Malachi to Revelation · Lesson 5 of 12

The Greek Bible and the Greek World

How seventy translators in Alexandria shaped every page of your New Testament

When the Bible Became Portable

Sometime in the third century BC, a group of Jewish scholars in Alexandria began translating the Hebrew scriptures into Greek. They started with the Torah (so the legend in the Letter of Aristeas tells us, 72 elders working in 72 days, hence the name Septuagint, "the seventy"). Over the next 150 years the rest of the Hebrew Bible was added. The motivation was practical: most Greek-speaking Jews in Egypt could no longer read Hebrew, and the Ptolemaic library at Alexandria wanted every world religion's scriptures in Greek. The result was revolutionary in ways no one in the third century BC could have anticipated.

The Septuagint became the Bible the apostles quoted. When Paul writes "the just shall live by faith" in Romans 1:17, he is quoting the LXX of Habakkuk 2:4. When Matthew writes "behold, the virgin shall conceive" in Matthew 1:23, he is quoting the LXX of Isaiah 7:14. When Acts narrates Peter's Pentecost sermon, the OT citations come from the LXX. Roughly two-thirds of NT OT quotations track the LXX rather than the Masoretic Hebrew text. Every page of your New Testament theology is built on top of decisions made by anonymous translators in Alexandria a hundred and fifty years before Christ. This lesson examines three of those decisions in detail.

Author & Audience
Author

The Septuagint is the work of many anonymous translators across roughly 150 years (~280–130 BC), centered in Alexandria, working from Hebrew manuscripts that in some cases predate the Masoretic Text we have today by a thousand years. The Letter of Aristeas (a 2nd-century BC apologetic work) gives the legendary account of 72 translators (six from each tribe) sent by the high priest Eleazar to Ptolemy II Philadelphus's library. The historical kernel is real: the Torah was probably translated in the early Ptolemaic period under royal patronage. The legend embroiders it. Either way, by the first century AD the LXX is the Bible of the Greek-speaking world.

Audience

Originally, Greek-speaking Diaspora Jews who could no longer read Hebrew — especially the large Alexandrian Jewish community, which by the first century AD numbered perhaps a million. As the LXX circulated, its audience expanded to include God-fearing Gentiles (Greek-speakers attracted to Jewish monotheism), Hellenistic scholars, and eventually the entire early church. When Paul evangelized Gentile cities, the Bible he placed in their hands was the LXX. The early Christian fathers (Justin Martyr, Origen, Athanasius) treated the LXX as their authoritative OT. It is only since the Reformation that Western Christianity has generally privileged the Masoretic Hebrew over the LXX — a choice that is itself debatable and that has had consequences.

Three Case Studies in Translation

Below, three places where the LXX's translation choices shaped Christian doctrine. In each case we put the Hebrew, the LXX, and the New Testament quotation side by side. The point is not that the LXX is "wrong" against the Hebrew or "right" against it — translations are always interpretations, and the NT's use of the LXX often makes theological claims about what the Hebrew was already pointing toward. The point is to see the apostles' Bible.

Case Study 1 — Isaiah 7:14 (Almah / Parthenos / Virgin)

Hebrew (MT)

הִנֵּה הָעַלְמָה הָרָה וְיֹלֶדֶת בֵּן
hinnēh hāʻalmāh hārāh wəyōledet bēn
"Behold, the young woman [is] pregnant and bearing a son…"

ʻalmāh = young woman of marriageable age; usually presumed unmarried, but the term does not specify virginity. The technical Hebrew word for virgin is bətûlāh.

Septuagint (LXX)

ἰδοὺ ἡ παρθένος ἐν γαστρὶ ἔξει καὶ τέξεται υἱόν
idou hē parthenos en gastri hexei kai texetai huion
"Behold, the virgin will be pregnant and bear a son…"

parthenos = virgin, unambiguously. The translators (3rd c BC, before any Christian context) chose to specify virginity. This is an interpretive narrowing of the Hebrew.

