The Authority of the Septuagint: What the Apostles Quoted—and Why It Matters

The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need Thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm Dr. James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now, on to today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey, everyone. Welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm Dr. James Spencer, and I'm joined today by a couple of guests. They're actually the editors of a book called The Authority of the Septuagint, Biblical, Historical, and Theological Approaches. And so I'm here with Greg Lanier, who is professor of New Testament at RTS Orlando. Yep, I'm getting that right. And also joined by William Ross, who is professor of Old Testament at RTS Orlando. And so happy to welcome you guys. This is a topic that I've been interested in for a long time, and so really appreciated the book and the essays in it. I had a chance to read it over the last few days and just really enjoyed engaging with the deep scholarship. And so hopefully, we can have a good conversation and introduce people to the world of the Septuagint a bit. So welcome, guys. I'm going to have you introduce yourselves since there's two of you. Greg, if you wouldn't mind just introducing yourself a little bit, say hi, and give some folks a little background just so they can hear your voice and understand who's talking. Excellent. Well, thanks for having me, James. And actually, Will is in, sadly, I wish he were in Orlando. He's actually in Charlotte. But yeah, I'm in my 10th year at RTS Orlando, also I'm a pastor at a local church that's in the Presbyterian vein. And I have a wife, three daughters, like to coach soccer, and I'm just mainly here to make Will look good. So that's my role in this dynamic duo. We've been working together for a long time, so this is one of several things we've done together. Very cool. Imagine what we could do if we lived in the same city. I know. Well, that's why they're keeping us apart, I think. They don't want the world takeover. That's right. William, sorry about that. Yeah, you're at RTS Charlotte. And so give us a little bit of your background. Yep, so I've been here in Charlotte. This is my seventh year. Greg and I met doing our PhD programs at Cambridge, and we're united in our love for the Septuagint then. And like he said, we've been doing projects here and there related to the Septuagint ever since. I teach Old Testament here. I teach the Hebrew courses. They let me teach the Greek courses too because of the Septuagint connection. And yeah, I'm married, have four kids, and I'm trying to assimilate as best I can to the Southern way of life because I'm originally from Philadelphia. So they're being nice to me so far here. Very good. Well, why don't we start out with an easy one and just give people a sense of what the Septuagint actually is if they're not aware. So William, why don't I start with you? Just give us a sense of what the Septuagint is and how it emerged. What time periods are we looking at, those kind of things. Yeah, so I think it's helpful and important to distinguish between the label and the phenomenon or the object that we're talking about. So Septuagint's really only just a label for a diverse collection of things. And it's sort of automatically anachronistic to use the label for almost anything in the ancient world. So I'll set that aside for a moment. But usually what people are talking about when they use the term is a collection of ancient Greek translations from the Hebrew Bible that were produced by Greek-speaking Jews somewhere between the mid-second, sorry, mid-third century BC through the second century AD. They were not all produced at once. They weren't all produced by the same group of people or in the same location. And some of the translations that were produced were shortly afterwards revised or tweaked or updated in different ways. So you've got Greek versions of all the books in the traditional canon of the Hebrew Bible. Plus you've got a handful of additional Greek works that were not translated from Hebrew. Some of them may have been, some of them were not. Books like Maccabees or Judith, Bell and the Dragon, some of these other apocryphal or deuterocanonical works. So that whole collection, sort of a library, if you will, that accumulated over time in the Greek-speaking Jewish world, that whole thing is what we're talking about when we refer to the Septuagint. But it was not something that was a unified entity in the ancient world conceptually, at least, right? People were not using the term Septuagint in the ancient world for the most part. Yeah, fair enough. So like we can buy a Septuagint today. You can buy this. Right. This didn't exist. Really from antiquity, it wasn't a set work that people were like, hey, let's sit down and write this Septuagint and put this all together. It's more something that we've collected over the years, and now you can get it as sort of a single bound set of manuscripts. That's right. That's right. Well, I mean, the binding of the books does go back to the 300s, but if you're on the streets of Capernaum in 50 AD, there's not a, you can't order it from Amazon. It would be a loose collection that was a moving target, right? Yeah. Well, on that, Greg, so when you're thinking about that time frame, how do you perceive the New Testament writers having access to the Septuagint? How are they