Human Fears Of Extinction–When Christ Returns There Are Global Fears of Space Based Dangers

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Now comes the fascinating part—this word is used in the Old Testament that Jesus and His apostles studied. It is the very word we have been studying for the last two weeks. How do I know that?

If Jesus went to WalMart this week to buy a Bible, what version would He buy?

Have you ever thought that?

We can find the answer to that question in the Bible you hold tonight.

The grouping and ordering of the books in the Old Testament Hebrew Bible is different from what Christians have in their Bibles because the Christian Bible adopted the order in the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible.

The Septuagint, the first translation of the Hebrew Bible, was made in the third century B.C. by Jewish scribes, descendants of those trained in Ezra’s Great Synagogue of Jerusalem, who were very well-versed in Hebrew and Greek. This translation became very popular among Jews in the first two centuries before Christ because many Jews in those days did not understand Hebrew. Their ancestors had left Israel centuries before, and generation after generation gradually lost the ability to read the Scriptures in Hebrew. Many of the Jews in Jesus’ day used the Septuagint as their Bible. Quite naturally, the early Christians also used the Septuagint in their meetings and for personal reading; and many of the New Testament apostles quoted it when they wrote the Gospels and Epistles in Greek. The order of the books in the Septuagint is the same order in our Bibles today.

Jesus and the Apostles studied, memorized, used, quoted, and read most often from the Bible of their day which was called the LXX (Septuagint). Since Matthew wrote primarily to convince the Jews that Jesus of Nazareth was indeed their promised Messiah, it follows as a matter of course that his Gospel is saturated with the Hebrew Scriptures. When Jesus quotes the Old Testament in Matthew He uses the Hebrew text 10% and the Greek LXX 90% of the time.

The Septuagint (LXX) was the Hebrew Old Testament translated into Greek. After his conquest of the Babylonian Empire, Alexander the Great promoted the Greek language throughout the known world, and thus almost everyone – including the Jews – spoke Greek. Hebrew fell into disuse, being reserved primarily for ceremonial purposes (like the use of Latin among Roman Catholics). In order to make the Jewish Scriptures (what we call the Old Testament) available to the average Jewish reader, a project was undertaken under the sponsorship of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285-246 BC.) to translate the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek. Seventy scholars were commissioned to complete this work and their result is known as the “Septuagint” (“70”) translation. (This is often abbreviated as “LXX”.)

According to Jewish legend, in ca. 250 B.C., Ptolemy Philadelphus brought together 72 scholars who translated the Old Testament into Greek in 72 days. Thus, the Latin word for 70, “Septuagint” (LXX), was the name attached to this translation. Probably translated over the period from 250 B.C. to 125 B.C. in Alexandria, Egypt, the Septuagint was the most important and widely used Greek translation of the Old Testament.