For many modern Christians, a footnote in their Bible that says “Some manuscripts read...” is just a scholarly curiosity. There is a widespread assumption that the Hebrew text used as the basis for our Old Testament translations today—the Masoretic Text—is the “original,” and that all ancient translations, such as the Greek Septuagint (LXX), are merely secondary interpretations.
However, for the first four hundred years of Church history, this assumption was reversed. The Greek Old Testament was the Bible of the Apostles, the Church Fathers, and the rapidly expanding Gentile mission.
The debate over which version holds primacy is not just academic dusty-corner work; it involves crucial messianic prophecies and the very structure of salvation history. This post explores why the Septuagint historically carries more authority for Christians than the Masoretic Text (MT), and how history has vindicated the Bible of the early Church.
The Bible of the Apostles
The strongest argument for the Christian authority of the Septuagint is simple: it is the Bible that the New Testament authors used.
The writers of the New Testament quoted the Old Testament approximately 300 times. Scholars estimate that in roughly 75–80% of these instances, they quote the Greek Septuagint, even where it diverges significantly from the later Masoretic Hebrew text.
If we believe the New Testament is inspired Scripture, the text it relies upon to make its theological arguments carries an inherent divine endorsement. The book of Hebrews, for example, builds entire theological arguments on readings found only in the Septuagint. To reject the authority of the LXX is, in many places, to undermine the foundation of New Testament teaching.
A Tale of Two Texts: Development and Timeline
To understand the conflict, we must understand the timeline. The two texts are separated by over a thousand years of development.
1. The Septuagint (LXX): The Older Witness
The Septuagint was not created all at once. The process began in Alexandria, Egypt, around 250 BC. According to tradition, commissioned by King Ptolemy II, Jewish scholars translated the Torah (the first five books) into Greek to serve the vast, Greek-speaking Jewish diaspora who could no longer read Hebrew. Over the next century, the Prophets and the Writings were added.
Crucially, the Alexandrian canon was broader than the one later adopted in Palestine, including books Christians know as the “Deuterocanon” or Apocrypha (such as Wisdom of Solomon, Maccabees, and Tobit). These books were read as Scripture by Hellenistic Jews and subsequently adopted by the early Christians.
2. The Masoretic Text (MT): The Medieval Standard
The Hebrew text used in most modern Bibles was standardized by the Masoretes—Jewish scribe-scholars in Tiberias and Babylon—between the 7th and 10th centuries AD.
While the Masoretes were incredibly meticulous copiers, the textual tradition they solidified had already undergone significant streamlining in the 2nd century AD, following the destruction of the Jewish Temple. During this period, Rabbinic Judaism reorganized itself, moving away from the textual plurality of the Second Temple period toward a single, standardized Hebrew text that reflected their evolving theological needs in an era of conflict with rising Christianity.
The “Re-Hebraizing” of the Text and Messianic Prophecy
For centuries, the prevailing view was that whenever the Greek LXX differed from the Hebrew MT, the Greek must be a “loose translation” or an error.
That view collapsed in the mid-20th century with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) at Qumran. These ancient Hebrew manuscripts, dating back to 200 BC, predate the Masoretic Text by a millennium.
To the shock of many scholars, the Dead Sea Scrolls frequently agreed with the Septuagint against the Masoretic Text. This proved that the Septuagint translators were not “loose”; they were often faithfully translating a much older Hebrew parent text (Vorlage) that the later Masoretic tradition rejected.
This leads to a sensitive but unavoidable historical reality: the standardization of the Hebrew text in the post-Christian era involved “polemical editing.” As the synagogue and the church parted ways, Jewish scribes naturally favored textual variants that blunted Christian apologetics and aligned with Talmudic theology.
The Church Father Justin Martyr, writing in the 2nd Century, explicitly accused Jewish scribes of removing passages from the Scriptures to hide their Messianic application. While modern scholars might not call it a conspiracy, they acknowledge that theological choices were made in preserving one Hebrew textual tradition over others.
The Smoking Guns: Three Key Examples
The differences between the texts are not merely minor grammatical variations. They affect vital messianic prophecies.
1. The Crucifixion: “Pierced” vs. “Lion” (Psalm 22:16)
This is the most famous dispute. The Psalm describes a suffering figure surrounded by enemies.
* The Septuagint (Christian reading): “They pierced my hands and feet.” This was viewed by the early Church as a prophecy of the crucifixion.