getting it? In the book, both Will and another author tackle that from different directions. But so far as we can tell, it's difficult to know exactly, but let's say Paul is traveling around. He would have potentially had things memorized, either in Hebrew or Greek or both. He could have gone to the local synagogue and accessed some text there, and that could have been in Hebrew. That could have been in Greek. It could be both. It's not 100% clear, but we do know that these translations and copies of the Hebrew had been circulated around and so forth. So that's the kind of thing. It's like, imagine if you didn't have a smartphone, you didn't have your printed ESV or NIV, and you're on a work trip. You'd have to go somewhere to find the text that you're going to work with. And so, which is very difficult for us to conceptualize because we have such ready access to everything now, but that's more accurate to what would have been true back then. It's not like he's lugging a whole suitcase full of scrolls around. They would have been quite, quite large back then. So it's a variety of different points of access. And the challenge is when you read like an English Bible, CSB, whatever it is, and they'll say the Septuagint in the footnotes. That's an oversimplification because we don't know exactly what Paul or Matthew or Luke or whomever would have had at their disposal. We can try to deduce things, but it's very, it's kind of difficult to pin down. So that's kind of a shorthand to try to express that they're using something that would have been in the Greek side of the equation as opposed to the Hebrew side of the equation. Fair enough. And you do talk a lot in the book about, part of the analysis of the book at least, is how the Hebrew and the Greek relate. So Old Testament, we usually think of it written in Hebrew. New Testament, we think of it written in Greek. But then you have this sort of intervening set of manuscripts that are Old Testament. This is the Old Testament translated into Greek. How do you think about those? Can you give people some handles for how they might think about that translation, maybe in some modern day terms? Is this like the message or is it more like, you know, the NASU or something like that? Yeah. Yeah. You've got a mixture of approaches to translation within the Septuagint as a corpus. So again, because it was produced by different people in different places at different times, they had different ideas of what a good translation looks like, different goals, different skill sets, things like that. Although they're all competent Greek speakers, they've got different ideas. So you find a range of translation approaches, right? So you've got books that are going to be sort of well-styled grammatical, you know, Greek, sort of like, you know, the ESV kind of middle lane sort of thing. That's something like you'd find in the Greek Pentateuch. Then you're going to have something closer to like Young's literal translation type of thing where the grammar is going to be a little awkward because the translators were trying their best to represent each word, lexic item, item for item in order. So you're going to have books like the Psalms, for example, tends to be more towards that side of the equation. Some of the later books.

that were translated after the turn of the era. And then you're going to have, kind of on the other side of the spectrum, much more dynamic or free type translations that when you compare our Hebrew text, the Masoretic Hebrew text, and this Greek translation, they don't look really much the same at all. There's not a one-to-one correlation much of the time. There's some of the time. You can kind of see points of continuity, but there's sort of a loose correlation between the Greek and the Hebrew text. So it appears to be, yeah, more of a free or dynamic rendering of the Hebrew source text. You get a whole range of things, which is one of the challenges when it comes to looking at New Testament citations and thinking through how they may have gotten New Testament authors, how they may have gotten to the Greek text that they cite and where it may have come from. It's almost like if you buy a Septuagint now, the Pentateuch would be like the ESV. Isaiah would be more like the New Living Translation. Proverbs would look very, Proverbs would be like you just stepped into a very different world. Some of it looks familiar. It's like, where are these other Proverbs coming from? You know, Jeremiah would be much shorter and then the Psalms would be like Young's literal translation all thrown together. So that's what makes it even conceptually a weird thing to try to talk about or it makes it just complicated. But yeah, those deviations that Will is talking about, that is one of the big reasons why it's even a conversation among Protestants, because many times, not all the time, but many times the New Testament authors will cite from a text form, like the wording in Greek, and sometimes it gets smoothed out in English, but in general, you can still make the observation. It seems to be closer to what you'll have in a Greek rendering, say in Isaiah, and it definitely deviates from what we have in the Masoretic. And so that's the specific question that often raised, or that phenomenon raises the question of what do we do with that? How do we think about that? And so that was really the impetus for a book like this, is thinking through that. That raises a whole host of questions that we wanted to try to answer, or at least push the ball forward. