Quotes from Septuagint

  • Thread starter Thread starter Hans_A
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
H

Hans_A

Guest
Greetings, I have read on other posts and in tracts that two thirds of the New Testament quotes the Septuagint. When I mentioned this to a Protestant friend, he asked, “Which quotations?”.

I guess I should have studied up on that before I made the remark , so could anyone please help me out? Thanks in advance.

Maranatha,
Hans
 
Did Jesus quote from the Apocrypha?

The short answer is yes—and so did the Apostles.

Jesus and the Gospel writers referenced the Deuterocanonicals in the following instances:

Matthew 6:12, 14-15—“Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors; if you forgive others their transgressions, your heavenly Father will forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, neither will your heavenly father forgive your transgressions.”
Sirach 28:2—“Forgive your neighbor’s injustice; then when you pray, your own sins will be forgiven.”

Luke 1:17 (describing John the Baptist)—“He will go before him in the spirit and power of Elijah to turn the hearts of fathers towards children and the disobediant to the understanding of the righteous, to prepare a people fit for the Lord.”
Sirach 48:10—“You are destined, it is written, in time to come, to put an end to wrath before the day of the Lord, to turn back the hearts of fathers towards their sons, and to re-establish the tribes of Jacob.”

Luke 1:28, 1:42—“And coming to her, he said, ‘Hail, favored one! The Lord is with you!’…Most blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.”
Judith 13:18—"Then Uzziah said to her: 'Blessed are you, daughter, by the Most High God, above all the women of the earth; and blessed be the Lord God, the Creator of heaven and earth.

Luke 1:52—“He has thrown down the rulers from their thrones, but lifted up the lowly.”
Sirach 10:14—“The thrones of the arrogant God overturns, and establishes the lowly in their stead.”

Luke 12:19-20—“I shall say to myself, ‘Now as for you, you have so many good things stored up for many years, rest, eat, drink, be merry!’ But God said to him, ‘You fool, this night your life will be demanded of you; and the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?’”
Sirach 11:19—“When he says: ‘I have found rest, now I will feast on my possessions,’ he does not know how long it will be till he dies and leaves them to others.”

Luke 18:22—“When Jesus heard this, he said to him, ‘There is still one thing left for you: sell all that you have and distribute it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.’”
Sirach 29:11—“Dispose of your treasure as the Most High commands, for that will profit you more than the gold.”

John 3:12—“If I tell you about earthly things and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you about heavenly things?”
Wisdom 9:16—“Scarce do we guess the things on earth, and what is within our grasp we find with difficulty; but when things are in heaven, who can search them out?”

John 5:18—“For this reason the Jews tried all the more to kill him, because he not only broke the Sabbath, but he also called God his own Father, making himself equal to God.”
Wisdom 2:16—“He judges us debased; he holds aloof from our paths as from things impure. He calls blest the destiny of the just and boasts that God is his Father.”

John 10:29—“My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one can take them out of the Father’s hand.”
Wisdom 3:1—“But the souls of the just are in the hand of God, and no torment shall touch them.”
 
Paul and James allude to them as well:

Romans 2:11—“There is no partiality with God.”
Sirach 35:12—“For he is a God of justice, who knows no favorites.”

Romans 9:21—“Or does not the potter have a right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for a noble purpose andanother fo an ignoble one?”
Wisdom 15:7—“For truly the potter, laboriously working the soft earth, molds for our service each several article: both the vessels that serve for clean purposes, and their opposites, all alike; as to what shall be the use of each vessel of eiother class, the worker in clay is the judge.”

Romans 11:24—“For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counsellor?”
Wisdom 9:13—“For what man knows God’s counsel, or who can conceive what the Lord intends?”

1 Thessalonians 2:16—"(The enemies of Christ persecute us), trying to prevent us from speaking to the Gentiles that they may be saved, thus constantly filling up the measure of their sins. But the wrath of God has finally begun to come upon them."
2 Maccabees 6:14—“Thus, in dealing with other nations, the Lord patiently waits until they reach the full measure of their sins before he punishes them; but with us he has decided to deal differently”

James 1:13—“No one experiencing temptation should say, ‘I am being tempted by God’; for God is not subject to temptation to evil, and he himself tempts no one.”
Sirach 15:11-12—“Say not: ‘It was God’s doing that I fell away’; for what he hates he does not do. Say not: ‘It was he who set me astray’; for he has no need of wicked man.”

James 5:2-3—“Your wealth has rotted away, your clothes have become moth-eaten, your gold and silver hav corroded, and that corrosion will be a testimony against you; it will devour your flesh like a fire.”
Judith 16:17—'The Lord Almighty will requite them; in the day of judgement he will punish them: he will send fire and worms into their flesh, and they shall burn and suffer forever."

