HistoricalChristian.Faith

Which text did the New Testament quote?

When a New-Testament writer cites the Old Testament, which text-form is he quoting — the Greek Septuagint, the proto-Masoretic Hebrew that later stabilized into the medieval Jewish Bible, an already-revised Greek (the kaige / proto-Theodotion recensions), an older Hebrew now recovered at Qumran, or a free rendering owing to none of these? This is a question about the shape of the text, not about the canon (which books count): a writer can quote a book everyone receives while disagreeing with everyone about how its words run. The honest verdict, stated plainly and not to be laundered upward, is two-part. Where the Greek and the Hebrew part ways the Greek New Testament predominantly follows the Septuagint — the working Bible of the Greek-speaking apostolic churches — and a solid block of quotations reproduces the Greek precisely at the point it diverges from the Hebrew. But the deeper finding is that Second-Temple Judaism was textually plural: there was no single standardized Hebrew or Greek "Bible," the Greek itself circulated in divergent forms and early revisions, and in a number of places the New Testament's "Septuagintal" reading is really an older Hebrew the Greek happened to preserve and the rabbinic line later lost. The Dead Sea Scrolls are what turned that second claim from a guess into a demonstrable fact — which is why the modern picture is not "Greek over Hebrew" but "a plural text, quoted plurally."

Related doctrines: Scripture's text & canon — see also the biblical canon · the Old Testament canon · the Septuagint's origin · rabbinic corruption of the text · the divine Name

Timeline

Justin Martyr (c. 155)

The earliest witness reads the divergence as a moral fact, not a textual one. Debating the Jew Trypho, Justin Martyr treats the Greek of "the seventy elders" as the true text and charges "your teachers" with having physically cut passages out of the Scriptures — the "from the wood" of Psalm 96:10, a Jeremiah descent-oracle — and with misreading the christological proof-texts, above all Isaiah 7:14's "virgin" (παρθένος) against their "young woman."¹ It is the seed of the whole later tradition — but framed as deliberate, recent, anti-Christian tampering, a diagnosis the text-critical evidence would not sustain: his flagship "from the wood" runs the other way (a Christian addition to some Greek copies, not a Jewish deletion), and several "excised" texts appear in no manuscript at all.²

Origen of Alexandria (c. 240)

The first scholar to map the divergences instead of moralizing them. In the Hexapla Origen set six columns side by side — the Hebrew, the Hebrew in Greek letters, Aquila, Symmachus, the Septuagint, and Theodotion — marking with obelisk and asterisk every place the Greek had more or less than the Hebrew. It is the first systematic collation of the Greek against the Hebrew, and its very method concedes the point the corruption-polemic denied: the two traditions genuinely differ, verse by verse. Yet Origen's governing instinct was conservative — keep the text the churches actually use rather than re-edit the Bible down to the synagogue's Hebrew — and where he does charge suppression he charges narrow passages (the Susanna scandal-narratives), to the elders' shame, not the wholesale loss of the messianic proof-texts.³

Jerome (c. 400)

The polarity reverses. Where the Greek Fathers trusted the Septuagint and suspected the Hebrew, Jerome abandoned the Greek as his base and translated the Old Testament afresh "from the Hebrew," appealing throughout his Vulgate prefaces to the Hebraica veritas, the "truth of the Hebrew." He ranked the versions Hebrew > Greek > Latin, debunked the legend of the seventy inspired cells, and — most pointedly for this question — argued that the evangelists and apostles, wherever the Septuagint diverged from the Hebrew, had themselves quoted the Hebrew and not the Greek. That is the exact counter-thesis to the modern consensus, and it flags from the start that "which text did the New Testament use?" was contested inside the church, not a settled datum.⁴

Augustine of Hippo (c. 425)

Against Jerome, Augustine defended the Septuagint as itself apostolically authoritative — even inspired. In City of God XVIII.42–43 he argues that the same Spirit who spoke through the Hebrew prophets spoke through the Seventy, so that where the Greek differs from the Hebrew both may stand as prophetic; and he notes the plain fact that "the apostles, in their writings, appeal not only to the Hebrew, but also to the Septuagint" — indeed usually to the Greek. His worry was pastoral: Jerome's new-from-the-Hebrew Psalter would unsettle congregations who had prayed the Greek for centuries. The Jerome–Augustine exchange fixes the two poles the later debate would swing between — the priority of the Hebrew original versus the churchly authority of the Greek the apostles actually quoted.⁵