New Testament (Matt 1:23)

ἰδοὺ ἡ παρθένος ἐν γαστρὶ ἕξει καὶ τέξεται υἱόν
idou hē parthenos en gastri hexei kai texetai huion
"Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son…"

Matthew quotes the LXX word for word. He does not derive the virgin-birth doctrine from this verse — he derives it from the angel's announcement and the historical fact — but he uses Isaiah's prophecy, in its LXX form, as the providential anticipation.

What this teaches. The LXX translators in 250 BC made a translation choice that specified something the Hebrew left general. Two and a half centuries later, the virgin birth of Jesus matched the specification. For Matthew this is providence at work in translation history: God so arranged the Greek wording of Isaiah that, when his Son arrived in the manner he had always planned, the prophecy fit exactly. Apologetically: the LXX was committed to print 250 years before Christ; no Christian editor could have retroactively altered it. The pre-Christian Jewish translators put "parthenos" there.
Case Study 2 — Habakkuk 2:4 (Emunah / Pistis / Faith)

Hebrew (MT)

וְצַדִּיק בֶּאظמוּנָתוֹ יִחְיֶה
wəṣaddiq be-ʾemûnātô yiḥyeh
"the righteous shall live by his faithfulness"

ʾemûnāh = steadfastness, reliability, faithfulness. The Hebrew suffix -ō is "his" — the righteous one's own faithfulness sustains his life.

Septuagint (LXX)

ὁ δὲ δίκαιος ἐκ πίστεως μου ζήσεται
ho de dikaios ek pisteōs mou zēsetai
"the righteous one will live by my faithfulness"

pistis = faith / faithfulness. The LXX renders the suffix "my" — God's faithfulness sustains the righteous one. (Some LXX manuscripts have autou, "his"; the variation reflects ancient ambiguity.)

New Testament (Rom 1:17, Gal 3:11, Heb 10:38)

ὁ δὲ δίκαιος ἐκ πίστεως ζήσεται
ho de dikaios ek pisteōs zēsetai
"the righteous shall live by faith"

Paul drops the pronoun entirely, opening the verse to a deliberately ambiguous reading: faith in God? God's faithfulness? Both? The whole architecture of Romans turns on this LXX-shaped phrase. Without the LXX category of pistis, "justification by faith" is a much harder doctrine to formulate.

What this teaches. The Greek word pistis covers both "faith" (subjective trust) and "faithfulness" (objective reliability). The Hebrew ʾemûnāh leans toward "faithfulness." When the LXX picked pistis, it joined those two semantic fields. Paul's revolutionary doctrine of justification depends on the fusion. The Reformation slogan "sola fide" is a direct downstream consequence of an Alexandrian translator's third-century-BC word choice.
Case Study 3 — Psalm 22:16 / 21:17 LXX (Pierced)

Hebrew (MT)

כָּאֲרִי יָדַי וְרַגְלָי
kāʾărî yāday wəraglāy
"like a lion [are] my hands and my feet" (?)

The Hebrew is famously difficult. kāʾărî looks like "like a lion." It produces an awkward sentence. The Dead Sea Scrolls (5/6 HəvNaḥal fragment) read kāʾărû — "they pierced" — a single Hebrew letter different.

Septuagint (LXX 21:17)

έρυξαν χεῖράς μου καὶ πόδας μου
ōryxan cheiras mou kai podas mou
"they pierced/dug my hands and my feet"

oryssō = to dig, pierce through. The LXX translators (working from a Hebrew text that probably read kāʾărû, "they pierced," as the DSS confirms) translated unambiguously.

New Testament (no direct quote, but…)

John 19:37 quotes Zechariah 12:10 ("they will look on him whom they have pierced") at the crucifixion — not Psalm 22:16. But Psalm 22 saturates the crucifixion accounts (the cry "my God, my God, why have you forsaken me" in Mark 15:34 quotes Ps 22:1 LXX). The early church read ōryxan as Messianic prophecy of the nails. Early Christian art and homiletics rely heavily on this LXX reading.