Now, of course, you may say that these don’t sound like exact quotes, and you’d be right; but there are thousands of allusions in the New Testament from the Old, both Deuterocanon and not, which are not exact quotes. Romans 11:34, for example, also has an allusion to Job 15:8, but ironically the allusion to Wisdom 9:13 is closer in actual wording to it than Job is. And, of course, if you want to get into loose allusions, we could expand the above list to ten times the size it is. Then there are also the cases of outright error in some New Testament quotes, such as Matthew 27:9, in which Matthew quotes “the prophet Jeremiah”, when the allusion is actually found nowhere in Jeremiah but rather in Zecheriah 11:12-13.

There is also the case of some Old Testament books not being quoted by Jesus in the New Testament: He didn’t quote from Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Ecclesiastes, or the Song of Solomon. And yet they are still considered to be canonical Scripture even though He did not reference them. 🙂
 
I’m no bible scholar, and recently a friend of mine asked this question: When Saint Paul quotes from the Old Testament, is the Greek exactly what one would find in the LXX version of the Old Testament?

I thought I learned a long time ago that Saint Paul’s quotations from the Old Testament were from the LXX, but I’m not sure. My bible commentary doesn’t mention this, and I spent about 45 minutes paging through the NJBC, but couldn’t find an answer.
 
I checked out that Septuagint site. What depth! I have that one bookmarked to study.
 
I wanted to thank all of you for your (name removed by moderator)ut. It was all very usefull.

Maranatha,
Hans
 
40.png
MEV:
I checked out that Septuagint site. What depth! I have that one bookmarked to study.
Click to expand...
Yip. I think that that site provides the most convincing evidence that the LXX was the bible of the earliest Christians (thus proving the canonicity of the duetero-canonical books), but the problem is, is that the information is so complex that it would be hard to break it down for apologetical purposes.
 
Can anyone tell me the real story about St. Jerome and his preface in the Vulgate about the deuterocanonicals?

Maranatha,
Hans
 
I don’t know if any of you have come up against the KJV only crowd, but since the KJV uses the Masoretic Hebrew for the Old Testament, they do everything in their power to discredit the LXX even to the point of claiming that it was produced by Origen in 250 AD. I thought I might share a little quote from around 182-188 AD which dispels that particular myth.
Irenaeus Against Heresies - Book 3:
  1. God, then, was made man, and the Lord did Himself save us, giving us the token of the Virgin. But not as some allege, among those now presuming to expound the Scripture, [thus:] “Behold, a young woman shall conceive, and bring forth a son,” as Theodotion the Ephesian has interpreted, and Aquila of Pontus, both Jewish proselytes. The Ebionites, following these, assert that He was begotten by Joseph; thus destroying, as far as in them lies, such a marvellous dispensation of God, and setting aside the testimony of the prophets which proceeded from God. For truly this prediction was uttered before the removal of the people to Babylon; that is, anterior to the supremacy acquired by the Medes and Persians. But it was interpreted into Greek by the Jews themselves, much before the period of our Lord’s advent, that there might remain no suspicion that perchance the Jews, complying with our humour, did put this interpretation upon these words. They indeed, had they been cognizant of our future existence, and that we should use these proofs from the Scriptures, would themselves never have hesitated to burn their own Scriptures, which do declare that all other nations partake of [eternal] life, and show that they who boast themselves as being the house of Jacob and the people of Israel, am disinherited from the grace of God.
  2. For before the Romans possessed their kingdom, while as yet the Macedonians held Asia, Ptolemy the son of Lagus, being anxious to adorn the library which he had founded in Alexandria, with a collection of the writings of all men, which were [works] of merit, made request to the people of Jerusalem, that they should have their Scriptures translated into the Greek language. And they – for at that time they were still subject to the Macedonians – sent to Ptolemy seventy of their elders, who were thoroughly skilled in the Scriptures and in both the languages, to carry out what he had desired. But he, wishing to test them individually, and fearing lest they might perchance, by taking counsel together, conceal the truth in the Scriptures, by their interpretation, separated them from each other, and commanded them all to write the same translation. He did this with respect to all the books. But when they came together in the same place before Ptolemy, and each of them compared his own interpretation with that of every other, God was indeed glorified, and the Scriptures were acknowledged as truly divine. For all of them read out the common translation [which they had prepared] in the very same words and the very same names, from beginning to end, so that even the Gentiles present perceived that the Scriptures had been interpreted by the inspiration of God. And there was nothing astonishing in God having done this – He who, when, during the captivity of the people under Nebuchadnezzar, the Scriptures had been corrupted, and when, after seventy years, the Jews had returned to their own land, then, in the times of Artaxerxes king of the Persians, inspired Esdras the priest, of the tribe of Levi, to recast all the words of the former prophets, and to re-establish with the people the Mosaic legislation.
Click to expand...
newadvent.org/fathers/0103321.htm
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top