Swete and the first modern enumerations (c. 1900)

The question passes from polemic to statistics. H. B. Swete's Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek (1900) and the Hatch–Redpath Concordance to the Septuagint (1897–1906) gave scholarship its first systematic tabulations of the New Testament's Old-Testament quotations and their agreement with the Greek — the ancestor of every later "how many follow the Septuagint?" count. Swete already framed the two cautions the modern field keeps: that "what counts as a quotation" is a soft edge (totals range from ~300 to ~400 by how one draws it), and that "the Septuagint" the apostles used was not one fixed book but a family of Greek texts, some already revised (kaige, proto-Theodotion) back toward the Hebrew.⁶

Qumran and the recovery of a plural text (post-1947)

The Dead Sea Scrolls settled the underlying question the Fathers could only guess at. Among the Qumran biblical manuscripts are Hebrew copies that agree with the Septuagint against the later Masoretic Text — a shorter Hebrew Jeremiah, a fuller Samuel (4QSamuel^a), a Deuteronomy 32 with the "sons of God" line the Masoretic dropped — proving that many places where the New Testament "follows the Greek against the Hebrew" are really cases of the Greek preserving an older Hebrew that a different, equally Jewish text-tradition once carried. The Scrolls thereby dissolve the ancient corruption-charge in both directions: the first-century text was plural, no side had "the" Hebrew, and divergence is a fact about competing textual families, not about malice.⁷

Archer & Chirichigno; Jobes & Silva; Fernández Marcos (1983–)

Modern synthesis sets the columns side by side and does the arithmetic honestly. Gleason Archer & Gregory Chirichigno's Old Testament Quotations in the New Testament: A Complete Survey (1983) prints the Masoretic Hebrew, Septuagint, and Greek New Testament in parallel for each quotation and sorts them into categories A–F; the standard textbooks of Karen Jobes & Moisés Silva (Invitation to the Septuagint) and Natalio Fernández Marcos (The Septuagint in Context) place that data in the wider picture. Their agreed result: most quotations follow "the LXX in one of its known forms," but the much-cited headline "340 of 386 from the Septuagint" is rhetorically inflated — most of that 340 is passages where Hebrew and Greek simply agree and so prove no preference. The probative residue is smaller and points a real but modest lean: where the two diverge, the New Testament follows the Greek roughly twice as often as the Hebrew.⁸