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian-owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free Retirement Defense Guide or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. Yeah, and let's move to that sort of pivot. I mean, the book is titled The Authority of the Septuagint. And so, let's talk a little bit about that notion of authority and what you all are really trying to get at with this. How does, and even calling it the Septuagint, as we've described, is difficult, right? Because it's not like you had the original Septuagintal manuscripts or something like that where it was a consolidated whole. And like these scattered manuscripts that were being produced in order for, I'm sure, for multiple purposes to translate the Hebrew into the Greek. What authority do they actually have and how does that then relate into how the New Testament authors use them? So, let's start maybe just with a simple question. What are we talking about when we're talking about authority? Well, that is the question. Right. I can start, Will, and you can add. So, Will and I wrote a book for Crossway a couple of years ago that's an introduction to the so-called Septuagint. And in the final chapter, what we tried to tease out is, with mainly a focus on a Protestant audience, because the Greek Orthodox Church, they only, essentially only use the so-called Septuagint. The Jewish community, of course, only uses the Hebrew Tanakh. The Roman Catholic Church, of course, has gone through its waves of privileging the Vulgate, but now they're more friendly towards the Masoretic in recent decades. And so, it really has been an in-house Protestant question. If Jesus and or other apostolic writers do regularly use some Greek text, does that mean they are treating it as inspired? Or secondarily inspired? You know, better than the Hebrew? Those are the kinds of things that you'll see on social media and YouTube videos for or against this text. And so, in that final chapter of this introductory book, we tried to flesh out three types of authority. One being the normative authority, that is, what do we base our doctrine and practice on? And consistent with not only sort of the Reformed tradition that we're in, but we believe also the early Jewish and early Christian community, the fundamental normative authority is the inspired Hebrew text. So, we're not in the camp that the Septuagint is an equally inspired source of authority in that regard. The second level of authority was a derived authority, which really any faithful translation from the inspired text would have, including English or Mandarin or Spanish. And in that sense, the Septuagint has a kind of authority, but it's downstream from the Hebrew. So, it's useful. It's interesting. It apparently was, you know, used by Matthew or Luke, and they felt like it was fine. Just like you would not necessarily read the Hebrew text in a sermon on Sunday morning. You feel comfortable reading in English saying, this is the word of the Lord, even though we know it's not technically because it didn't speak in English. And then there's the interpretive authority, which is the Septuagint is sort of a, really the earliest commentary that we have on the Hebrew Bible because every translation is a commentary. And so, we tried to tease that out. We realized in a few pages that we didn't cover everything. And so, we wanted to bring in some systematic theologians, historical theologians, patristics folks, to try to push the ball forward a bit. And in particular, the systematic guys, their mainly, their main contribution, this is Dan Trier and Josh McQuay, their main contribution is trying to actually flesh out what do we mean by authority. It's not a one size fits all when it comes to authority. I mean, even in sort of modern, you can think of analogs in the way you do your family or the way you have a school. Like there's different types of authority that are exercised in different ways. And so, they try to clarify some of that in much better systematics terminology than Will or I are equipped to deal with. So, that's the way we ended up in that kind of threefold way of thinking about it. Will, do you want to add anything on that? Yeah, no, I think that's a good summary. I guess I would just say that you do, as a Protestant, right, with a high view of Scripture, you kind of are pressed into reconciling or trying to reconcile this question. Because if you believe, as Protestants do, that the Hebrew text is the locus of inspiration, right? There is an inspired original or final form or whatever language you want to put on that. And that is the source from which we are to derive our doctrine and our practice. And when it comes to locations in the New Testament writings where an author cites a source from the Old Testament, whether from Isaiah or Psalms or wherever, and the text that they quote, introducing it as it is written, and then they cite something, and that something that they cite in Greek does not line up with the Hebrew text that we have and know in the Masoretic text or elsewhere, then you're sort of in this quandary where you say, okay, well, the New Testament author has a citation that he's viewing as Scripture and using in a sort of normative sense. So how do we put those two things together? So it's a doctrinal question on the one hand, but