Q
Did Jesus and the apostles, including Paul, quote from the Septuagint?
A
There are absolutely no manuscripts pre-dating the third century A.D. to validate
the claim that Jesus or Paul quoted a Greek Old Testament. Quotations by Jesus and
Paul in new versions may match readings in the so-called Septuagint because new
versions are from the exact same fourth and fifth century A.D. manuscripts which
underlie the document sold today and called the Septuagint. These manuscripts are
Alexandrinus, Vaticanus, and Sinaiticus.
According to the colophon on the end of Sinaiticus, it came from Origen’s Hexapla.
The others likely did also. Even church historians, Jerome, Hort, and our contemporary
D.A. Carson, would agree that this is probably true. Origen wrote his Hexapla two
hundred years after the life of Christ and Paul. NIV New Testament and Old
Testament quotes may match occasionally because they were both penned by the same
hand — a hand which recast both Old and New Testament to suit his Platonic and
Gnostic leanings. New versions take the Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, and Alexandrinus
manuscripts — which are in fact Origen’s Hexapla — and change the traditional
Masoretic Old Testament text to match these. Alfred Martin, who is the past vice-
president of Moody Bible Institute, called Origen “unsafe.” Origen’s Hexapla is a
very unsafe source to use to change the historic Old Testament.
The preface points out that the stories surrounding the B.C. creation of the Septuagint
(LXX) marketed today and existence of a Septuagint or a Greek Old Testament are
fables. All of the Septuagint manuscripts cited in its concordance were written after
A.D. 200 and represent Origen’s Hexapla, in kind. The Encyclopedia of Religion and
Ethics elaborates, calling “the letter of the pseudo-Aristeas, a manifest forgery and the
fragments of Aristobulus highly suspect.” It also points out many of the LXX’s
Gnostic and Platonic readings.