The catalog

Below is a working reference table of Old-Testament quotations in the New Testament, each tagged for which text-form it reflects where the Greek and Hebrew diverge. The four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, Paul's Epistles to the Romans, 1–2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, and the Pastorals (1–2 Timothy, Titus), the Epistle to the Hebrews, the General Epistles (James, 1–2 Peter, Jude), and the Revelation of John are now worked row by row — the entire New Testament — every one of their explicit quotations (and, for Revelation, its handful of near-quotations) adjudicated against the Septuagint and the Masoretic Hebrew (and, where a divergence is load-bearing, the Qumran evidence), with the standard surveys re-checked rather than copied; the honest result is that most rows come out agree (Greek and Hebrew coincide, so the citation decides nothing), and the real divergences cluster in Matthew's fulfilment (“formula”) quotations, in a handful of citations that turn on a distinctively Greek — or, in Mark, distinctively Aramaic-Targumic — reading, and above all in Acts, whose apostolic speeches lean on the Septuagint at their argumentative hinges (Peter's and Paul's shared resurrection proof from Psalm 16's “see no corruption,” Stephen's “Remphan,” the eunuch's Isaiah 53, Paul's “despisers” of Habakkuk) — and, running the other way, in John, whose two sharpest citations follow the Hebrew against the Greek (Zechariah 12:10's “whom they pierced,” Psalm 41:9's “lifted up his heel”), the Gospels' clearest MT-distinctive counterweight to that Septuagintal lean. Romans — the densest quotation-field in the Pauline corpus — confirms the same divided picture: most of its citations are agree rows or catenae whose parts coincide, its distinctively-Septuagintal cases cluster where the Greek word carries the argument (Isaiah 28:16's “shall not be ashamed” at Romans 9:33 / 10:11, Psalm 19:4's “their sound” at 10:18, Isaiah 40:13's “mind of the Lord” at 11:34, Isaiah 45:23's “every tongue shall confess” at 14:11), and — the honest counterweight — a real residue runs the other way: Job 41:11 at Romans 11:35 tracks the Hebrew against a wholly different Greek (MT-distinctive), while three of Paul's sharpest citations match neither received text — the famous “the just shall live by faith” of Habakkuk 2:4 (Romans 1:17), where Paul drops the possessive both traditions carry; the Deliverer coming “out of Sion” of Isaiah 59:20 (Romans 11:26), an ἐκ Σιων found in no Greek or Hebrew copy; and the Targum-shaped “vengeance is mine” of Deuteronomy 32:35 (Romans 12:19). 1–2 Corinthians and Galatians extend the same divided picture into Paul's most sharply-argued letters: again most rows are agree rows or free conflations, Paul's Septuagintal lean surfaces where the Greek word carries the argument (Isaiah 40:13's “mind of the Lord” at 1 Corinthians 2:16, the universalizing “all” the Septuagint adds to Deuteronomy 27:26's curse at Galatians 3:10, the causal “therefore” of Psalm 116:10 at 2 Corinthians 4:13), and the honest counterweights are real: 1 Corinthians 3:19 renders Job 5:13 closer to the Hebrew than to the wholly different Greek of Job (MT-distinctive), 1 Corinthians 14:21 quotes Isaiah 28:11–12 in a form owing to neither received text, and above all the resurrection taunt of 1 Corinthians 15:54–55 couples Isaiah 25:8 and Hosea 13:14 in a shape agreeing with a revised Greek (a Theodotion/kaige-type text) against the Old Greek — the catalog's clearest instance of the Greek itself circulating in more than one form. The disputed “eye hath not seen” of 1 Corinthians 2:9, matching no extant Old-Testament text, is adjudicated on its own page (assessment contested — a secure text-form over a genuinely disputed source). Ephesians and the Pastorals close out Paul: the shorter captivity letters (Philippians, Colossians) and 1–2 Thessalonians carry no explicit Old-Testament citations, but Ephesians supplies one of the corpus's most-discussed text-forms — the “he gave gifts unto men” of Ephesians 4:8, which reverses the “received gifts” of both the Hebrew and the Greek Psalter to a “gave” shared with the Aramaic Targum (a switch Jerome and Theodoret each noticed) — alongside a modest Septuagintal lean (Psalm 4:4's imperative “be angry” at Ephesians 4:26, where the Hebrew reads “tremble”; the “two shall be one flesh” of Genesis 2:24 at Ephesians 5:31), while the Pastorals cite thinly and mostly agree (Deuteronomy 25:4's un-muzzled ox at 1 Timothy 5:18; the Numbers 16:5 “seal” at 2 Timothy 2:19). Hebrews — the New Testament's most quotation-saturated book — is the corpus's strongest single case for an apostolic theology done from a Greek Bible: its opening catena (Psalm 104:4's mutable angel-“spirits,” Psalm 102's vocative “Lord” addressed to the Son, Psalm 8's made “lower than the angels”) and its later argument-hinges (the Septuagintal new-covenant oracle of Jeremiah 31 with its “I regarded them not” for the Hebrew “I was their husband,” the personalized “coming one” who must not “draw back” of Habakkuk 2:3–4, the “yet once more” of Haggai 2:6 the argument of 12:27 hangs on, the “scourgeth every son” of Proverbs 3:12) all lean on distinctively Greek wording — the book-level thesis weighed as its own argument below. The honest counterweights are real too: Hebrews carries the catalog's one older-Hebrew row (Deuteronomy 32:43's angels at 1:6, the Greek preserving a reading now attested at Qumran, not inventing one), and its “vengeance is mine” at 10:30 follows the same Targum-shaped Deuteronomy 32:35 form Paul uses, matching neither received text. The General Epistles — James, 1–2 Peter, and Jude — cite thinly and extend the same divided picture into the catalog's last worked field: most rows are agree rows, and the Septuagintal lean surfaces where the Greek word carries the point — the "God resisteth the proud" of Proverbs 3:34 (James 4:6 / 1 Peter 5:5), the "righteous scarcely saved" of Proverbs 11:31 (1 Peter 4:18), the "shall not be ashamed" of Isaiah 28:16 (1 Peter 2:6), the "royal priesthood" of Exodus 19:6 (1 Peter 2:9), the shortened Isaiah 40 with its "glory of man" (1 Peter 1:24–25) — and Bede, uniquely among the Fathers surveyed here, twice names the "ancient Editio" (the Septuagint) as the apostles' source over against his own Hebrew Vulgate (on James 4:6 and 1 Peter 4:18). The honest counterweights run both ways: 1 Peter 4:8's "charity shall cover the multitude of sins" follows the Hebrew of Proverbs 10:12 against a wholly different Greek (MT-distinctive), and the stone-of-stumbling of Isaiah 8:14 at 1 Peter 2:8 follows a revised Hebraizing Greek against an Old Greek that negated the image — the catalog's second revised-Greek row, a fixed testimonium 1 Peter shares with Paul (Romans 9:33). Jude carries no Old-Testament-canon quotation to tag: its two famous citations — the dispute over Moses' body (Jude 9, from the Assumption of Moses) and Enoch's prophecy (Jude 14–15, quoting 1 Enoch 1:9) — are drawn from Second-Temple works outside the Hebrew canon, so they raise a canon question worked on its own page, not a text-form one. With Paul's corpus, Hebrews, and the General Epistles complete (1–3 John carry no explicit Old-Testament citation), the last field — the Revelation of John — is a case apart, and completes the catalog. It carries no citation formula and, on the standard counts, no formal quotation — only the New Testament's densest weave of allusion and echo (Daniel, Ezekiel, Isaiah, Zechariah, the Psalms) — so only its handful of near-quotations can be tagged (see the note on quotation versus allusion below the tag key). They repay the attention, because the two cleanest cases split the difference: at Revelation 1:7 the pierced-Messiah allusion to Zechariah 12:10 reads “they… which pierced him,” tracking the Hebrew against the Old Greek's “they danced” — the same testimonium John 19:37 carries — while at Revelation 2:26–27 (repeated at 12:5 and 19:15) the ruler who will “rule” (ποιμανεῖ, shepherd) the nations “with a rod of iron” follows the Septuagint of Psalm 2:9 against the Masoretic “thou shalt break them.” One author, an MT-distinctive datum and an LXX-distinctive datum side by side — the catalog's tightest single proof that the first-century text was plural, and the ground of a book-level question — does Revelation's wording reflect a Hebraizing Vorlage or the Greek? (assessment contested) — that is the same put to Hebrews and Romans. With that, every book of the New Testament that quotes the Old is worked row by row.⁹