it's also a text critical question at the same time. And that's part of what makes it so fascinating and challenging. And even to underscore that, in Hebrews a couple of times, the author of Hebrews even says, as the Holy Spirit said, and then gives word for word the Greek form from, you know, whatever it might be, Deuteronomy or something, and it doesn't 100% agree with the Masoretic form. And so it's not even as it is written, it's as the Holy Spirit said. So it's quite fascinating whenever you start to peel back the layers of, okay, what are the implications of that? And Karen Jobes, who wrote the afterword of the book, from an evangelical perspective, had done a lot of thinking on this. And we're really happy that she's retired now, but happy that she was able to contribute. So in a lot of respects, we're trying to carry that conversation forward and put some more rigor around what are some helpful ways to think about this? What are we saying? What are we not saying? And that kind of thing. So, or at least our contributors were trying to do that. Yeah. Well, and when you think about it, just so I can kind of summarize for the

audience and make sure I'm hearing you correctly. In our everyday vernacular, if we said the Holy Spirit says and quoted an English passage out of Scripture, if we said, you know, it is written, and let's say I quote the King James, which we all, you know, if you're familiar with the King James or if it's other translations, they use a different sort of text critical rationale. And so you could technically read a passage out of the King James Version that's sufficiently different from other English versions. And if you're saying, hey, thus says the Lord or the Holy Spirit says, and you're quoting King James, you're making a decision there, right? There's an interpretive decision that's happened prior to you even coming to the text that you're now quoting as the spirit of the Lord. We wouldn't have any issue with that in our modern-day vernacular, just you, you know, the three of us talking, we could say that and it would be like, okay, right? We get what we're doing there. Some folks might not like it, but some people might not like it, but the three of us, we'd probably, you know, if we're quoting the ESV, we're not going to be like, well, there's actually a really deep text critical issue, you know, in our everyday kind of conversations. We're not going to do that. Right. The deeper problem is that this has become encoded into inspired text. That sort of, I don't know whether I'd call it a looseness of language, but a freedom to sort of cite these more interpretive translations is now being coded back into an inspired text, the Greek New Testament. Is that, am I understanding the crux of the issue correctly? Yes. Yeah. And I would say that it's not always that a New Testament author is citing one of those more dynamic or loose translations of the Hebrew. It may be that they're citing a translation that's quite rigorous and aligned, but it just says something kind of different at one little phrase or just maybe one word than what the Hebrew text itself says. So it's not, it's not like, oh, they cited the message, like the Greek equivalent of the message sometimes. Right. Sometimes it's like, oh, well, they're citing the Greek equivalent of the NASB, but it says something kind of slightly different. That's, but, but the issue as you're stating it is right. Yeah. And that, and it spills over actually into the patristics as well. When you think of the hammering out of some of the creeds and some of the language that goes into that and their debates, you know, many of them were, you know, essentially reliant on the Septuagint. So there's, there's even a second generation impact of this as well. But the biggest part is apostolic use of the Septuagint. And there's, and to be clear, there's also sometimes non-use of the Septuagint. So you may, you may remember, we have a couple of case studies where it's clear that the apostles side with the Hebrew tradition very much against the Greek tradition. And so you actually have both phenomenon taking place at the same time. So a lot of folks would say, oh, the New Testament authors only use the Septuagint. That's kind of statement is problematic in a lot of ways. You have, you have the other phenomenon as well. So yeah, we're trying to, trying to sort of understand all of that in some respect and keep everything in its right place is the goal. Yeah. Cause even you could, I mean, just to give people a sense, there's a way that the Septuagint can actually shine light on the Hebrew text to some degree because, you know, the Hebrew text occasionally will have letters that are put together in arrangements, but without, you know, the vowels are added later. So it's just consonants. And so an arrangement of consonants could mean two different things. And occasionally the Septuagint may give us insight into what at least the ancients thought that meant. And so it's not that it's always the Septuagint's fault for not matching, right? Sometimes it's just, you know, our distance from the Hebrew text that would create these problems. I assume those would be similar in New Testament times. Am I right about that or not? Sure. Yeah. And, and so really, if you think about it, if you step back a bit, even though the, probably the main issue that prompts people to have this question is the New Testament use of the Greek as