What this teaches. In this case the LXX is probably closer to the original Hebrew than the medieval Masoretic Text (the Dead Sea Scrolls support the LXX reading). The MT preserves an awkward "like a lion" that almost certainly reflects scribal error sometime in the late first millennium AD. The LXX, frozen in Greek by ~150 BC, preserves the older reading. This is one of many places where the LXX is an independent textual witness whose evidence the church should still take seriously. Patristic exegesis of Psalm 22 as predictive prophecy of the crucifixion turns out to be working from a defensible textual base.
The Vocabulary Inheritance

Beyond these case studies, dozens of foundational NT theological terms come directly from LXX usage. A short list:

κύριος (Lord) — LXX rendering of YHWH. When Romans 10:9 says "if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord," every Greek-speaking Jew hears: Jesus is YHWH. The bridge is the LXX.
χριστός (Christ) — LXX rendering of māšîaḥ, anointed one. By Daniel 9:25–26 LXX, christos has eschatological force. The NT title "Jesus Christ" is unintelligible apart from this LXX-shaped expectation.
διαθήκη (covenant) — LXX rendering of bərît. The whole architecture of Hebrews depends on this word.
ἐκκλησία (church) — LXX rendering of qāhāl, assembly. When Jesus says "I will build my ekklesia" (Matt 16:18), the OT freight is "I will build the covenant assembly of Israel" — a stunning claim.
περιτομή (circumcision), πάσχα (Passover), ἀπολύτρωσις (redemption), ἱλαστήριον (mercy seat / propitiation), Ἁγιασμός (sanctification) — all enter Christian vocabulary through the LXX's prior decisions.

The point is structural, not incidental. The apostles did not invent a new theological vocabulary. They picked up the vocabulary the LXX had built over the previous three centuries, and used it to talk about Jesus. When Christianity went to the Gentile world, it went with a Greek Bible already in its hands, with every key term already loaded with OT meaning.

Greek (LXX) Word Studies
κύριος kyrios · "Lord, Master"

The single most important LXX choice. The divine name YHWH appears in the Hebrew Bible about 6,800 times. Late second-temple Jews considered the name too holy to pronounce; they read Adonai (my Lord) aloud when the text said YHWH. The LXX translators codified this practice by rendering YHWH consistently as kyrios. The Christian effect was theologically explosive. When the NT calls Jesus kyrios, it is using the LXX word for YHWH. Philippians 2:11 says "every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is κύριος" by quoting Isaiah 45:23 LXX, where kyrios means YHWH explicitly. The deity of Christ is not a Greek philosophical add-on; it is built into the apostolic vocabulary at the cellular level, through the LXX.

παρθένος parthenos · "virgin"

Discussed above. Worth noting: the LXX uses parthenos not just in Isaiah 7:14 but throughout the Pentateuch for legally relevant virginity (Lev 21:13–14, Deut 22:23–28). The translator of Isaiah is not inventing the term's meaning — he is making an interpretive choice consistent with how parthenos works elsewhere in the LXX. Matthew 1:23's appeal to the verse rests on the fact that the Greek tradition had specified the term in this direction long before Mary's situation existed.

χριστός christos · "anointed one"

Literally a Greek translation of māšîaḥ. Etymologically, chriō means "I anoint, I rub oil on." A christos is anyone smeared with oil for a sacred office: kings, priests, prophets. The LXX uses christos matter-of-factly for Aaron (Lev 4:5), David (Ps 18:50 LXX), even Cyrus (Isa 45:1 LXX). The eschatological narrowing of the term — the Christ — gathers force during the silent years (cf. Dan 9:25–26 LXX) and explodes in NT use. When Andrew tells Peter "we have found the Messias (which means Christos)" in John 1:41, the bilingual gloss is telling: the same eschatological category was named in both languages in Jesus' Galilean world, and the Greek name traveled.