How to read the tags

• agree — Hebrew, Greek, and New Testament substantially coincide; the quotation is evidentially inert for the "which text?" question (it fits every answer equally).
• LXX-distinctive — the New Testament follows the Septuagint's Greek precisely where it diverges from the Masoretic Hebrew; the citation cannot have come from the Hebrew as we have it.
• MT-distinctive — the New Testament stands closer to the Hebrew than to the Septuagint, implying direct use of a Hebrew (or Hebraizing) text.
• older-Hebrew — the New Testament "follows the Septuagint," but the Septuagint here preserves an older Hebrew reading now attested at Qumran against the Masoretic Text — so it is not Greek-over-Hebrew but Hebrew-over-Hebrew. (The category Archer's flat A–F scheme does not isolate.)
• revised-Greek — the New Testament agrees not with the "Old Greek" Septuagint but with an early Jewish revision of it (kaige, proto-Theodotion, Aquila-like), which had pulled the Greek back toward the Hebrew.
• neither / free / targumic — the quotation matches neither the Septuagint nor the Masoretic Text precisely: a paraphrase, a conflation, or a form shared with the Aramaic Targum tradition.
• ambiguous — the source or the text-form cannot be securely fixed (a loose allusion, an unidentified source, or a rendering compatible with more than one Vorlage).

A note on the boundary — quotation versus allusion. The rows below are quotations: places where a writer reproduces an Old-Testament passage closely enough that its wording can be measured against a text-form. That boundary is deliberately soft — the standard tallies swing from roughly 300 to 400 quotations by how one draws it — and one book sits almost wholly on its far side. The Revelation of John carries no citation formula (“as it is written,” “that it might be fulfilled”) and, on the standard counts, no formal quotation at all — yet it is the most Old-Testament-saturated book in the New, a continuous weave of allusion and echo. Loose allusions are not tagged here, because a paraphrase seldom preserves enough wording to fix a Vorlage; the catalog admits only the handful of Revelation passages that come near enough to a quotation to carry a text-form signal, and leaves the rest as the allusive weave they are. That handful counts out of proportion to its size — the two cleanest cases (Rev 1:7 and Rev 2:27) point in opposite directions, and that split is itself the evidence.

Arguments

The load-bearing sub-claims — how the raw counts should be weighed, and how to tell a genuine "Greek over Hebrew" case from an "older Hebrew the Greek preserved" — are argued off this timeline. The per-row adjudications that populate the catalog above are the argument pages this section grows.