opposed to the Hebrew. There's actually a corollary issue, which is if you open up any New Testament, excuse me, any Old Testament with the exception of the King James and maybe the New King James, although they have some footnotes too, any modern English translation of the Old Testament will occasionally have to make choices where the editors believe that the Masoretic text that is based on in general, 99.9% of the time maybe has some sort of issue. And they might side with, they'll actually put in the text, the Septuagint reading because they believe that perhaps the Hebrew reading has somehow been lost or what have you. And so it's even raised, this issue is raised on that side of the coin. Like Deuteronomy 32 is a great example where it's just the text underneath the hood is actually quite tricky. And so English translations will often piece it together from the Hebrew and a little bit of the Greek thrown in with some Dead Sea Scrolls added because they're trying to figure out what was the actual text because it appears to have been kind of mildly polluted over time. And again, in certain points, it's not rampant, but certain places. So it's an Old Testament question too. So on the, on, just to return to that issue of authority, where do you guys kind of land on it? Not the first one, not the normative authority, right? Because it's not an original autograph. It is a translation of the Hebrew. And so where do you all land on that derivative authority versus, you know, sort of an interpretive authority? Where did we land? If you landed. Well, I'm not, yeah, I mean, you know, it wasn't a, we weren't asking everyone to land in the same place, but. Would you say though that the normative authority question for you all is, is sort of not really an option for evangelicals? I think that's right. Right. Okay. And what's interesting, even, so we had, we had one Catholic contributor, Roman Catholic contributor. And even, he's not representing all of Roman Catholicism, but he's done a lot of thinking on this particular topic and doctrine of scripture type stuff. And actually was originally Lutheran. And I was, I didn't know what, what he would ultimately come up with. And he landed in a very similar place in terms of the normativity of the Hebrew. He nuances out some things differently in other, other regards, but he was just citing totally different people than we typically would. So that was kind of an interesting phenomenon. But I think in general, the, in the patristic chapter, I think helps underscore this. The church fathers largely use the Septuagint, but they, they do it because they believe, most of them, they believe that it's the best way that they can access the Hebrew, even if they didn't have the facility in Hebrew. Yeah. So it's not that they love the Septuagint because they love the Septuagint, although with origin, that was a little bit of a question. It's because they felt like it was the most viable conduit to the Hebrew, which implies that they believe that the Hebrew was the definitive authority. They may just not kind of like most people today in the church, they don't have competency in Hebrew. And so the next best thing is a good English translation, what have you. And so we all kind of landed there ultimately. That being said though, even though we believe that the Hebrew text is the definitive authoritative text, the Septuagint still, in our opinion, and there's debate on this, but our opinion, it still plays a role in helping perfect that text to get it as good as possible. And so, and that, but that was one of the big debates in the reformation period. And so one of the, one of the chapters deals with the reformers and the post-reformation scholastics. Does a great job because there hasn't been a lot of work on that. One of their biggest debates was, can we use the Septuagint to do that, to, to have a role in correcting the Masoretic? And that was actually a big divide in the post-reformation period. And in a lot of respects still continues today. I personally think it's viable, but that's not the only kind of reform position. And so that is a place of ongoing debate. So in terms of normative authority, Hebrew, yes, Septuagint though still has a role as do old Latin translations, the Aramaic targums, that kind of stuff. So they have varying levels of helpfulness in the goal of perfecting the Hebrew text because it was passed on by, providentially by a, a human process, I think, superintended by God, but still subject to normal scribal stuff. So. What would you say the same and maybe comment a little bit on how the Septuagint differs from some of those other translations that Greg mentioned, you know, the Aramaic targums, the, even the Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts, you know, some of those kinds of things. How should we differentiate or should we differentiate between the Septuagint and some of those other things? Yeah, I would say in principle, we don't need to differentiate between them, at least if we're thinking in terms of textual criticism, right? So the, the Masoretic text, which is the sort of majority tradition of Hebrew manuscripts that has been passed down for thousands

