The Septuagint and New Testament Quotations

The Septuagint (LXX) was produced in Alexandria beginning in the third century BC, traditionally by seventy-two Jewish scholars working on the Torah. By the first century AD, it was the Bible of the Greek-speaking diaspora and of early Christianity. The New Testament, written in Greek, quotes the Old Testament approximately 300 times; of these, the majority follow the Septuagint over the Hebrew when the two differ.\n\nFor many centuries, scholars debated whether the LXX's divergences from the Masoretic Text (MT) were errors or reflected a different Hebrew Vorlage. The Dead Sea Scrolls partly resolved this: many Hebrew manuscripts at Qumran agree with LXX readings against MT in places where previously only Greek witnesses preserved those readings. This confirmed that the LXX is often translating a genuine, earlier Hebrew tradition.\n\nApologetically, this matters in two ways. First, New Testament citations that follow LXX are not errors but drawing on a legitimate textual tradition. Second, the fact that both Jewish and Christian communities preserved multiple textual streams (proto-Masoretic, Samaritan, and LXX) shows that Scripture was copied and guarded rather than rewritten to eliminate variation. The messiness of transmission, paradoxically, is evidence of fidelity rather than fabrication.