πίστις pistis · "faith, faithfulness, trust"

The semantic range of pistis in Greek includes both the subjective act of trusting and the objective quality of being trustworthy. The LXX uses pistis for ʾemûnāh in Habakkuk 2:4 and elsewhere — binding those two semantic fields together. Paul's "by faith, by faith" theology lives inside the bonded category. Every English-language argument about "faith vs works" or "faith in Christ vs faithfulness of Christ" (the subjective vs objective genitive debate in Galatians 2:16, 3:22, etc.) is downstream of the LXX's decision to use this one Greek word for both.

ἐκκλησία ekklēsia · "assembly, gathering, called-out company"

Etymologically: ek- (out from) + kaleō (to call). An ekklēsia is a body of people called out from the larger population for some common purpose. In secular Greek usage, the ekklēsia was the citizen-assembly of a city-state (Athens, etc.). The LXX adopts the word to render Hebrew qāhāl, the covenant assembly of Israel gathered before Yahweh (e.g., Deut 9:10 LXX, "the day of the ἐκκλησία" — Sinai). When the NT calls the church the ekklēsia, it is not borrowing a Greek civic term; it is invoking the LXX's OT category. The church is the assembly of Israel renewed and opened to the nations through Christ.

Why This Matters for Us

Three pastoral implications follow from taking the LXX seriously.

1. The NT writers were not first-time inventors of theology. They were heirs of a Greek-Jewish theological vocabulary three centuries in the making. When Paul reasons in Romans, he reasons inside the LXX. Reading the NT in isolation from the LXX is reading a building without its foundation.

2. Translation is itself theological work. The Septuagint translators were not just transferring sounds; they were making constant interpretive choices about what the Hebrew meant. The NT writers ratify many of those choices by quoting them as authoritative. This has implications for how we approach Bible translation today: the goal is not bare literalism but faithful communication of the text's meaning — the same goal the Alexandrians had.

3. God works in long arcs. The most important theological book in the early church was written by anonymous Jews under a pagan king two centuries before anyone knew there would be an early church. God does not waste even an "intertestamental" period. The very years that seemed silent were the years during which the language of the New Testament was being forged.

Discussion Questions
1. Which of the three case studies (virgin / faith / pierced) most surprised you? What does it do to your reading of the OT to know the apostles often quote a Greek translation rather than the Hebrew?
2. The LXX is roughly two-thirds of the NT's OT citations. Why might the Western church have generally privileged the Hebrew Masoretic Text since the Reformation? What might be lost in that choice?
3. Trace the word kyrios: LXX rendering of YHWH → NT title of Jesus → Christian confession. How does this etymological chain bear on the question of when the early church came to believe Jesus was God?
4. The LXX translators in Alexandria had no idea they were preparing the linguistic infrastructure for the New Testament. Where in your own life might you be doing work whose ultimate significance you cannot now see?
5. Read Acts 8:26–39 (Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch). What is the eunuch reading? What translation? What does this scene tell us about the role of the LXX in the spread of the Gospel?
6. If ekklēsia is fundamentally an OT covenant-assembly term and not a generic Greek civic term, how does that reshape how we think about being "the church"?
Prayer
Father, before there was a New Testament you were already preparing its words. Through faithful translators in Alexandria, through scribes copying scrolls by candlelight, through generations of Greek-speaking Jews keeping covenant in foreign cities, you were assembling the vocabulary your Son would inhabit. Teach us to honor the long arcs of your work and to trust that you waste no decade. Make us faithful in the work of our own moment, even when we cannot see its end. And give us reverent ears for every word of scripture — Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek — through which you have spoken your one Son to the world. In Jesus' name. Amen.

Malachi to Revelation · Lesson 5 of 12

Next: Lesson 6 — Maccabees, Hasmoneans, and the Second Mediator