Translate, collect, analyze all available evidence, whether it's Greek, whether it's Aramaic, whether it's Syriac, whatever else, Dead Sea Scrolls, Hebrew evidence, other evidence, even Latin Vulgate, Old Latin, things like that. So from a text critical perspective, we don't need to distinguish the Septuagint as sort of a specially privileged bit of evidence. Now, it's older in some cases than, for example, the Latin Vulgate or the Syriac. But it's not principally different, okay? So from that perspective, I don't think we need to look at it differently. But I think we can say that to the extent that this would be true for any translation, English Bible, French Bible, whatever, to the extent that a translation accurately and consistently conveys the same meaning, right, the same wording, and I know there's a lot of discussion to be had just right there. Right. It's going to have a high degree of that same authority, which is why we can stand, you know, in front of a church and read an English Bible or French Bible and say this is the Word of the Lord, and it is because there's a derived authority. So I think there's a sort of a matter of degree, so to speak, a good translation, you know, given a higher degree of authority than a wonky translation or a very loose translation. And so, yeah, it's to be distinguished normative from derivative in principle, but there's a graded sort of, I guess, scale, for lack of a better description, that's involved there. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up, and many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian-owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free retirement defense guide, or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. Yeah, I appreciate that. I think the consistency is really helpful to hear that aspect of this. Maybe speak to, so you mentioned earlier, right, which intuitively, I think I get why earlier is better, right? Because there's less for it to be derived from. You know, if you make a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, eventually you're going to get some degradation. And so later manuscripts just, they may be drawing on a number of different sources and not necessarily looking more directly at the Hebrew. So is that, am I right on that, why that earlier matters? Yeah, that's true. Another big factor when it comes to Old Testament textual criticism, one of the reasons that the Dead Sea Scrolls were such a historic discovery is that most of our textual evidence that's in Hebrew for the Hebrew Bible is from a much, much later time. Most of the cases, it's medieval, or maybe a little bit earlier, maybe Byzantine in some cases. So older is certainly better. But one of the major developments that occurred in the textual history of the Hebrew Bible is that sometime in the first century, right around the time that the Romans destroyed the temple itself, the kinds of texts that survive almost entirely sort of centralize around the text we now have in the Masoretic tradition. So starting from about AD 70 onwards, almost all Hebrew evidence and any other witness to the Hebrew Bible, like the Syriac or the Vulgate or others, are going to look almost exactly like the Masoretic tradition, okay? And so there's a kind of broader contours like a general principle, earlier is better, still applies, but you do need to weigh it, obviously, like we talk about in New Testament textual criticism as well. And then last question on this, and either of you guys can answer it, but as we think about, you know, so, okay, yes, the Dead Sea Scrolls are this amazing find, right? Because they're sort of pushing Hebrew back, and that's extremely helpful, but they weren't widely circulated. At least my impression is that they weren't widely circulated. A lot of those are very much communally oriented documents. You know, the community rule, for instance, doesn't seem like it would have necessarily needed to be circulated all around the place versus what we have with the Septuagint, because it's a translation of the Old Testament and there's widespread understanding of the Old Testament is relevant at the time, inspired, you know, used at the time. You're going to get a broader circulation of the Septuagint. How does some of that play into the way we're thinking about the Septuagint as a different sort of degree than we might think of some of these other manuscripts? Well, one, maybe I can at least start with this. One way to think about it, if you look at what the early Christian church is doing, you know, writing gospels and circulating them, writing letters, circulating them. You know, one of the things that I find incredibly interesting and not really discussed as much as probably it should, is that the early Christians did not feel the need. This is Paul. I mean, Paul is a converted Pharisee. It's really fascinating that he did not feel the need to institute some sort of linguistic Judaizing. So as they're evangelizing the world, according to the Great Commission, they're not going around saying, hey, by the way, to know God's word, because Jesus said, hey, all this is about me and so forth. Go and therefore and preach the gospel to the nations, Luke 24 type stuff. They don't go around saying, okay, we're in Corinth. All y'all need to go and take Will Ross's Hebrew class, which you should, before you can read the Bible. They never did that. It's like, you need to now linguistically Judaize and then you can read the inspired text. What they did is they just used what I like to call the pew Bible that was in Corinth or wherever, which nine times out of 10 is going to be a Greek form thanks to Alexander the Great. And so like