Related arguments — the Septuagint's interpretive gloss (over a stable Hebrew)

Five of the catalog's rows are the same species of divergence and are best read together: the New Testament follows the Septuagint's Greek at a point where the Hebrew is stable — the same consonants stand in the Masoretic Text and, where attested, at Qumran — so the Greek reads an identical Hebrew its own way, not preserving an older Hebrew the Masoretes later lost (the fork worked at Goliath's height and Hebrews 1:6). The mechanism varies — a lexical choice (Isaiah's "virgin"), an interpretive rendering or inner-Greek variant (Hebrews' "body"), a revocalization plus a dālet/rêš confusion (Amos' "mankind … seek" for "possess … Edom"), an etymological fork between two homonymous roots (Psalm 16's "corruption" for "the pit"), a free interpretive rendering (Isaiah 29:13's "in vain … teaching" for "learned by rote") — but all five sit on the same side of the fork. Each row is adjudicated on its own page, and two of them (Psalm 16's "corruption" and, more modestly, Isaiah 29:13) show a distinctively Greek word doing argumentative, not merely lexical, work.

Isaiah 7:14 at Matthew 1:23 — is the "virgin" a Septuagintal gloss, and does Matthew depend on it? (assessment: sound)

The catalog's first row, adjudicated. Matthew's virgin-birth proof-text reproduces the Septuagint's παρθένος ("virgin") verbatim and turns on it, where the standing Hebrew ʿalmah ("young woman") and the three later Jewish revisers (νεᾶνις) do not by themselves denote virginity — so the "LXX-distinctive" tag holds. Two refinements keep it honest: the divergence is a gloss over an identical Hebrew (the consonantal ʿalmah stands unchanged in the Masoretic Text and in the c. 125 BC Great Isaiah Scroll, 1QIsaiah^a), so unlike Hebrews 1:6 or Goliath's height the Greek preserves no older Hebrew here — the whole divergence is translational; and the gloss is a defensible pre-Christian Jewish reading (virginity connoted in the word's ordinary use, chosen c. 150 BC), not a Christian fabrication.¹⁰

Psalm 40:6 at Hebrews 10:5 — a Septuagintal "body," and does the argument depend on it? (assessment: sound)

The catalog's Hebrews-10:5 row, adjudicated. Hebrews quotes Psalm 40:6 with the Septuagint's σῶμα ("a body hast thou prepared me") where the Hebrew reads "ears thou hast dug for me," and the author reuses the Greek word at 10:10 ("the offering of the body of Jesus Christ") — so the "LXX-distinctive" tag holds. Two refinements: the Hebrew "ears" is textually stable (no variant Vorlage to recover), so like Isaiah 7:14 this is a Greek gloss over an identical Hebrew, not an older-Hebrew case; and the argument's spine is the antithesis "sacrifice thou wouldest not … I come to do thy will," present in both text-forms — so σῶμα is exploited (a bridge to "the offering of the body") rather than the foundation the argument would collapse without. Whether the Greek reached "body" by interpretive synecdoche (the fashioned obedient person for the fashioned ear) or by an early inner-Greek variant from ὠτία, the divergence is Greek-internal, not Hebrew-based.¹¹

Amos 9:11–12 at Acts 15:16–18 — a Septuagintal "seek the Lord," and does the Council's decision depend on it? (assessment: sound)

The Jerusalem Council's proof-text, adjudicated. James confirms the Gentile mission from Amos in the Septuagint's form — "that the residue of men might seek after the Lord" — where the Hebrew reads "that they may possess the remnant of Edom," so the "LXX-distinctive" tag holds. Two refinements: the Hebrew is stable (the Wadi Murabba'at scroll reads "Edom" with the Masoretic Text; no Hebrew witness attests the Greek), so like Isaiah 7:14 the divergence is Greek-side — a revocalization (ʼĕdôm "Edom" → ʼādām "mankind") plus a dālet/rêš confusion ("possess" → "seek") — not an older-Hebrew case; and the Council's decision does not strictly hang on the Greek, because the load-bearing clause "all the nations upon whom my name is called" (v. 12b) stands in both text-forms, so the Greek sharpens James's argument (nations as seekers, not conquered vassals) rather than being its foundation.¹²

Psalm 16:10 at Acts 2:27 / 13:35 — “see no corruption”: does the apostolic resurrection proof depend on the Greek? (assessment: sound)

