Why Jesus Quoted a Greek Bible: Understanding the Septuagint

If you have ever wondered why the New Testament sometimes quotes the Old Testament in words that do not quite match the Old Testament passage it points to, you have stumbled onto one of the most fascinating doors in all of Scripture. Walk through it and you find the Septuagint – the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible that the earliest Christians, and Jesus himself, knew and used.

For most readers the word is unfamiliar, and the abbreviation LXX looks like a typo. But the Septuagint shaped how the gospel was first preached, how the apostles wrote their letters, and how the very first generation of believers heard the promises of God. It is worth getting to know.

What the Septuagint Actually Is

The Septuagint is the oldest complete translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into another language. Beginning around the third century before Christ, Jewish scholars in the great city of Alexandria, in Egypt, rendered the Hebrew Scriptures into Koine Greek – the everyday Greek that had spread across the Mediterranean world after the conquests of Alexander the Great.

Why translate the Hebrew Bible at all? Because by that time a huge population of Jewish people lived outside the land of Israel, scattered through the Greek-speaking cities of the ancient world. Many of them no longer read Hebrew comfortably. Their children were growing up speaking Greek in the marketplace, the school, and the synagogue. If these communities were to keep hearing the Scriptures, the Scriptures had to speak their language. The Septuagint was the answer.

The name itself comes from the Latin word for seventy, and the abbreviation LXX is simply the Roman numeral for seventy. An old account known as the Letter of Aristeas tells the story of around seventy-two scholars – six from each of the twelve tribes of Israel – summoned to Alexandria to produce the translation. Whether every detail of that account is historical or partly legend, the number stuck, and the name has been with us ever since.

The Bible the Apostles Carried

Here is the part that surprises people. When the New Testament writers quote the Old Testament, they very often quote the Septuagint rather than translating fresh from the Hebrew. The Greek-speaking world they were writing to already knew the Scriptures in Greek, so it made sense to use the version their readers held in their hands.

This is why a quoted verse in the New Testament occasionally reads a little differently from the same verse in your Old Testament. Your Old Testament is translated from the Hebrew. The New Testament writer was often quoting the Greek. The two are saying the same thing, but through two different windows.

Consider how the gospel of Matthew points to the birth of Christ with the promise that a virgin would conceive and bear a son. The Greek word used there, drawn from the Septuagint rendering of Isaiah, carries the sense of a young unmarried woman in a way that became central to how the early church read the prophecy. The translators in Alexandria had made their choice two centuries before Bethlehem, and that choice echoed straight into the gospel.

The pattern repeats again and again. The sermons recorded in the book of Acts, the dense scriptural arguments of the letter to the Hebrews, the way Paul stitches Old Testament promises into his letters – over and over, the wording follows the Greek of the Septuagint. To read the New Testament well is, in part, to read it alongside the Bible its authors were holding.

Why It Still Matters For You

You might reasonably ask what a Greek translation made before Christ has to do with your own quiet time this evening. More than you would think.

First, the Septuagint is a witness to how ancient the biblical text really is. The translators worked from Hebrew manuscripts older than almost any Hebrew copies that survive today. When scholars compare the Septuagint with the later Hebrew tradition and with the Dead Sea Scrolls, they are looking across more than two thousand years at a text that has been faithfully carried through time. That is a quiet but powerful encouragement to anyone who wonders whether the Bible we read is the Bible that was written.

Second, it reminds us that translation has always been part of God’s plan, not a compromise of it. The first Christians did not insist that the Scriptures stay locked in their original language. They translated, so that more people could hear. Every English Bible on your shelf stands in that same long tradition that runs straight back to Alexandria.

Third, seeing a verse in its original or ancient languages – even when you do not read those languages – has a way of slowing you down and connecting you to something vast. You are reading words that have been treasured, copied, and prayed over for three thousand years. There is reverence in that, and it changes how the words land.

A Living River, Not a Museum Piece

It is easy to treat all of this as ancient history, interesting but distant. It is anything but. The Septuagint is the reason an Ethiopian official could be reading Isaiah on a desert road in the book of Acts and have it explained to him as pointing to Jesus. It is the soil out of which the language of the New Testament grew. When you read the Greek of the Septuagint, you are reading the Scriptures as the early church knew them, in the words Jesus and the apostles drew upon.

On this site you can step into that experience directly. Through the Languages feature you can view Old Testament passages in the Greek of the Septuagint and let the ancient text sit beside the English you know. You will not need to read Greek to feel the weight of it. Sometimes simply seeing the older form of a familiar verse is enough to make you read it again, slowly, as if for the first time.

The living water of God’s Word has been flowing for a very long time, through many languages and many generations, and it has lost none of its freshness on the way to you.