when I go preaching somewhere, I'll always, if I'm guest preaching, I'll ask them, what's your pew Bible? And that's the one I'll read because that's what they're gonna be familiar with. I'm certainly not going to show up and just say, okay, open up your Masoretic text, your BHS to Leviticus, and let's just go after in Hebrew because that's the inspired text. I'm also going to say, why don't we just use the local version that you have? And so on the Greek side of the equation, the proliferation of the Greek Bible largely due to the Hellenization project of Alexander the Great and all the aftermath of that meant that everywhere the apostles went, so far as we can tell based on the evidence in Acts and the epistles and so forth, there were Greek Bibles or at least some awareness of something in Greek that they could tap into. So that to me, I think is actually a pretty interesting part of all this, especially in a world where knowledge of the Hebrew was on the wane outside of clerical circles. And that's very, very different than the cloister of the Qumran community at the Dead Sea Scrolls. It's a different vibe with them. But there were even, you know, it's interesting. There were even Greek scrolls at Qumran and elsewhere around the Dead Sea. So even those folks who were trying to get out of town and form their own hippie commune as a protest to the, the corrupt Jerusalem establishment in their day, they still had Greek scrolls and they're actually quite interesting and important. So even they weren't immune to the process, but I don't know, Will, if you want to add to that or clean that up. No, I think I would just say that, yeah, you're part of the, again, challenge in thinking about the Septuagint and how it originated, how widespread it was, is we don't know the origin story for any given book. Well, we know it as the, the origin story we know best is for the Greek Pentateuch. And that's not the letter of Aristeas, which we don't even need to get into because that's a sort of a legend. But we have the sort of the best scholarly understanding for when and where and why the Greek Pentateuch was translated. But for any other given book, it's not that it's up in the air, but it's much less certain when, where, who, and why, what source texts they may have used. And you've got to remember that, you know, wherever you are, let's say you're a Jew living in the early first century BC in the Fayum in Egypt. One relevant question is what kind of, what quality Hebrew source text do you have access to when you set out and say, you know what, it's about time somebody translations.

you know, Leviticus or, you know, Micah or what have you. So there is a certain, a high degree of importance to remembering that there's, it's an analog age. Everything is hand copied. There's a locality and sort of built in slow distribution mechanism where manuscripts, which are large and heavy and expensive to produce and to copy and to store, right? These things aren't quick to be distributed and there's limits to what anybody might have access to. So you're going to just, like Greg was saying, right? You're going to use whatever you have to hand. And I think it's reasonable to conclude that, you know, educated scribe type people, whether it's Paul or the translators, the Septuagint, they're going to know that whatever texts they may have to hand might not be the best text that exists. But, you know, the best text that exists, you know, may have been copied by Jeremiah, the scribe. Everybody knows him. He's the best. He lives in Jerusalem, but here I am in the Phallium. I can't get to that text. I don't have access to it, so I'll work with the best one I have access to. So there's a sort of built in awareness of varying levels of quality, but limitations to what you can access. No, it's a really good point. Really good point. Let me ask a sort of a. Oh, go ahead. Go ahead. I was going to put a little period on that. Yeah, I think so much of the especially when you talk like online type hype around the Septuagint for against a lot of times the operating assumption is that things back then are like they are now. And everyone has Dropbox and PDFs they can send around and that you could just phone, you know, your buddy at the monastery down, you know, half the world away and they could just email you the better copy of Micah. And that's just profoundly not true. And so one of the things that makes the Septuagint stuff interesting is that it forces you to reckon with what history was actually like as opposed to a slightly tidier retelling of history where every text everywhere is the same and so forth. And it's just, it's just not, I mean, the data simply just doesn't bear that out. And so what we're trying to do with this book is have a better answer for how can everyone in the book has a high doctrine of scripture. How can we have a better way of telling this story that's actually more, that matches the data as it really, as they really are as opposed to kind of wishful thinking about what maybe it should be. Yeah. As if, you know, magically when Paul is in Corinth, he has the right manuscript to cite. He just opens his blogos and down, you know, it's right there, right? Work ordnance. Given that, given that last comment and we're running out of time, I just wanted to ask a question. It's something I didn't look up before the interview because I, I've used the Greek Septuagint. If I'm going to use it, I