflect Rahlfs's Greek edition
of the Septuagint.
- The Lexham English Septuagint|, published in 2020, is a
scholarly translation of Swete's edition of the Septuagint, and is based largely
on a single manuscript, Codex Vaticanus, one of the oldest and most outstanding
Greek Biblical manuscripts. The English translation does not rely upon a
preexisting base translation.
Here are some useful links to online study tools:
If you are looking for book-length introductions to the Septuagint, the following may
provide good starting points:
- Salvesen, Alison G., and Timothy Michael Law. The Oxford Handbook of the
Septuagint. Oxford Handbooks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.
- Lanier, Gregory R., and William A. Ross. The Septuagint: What It Is and Why
It Matters. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2021.
- Kreuzer, Siegfried. Introduction to the Septuagint. Baylor University
Press, 2019.
- Jobes, Karen H., and Moisés Silva. Invitation to the Septuagint. 2nd ed.
Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2015.
- Aitken, James K., ed. T&T Clark Companion to the Septuagint. London:
Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015.
- Law, Timothy Michael. When God Spoke Greek: The Septuagint and the Making of
the Christian Bible. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
- Dines, Jennifer M., and Michael A. Knibb. The Septuagint. London: T
& T Clark, 2005.
- Fernández Marcos, Natalio. The Septuagint in Context: Introduction to the
Greek Versions of the Bible. Leiden: Brill, 2000.
- Septuagint
bibliography: an enormous bibliography (more than 18,000 items) of
studies published on the Septuagint.
Adventures in Genesis and Exodus
When: Sunday June 25, 2023 through Sunday August 20, 2023, approx.
12:30 through 1:00, with optional overtime discovery and discussion
The heart of the Septuagint is the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. In
this course we focus on Genesis and Exodus. Although we will be reading these books
looking for aspects we haven't seen in the Bibles commonly known, we will also seek a
fully immersive experience, attempting to ingest the stories of creation, the
patriarchs, and the sojourn and exodus from Egypt in a way similar to how first century
Christians might have experienced it. This is difficult to do in translation, but we
will make an attempt!
Class 1 (June 25): Introduction
- Hortatory Address to the
Greeks 13 (attributed to Justin Martyr)
- Class orientation: resources, versions, format
- Starting off: Genesis 46, Isaiah 7
- Volunteers for upcoming classes.
Class 2 (July 2): Genesis 1-11
- Letter of
Aristeas
- Translation style of Genesis
- Genesis 1-11: Creation, Adam through Thara
Class 3 (July 9): Genesis 12-24
- Literacy, libraries, and book culture in the ancient world
- How we use ancient manuscripts to create modern Bibles
- Genesis 12-24: Abraham
Class 4 (July 16): Genesis 25-36
- Alternative translations of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, and the influence of early
Biblical scholars (Origen, Eusebius, Jerome)
- Genesis 25-36: Isaak and Jakob
Class 5 (July 23): Genesis 37-50
- What books were in the Septuagint?
- Genesis 37-50: Joseph
Class 6 (July 30): Exodus
- Ancient non-Christian versions of the Old Testament: Samaritan, Syriac, and the Dead
Sea Scrolls
- Introduction to the LXX translation of Exodus
- Exodus
August 6: no class (parish feast)
Class 7 (August 13): Leviticus and Numbers
- Ancient Christian versions of the Old Testament: Latin, Coptic, Gothic, Armenian,
Georgian, Slavonic, Ethiopic, and Arabic
- Leviticus and Numbers
Class 8 (August 20): Deuteronomy
- St. Augustine versus St. Jerome: the reception of the Septuagint in early
Christianity
- Deuteronomy
Class 9 (August 27): Conclusion
- The original Orthodox Study Bible: Byzantine scholia and commentaries
- The Octoteuch and other Biblical structures
- Joshua
- Where to go from here