* The Masoretic Text (Jewish reading): “Like a lion my hands and feet.” This Hebrew reading (ka’ari) is grammatically broken—it lacks a verb—and obscures the imagery of crucifixion.
The evidence for the Septuagint here is so overwhelming that almost all modern English translations (ESV, NIV, NASB, CSB)—even those that generally prioritize the Masoretic Text—abandon the Hebrew MT in this verse. They default to the “pierced” reading, implicitly acknowledging that the Masoretic Text is corrupted at this point.
For centuries, this was a stalemate. Then, archaeologists found the Nahal Hever Psalms scroll near the Dead Sea. This 1st-century Hebrew fragment contains the word ka’aru (”they pierced/dug”), vindicating the Septuagint reading as the ancient original.
2. The Divinity of Messiah (Deuteronomy 32:43)
In Hebrews 1:6, the New Testament author seeks to prove that Jesus is superior to angels, quoting God saying, “Let all God’s angels worship him.”
You will not find this verse in the standard Masoretic Hebrew text; it is completely missing. It exists, however, in the Septuagint. The Masoretic tradition likely excised the line because the command for divine beings to worship a Messianic figure sounded dangerously close to the Christian claim of Jesus’ divinity, or perhaps polytheistic to strict monotheists. Once again, a Dead Sea Scroll fragment (4QDeut) contains the phrase, supporting the longer reading used by the New Testament.
3. The Timeline of Creation (Genesis 5 & 11)
The primeval genealogies differ radically. The Masoretic timeline places creation roughly around 4000 BC. The Septuagint provides much longer life spans for the patriarchs before they have children, pushing the timeline back to roughly 5500 BC.
Why the difference? In the first century AD, there was a widespread Jewish and early Christian expectation that the Messiah would arrive in the middle of the “sixth millennium” after creation (around the year 5500) to usher in a seventh millennium of Sabbath rest. Jesus arrived exactly on time according to the Septuagint chronology.
By shortening the timeline by 1,500 years, the later Rabbinic Hebrew text effectively “disqualified” Jesus as the Messiah by arguing the world was too young for the Messianic age to have yet arrived.
The Threefold Witness: LXX, Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Vulgate
The credibility of the Masoretic Text is further eroded when we look at the “threefold cord” of ancient witnesses that stand against it.
It is not just the Greek Septuagint that differs from the Masoretic Text; the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Latin Vulgate also differ.
When St. Jerome translated the Vulgate in the late 4th Century, he bypassed the Greek and went directly to the Hebrew manuscripts available in his day. While Jerome is famous for championing the “Hebrew Verity,” his Latin translation frequently aligns with the Septuagint and the Dead Sea Scrolls against the later Masoretic Text.
For example, in the crucial Psalm 22:16 passage, Jerome translated the Hebrew as foderunt (”they dug/pierced”), not “lion.” This proves that the Hebrew texts available to scholars in the 4th Century—texts far older than the Masoretic manuscripts we have today—still contained the Messianic readings.
When the Dead Sea Scrolls (200 BC), the Septuagint (250 BC), and Jerome’s Hebrew sources (400 AD) all agree against the Masoretic Text (900 AD), a clear picture emerges. The Masoretic Text represents a specific, narrowed, and later tradition—one that appears to have been “cherry-picked” and altered to fit the theological constraints of post-Temple, anti-Christian Judaism. The Christian Old Testament, preserved in the Septuagint, represents the older, wider, and more authoritative form of the Word of God.
Conclusion: Why This Matters for Every Christian
This is not merely a debate for academics in ivory towers; it is a vital issue for every Christian who opens a Bible.
We live in an age that idolizes “the original languages,” often assuming that because a text is in Hebrew, it must be the purest source. But we must remember that texts are not neutral; they are shepherded by communities. By defaulting to the Masoretic Text, modern Protestant Bibles have unwittingly accepted a version of the Old Testament that was curated by a community explicitly rejecting the deity of Christ.
If we blindly accept the footnotes that say “The Hebrew reads...” without understanding which Hebrew and from when, we risk adopting a sanitized Scripture that obscures the very Messiah we worship.
Christians are called to be vigilant, not just in their behavior, but in their sources of truth. We cannot afford to be passive recipients of “scholarly consensus” when that consensus relies on a text stripped of its most potent witnesses to the Incarnation. To embrace the Septuagint is not to reject the Hebrew heritage; it is to reclaim the Bible of the Apostles—the Bible that fully prepares the way for the Lord.