use the Greek Septuagint. Like I have the paper copy you held up Ross probably or something like that. That's unfortunate. There's a better one out there that you should use. It's the Septuagint, the reader's edition edited by Gregory R. Lanier and William A. Ross. Oh, I'll have to pick that up. Yeah, you can put it in the show notes when I was in my MDiv back in the day. So yeah, it's been a while. Is there for just everyday Christians sort of interested in Septuagint? Is there an English translation of Septuagint? We just asked this on the internet the other day. Yeah, there's three. The older one from the 1800s is by Lancelot Brenton. And so it kind of has a King James feel, but it's useful. And then there's two modern ones. The new English translation of the Septuagint, which you can get online for free. They have PDFs out there and there's a Lexham has done one. Lexham Press has done the Lexham English Septuagint. And I don't think they have it. Well, they probably have it on the Bible software packages, but I don't, it's not publicly available. Yeah, they both have their pros and cons, but they're still useful. And then there's some French and German ones as well, if you really want to be fancy. I just think it's interesting. I mean, I've taught how to study the Bible sort of classes in churches and different things like that. And one of the things I usually recommend to people is to do version comparison. And I'd never really thought about the English Septuagint being an option to look at different Hebrew aspects. And so, or especially if you're studying the book of Hebrews and it's full, I mean, it's like 90 plus quotations, citations of the Old Testament. The vast majority, if not all of them are from the Septuagint or whatever you want to call it, tradition, not from the Hebrew, ironically. The general consensus is that the author of the Hebrews is not interacting with the Hebrews source text for its scriptural quotations. And so when you read them in Hebrews and then you go look them up in your NIV, that's from the Hebrew, right? Whatever. It may not match. And so that can raise questions like, oh, has Hebrews misquoted something like the author of Hebrews? Because it doesn't match what I have on the other side of my Old Testament side of my Bible. And the reality is the author of Hebrews is a very good quoter, if you will. It's not inaccurate. He's just using the Septuagint. And so what you have to do if you want to do it right, if you have the time, what you have to do is not look at your ESV or NIV of that quotation. You've got to look it up in an English translation Septuagint if you want to do it the most robust way possible. And that will help explain, oh, that's why it's this word, not that word, because he's using the Septuagint. There we go. And so it actually is a pretty, I don't know, significant part of the process. If you really want to get down to the weeds, I would include it in that workflow. But, you know, if you've got five minutes, it's tricky to know where to spend your time. Yeah. So I get that, too. No, I just it's interesting to think about. And like I said, I hadn't really wrestled that one to the ground. I guess I've never used an English version of the Septuagint, so I never even thought of it until we were you guys were talking. So I think that's a fascinating way to sort of pull this in, understanding that, of course, it's, you know, like any other translation. You want to treat it like almost any other translation. It's good data. It's good to look at. It helps you understand some of what's happening in the New Testament. But the inspired text lurks behind somewhere in the Hebrew, you know, Vorlager. Right. And that original autograph is what we're really trying to be faithful to as much as possible. So very cool. Well, gentlemen, I really appreciate you being on. I know we kind of only scratched the surface on Septuagint issues, which isn't surprising in only about forty five minutes. But appreciate your time and really enjoyed the book. So IVP gives listeners a 20 percent discount on these books. And so when you click the link in the show description, it'll take you to the IVP website. If you order off the website, put in the discount code that'll be in the course or in the show description as well. You can get the authority of the Septuagint biblical, historical and theological approaches by Greg Lanier and Will Ross for a 20 percent discount. So I'd encourage you to do that. I enjoy the book. If you really like to dig in and think about these topics in a very academic mode, it's a book of essays. So if you're if you're into that sort of thing, I would really recommend this. It was very helpful. So thanks, gentlemen, for being on. Any last words? Appreciate you having us on here. And yeah, hope the book finds wide readership and it's helpful to people. Absolutely. Well, very cool. All right, gentlemen. Well, I'll call it a day there and we'll see on the next episode of Thinking Christian. Take care, everybody. Just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to LifeAudio.com, you'll find dozens of other faith-centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more. Scripture and brain science agree. Meditating on God's word transforms us and reduces stress in our lives. I'm Jodi Nisnick, host of So Much More Creating Space for God, a scripture meditation podcast. 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