The Orthodox Septuagint or the Protestant Masoretic?

The Orthodox Septuagint or the Protestant Masoretic?

     The Orthodox Church uses the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament, the one used by Christ and the apostles (as quoted in the New Testament).  The Protestant world uses the Masoretic text which came some 1000 years after the time of Christ and was altered by Jewish Rabbis who tried to erase prophecies that seemed to point to Jesus as the Christ of the Old Testament.

     The Septuagint was translated in Alexandra circa A.D. 250 during the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphius as a publication of the Library of Alexandria. This Library was the Media Center of the Roman world. Ptolemy wanted a copy of every book in the known world to be available through the Library. Accordingly, he found a way to include a translation of the hitherto untranslated Scriptures of the Jews which could be made available through the Library. Scholars who were fluent in both Hebrew and Greek traveled from Jerusalem to Alexandria to translate the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek.

     Their translation, known as the Septuagint from the seventy-two who completed this work, was praised as grasping the true meaning of the Hebrew and setting it forth in Greek by the most erudite of the Jews who were contemporaries of Our Lord Jesus Christ, including Philo and Josephus. The Septuagint found such favor with the Jewish community in Alexandria that they established a celebration on an island in the Nile to mark each anniversary of its completion. The Septuagint immediately found a widespread reception in the pre-Christian literary world, notably in Rome itself. Both the authors of the New Testament and also the Fathers of the Church used the Septuagint as an authoritative source in teaching Christian doctrine. The Septuagint, abbreviated as ‘LXX’, is the scriptural standard for the Orthodox Church as Old Testament scripture whether in Greek or in Church Slavonic.

     The Lord Jesus Christ fulfilled every one of the prophecies concerning the Messiah found anywhere in the text of the Septuagint. This is the consistent witness of the Fathers from Saint Dionysius the Areopagite to Saint Irenaeus of Lyons. Indeed, the recent discovery of St. Irenaeus’ The Proof of the Apostolic Preaching in an Armenian Monastery was first published in a translation from Armenian into French in Paris, August 23, 1913 (Cf. § 30, p. 683). St. Irenaeus’ Proof comes down to this: “What the Scriptures prophesied, Christ fulfilled” and this is the keystone of the Apostolic preaching. Thus, His Resurrection on the third day, is, in the Nicene Creed, confessed to be “according to the Scriptures,” that is, in fulfillment of the prophecies of Christ recorded in the Canonical Scriptures.

     The destruction and leveling of Jerusalem, which was prophesied by Christ, (Mt. 24:2; Mr.13:2; Lk. 21:6) was accomplished under the Roman General Titus in 70 A.D. Around A. D. 90 the Jews initiated a program of eliminating, wherever possible, or altering all of the prophesies of Christ in the Hebrew texts available to them, and of a further program of reconstructing their version of the text of the Old Testament by using inferior texts. As it happens, the Psalter in the Septuagint stands as that book which, more than any other in holy Scripture, is replete with prophecies of Christ. Given the widespread popularity of the Septuagint Psalter, even in the first century A. D., the Jews were limited in how far they could take their deliberate eradication or alteration of the prophesies of Christ. They chose not to alter or delete the prophesies in the Psalter quite possibly out of fear of tipping their hand as regards their extensive tampering with other texts in the Canonical Scripture of the Old Testament.

     The text produced by the Jews is called the Masoretic text. The final edition of the Masoretic text appeared around 1000 A.D. This text, stripped as far as possible of the prophesies of Christ by the Masoretes, i.e. Jewish scholarship, is the text preferred and used by the protestant world. This corrupted text stands behind the Old Testament translation into German by Martin Luther and into the English of the 1611 King James Version.

     The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls written in Hebrew found in the Judean wilderness circa the 1950’s calls the Jewish endeavor outlined above into serious question. These scrolls dating from the first century A.D. confirm basis for the Septuagint in the Hebrew of the Qumran texts. The texts found in Qumran are in consonance with those used in the translation of the Septuagint. Further, they are dated approximately 900 years before the eleventh century rescission of the Masoretes. Each of the prophesies of Christ are in place, intact, and supported by the texts found in the Judean desert. Even apart from such modern supporting documentation for the text of the Septuagint, we can, as Orthodox Christians, continue to rely, as did the Evangelists, Apostles, and Fathers of the Church, upon the Septuagint as Canonical Scripture.