When God Spoke Greek: The Septuagint and the Making of the Christian Bible

How did the New Testament writers and the earliest Christians come to adopt the Jewish scriptures as their first Old Testament? And why are our modern Bibles related more to the Rabbinic Hebrew Bible than to the Greek Bible of the early Church?

The Septuagint, the name given to the translation of the Hebrew scriptures between the third century BC and the second century AD, played a central role in the Bible's history. Many of the Hebrew scriptures were still evolving when they were translated into Greek, and these Greek translations, along
with several new Greek writings, became Holy Scripture in the early Church.

Yet, gradually the Septuagint lost its place at the heart of Western Christianity. At the end of the fourth century, one of antiquity's brightest minds rejected the Septuagint in favor of the Bible of the rabbis. After Jerome, the Septuagint never regained the position it once had. Timothy Michael
Law recounts the story of the Septuagint's origins, its relationship to the Hebrew Bible, and the adoption and abandonment of the first Christian Old Testament.


Author: Timothy Michael Law
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 07/19/2013
Pages: 240
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.75lbs
Size: 9.20h x 6.00w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9780199781720

Review Citation(s):
Choice 02/01/2014

About the Author

Timothy Michael Law is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of The Marginalia Review of Books.