The catalog’s Acts-resurrection rows, adjudicated — and the group’s clearest case of a Greek word carrying an argument. Both Peter (Acts 2:25–31) and Paul (Acts 13:35–37) prove the resurrection from Psalm 16:10’s “thou wilt not suffer thine Holy One to see corruption” — the Septuagint’s διαφθοράν (“decay”) — where the Hebrew reads šaḥat (“the pit,” parallel to “Sheol”): David’s body decayed in a tomb still shown in Jerusalem, so the psalm’s promise of no decay must speak of another. So the “LXX-distinctive” tag holds. Two refinements: like Isaiah 7:14 and Amos 9:12 this is a Greek reading of a stable Hebrew — an etymological choice between šûaḥ (“sink down” → a pit) and šāḥat (“corrupt”) over identical consonants, not an older Hebrew the Masoretes lost; and, unlike Amos 9 (whose load-bearing clause survives both text-forms) or Psalm 40:6 (a bridge the argument survives without), here the Greek word is the empirical proof — the vivid “David decayed, this man did not” prong bites only on “decay,” making this the strongest “the argument needs the Greek” case in the New Testament. A reduced resurrection reading still survives on the parallel, text-form-neutral “soul… in Sheol” line, so it is the sharpest prong, not the whole argument, that needs the Greek.¹³

Isaiah 29:13 at Matthew 15:8–9 / Mark 7:6–7 — “teaching for doctrines the commandments of men”: does Jesus’ critique of tradition rest on the Greek? (assessment: sound)

The synoptic flagship of the whole thesis, adjudicated — a proof-text placed on Jesus’ own lips in two Gospels. Answering the scribes over hand-washing and Corban, Jesus clinches the rebuke with Isaiah 29:13 in the Septuagint’s form — “in vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men” — where the Hebrew reads that “their fear toward me is a commandment of men learned by rote,” so the “LXX-distinctive” tag holds, and this is the textbook first example of the New Testament following the Greek against the Hebrew. Two refinements: like Isaiah 7:14 and Psalm 16:10 this is a Greek reading of a stable Hebrew (the Masoretic reading stands and the c. 125 BC Great Isaiah Scroll agrees; the divergence is the free Isaiah-translator’s, not an older Hebrew — the “in vain” that Lowth traced to a variant wĕtōhû is a conjecture back-formed from the Greek, unattested in Hebrew); and, unlike Psalm 16:10 (whose empirical prong bites only on the Greek word), here the Greek sharpens but does not found the argument — the Hebrew’s “commandment of men” already indicts human tradition in worship, and Jesus’ own Corban argument, not the citation, carries the charge that a tradition can void God’s command — so it patterns with Amos 9:12 and Psalm 40:6, and the later Scripture-against-tradition use (Cyprian, the Reformers) is sound on either text-form.¹⁴

Related arguments — the Hebrew (Masoretic-distinctive) text-form (the New Testament closer to the Hebrew than the Greek)

The honest mirror of the gloss group: three of the catalog’s rows run the other way, the New Testament standing closer to the Hebrew than to the Septuagint where the two diverge — the doctrine’s diversity counterweight to any “the New Testament = the Septuagint” picture. All share one shape: the Hebrew-aligned text-form is secure, while the mechanism (a fresh translation from the Hebrew, a Greek already revised toward the Hebrew, or a fixed testimonium) is left open — and in each the ancient champion, Jerome, reading from the Hebraica veritas, presses a strong “the apostle followed the Hebrew” form that the evidence does not settle. The third row carries a second, doctrinal sub-claim past the text-form — whether Matthew’s Hebrew reading locates bodily healing “in the atonement” — rated separately on its page. Each row is adjudicated on its own page.

Matthew’s formula quotations — do they evidence direct use of a Hebrew (non-Septuagintal) text? (assessment: sound)

The catalog’s Matthew rows, adjudicated together — the doctrine’s diversity counterweight. Matthew’s distinctive “formula quotations” (the fulfilment citations “that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet”) are genuinely non-Septuagintal where the Greek and Hebrew part ways, and at Matthew 2:15 the citation follows the Hebrew of Hosea 11:1 (“my son,” singular) against the Septuagint’s “his children” — so the “MT-distinctive” tag holds and Matthew is the standing counter-case to any “the New Testament = the Septuagint” picture. This is the mirror image of the gloss group: not the Greek reading a stable Hebrew, but the New Testament standing closer to the Hebrew than to the Greek. Three refinements keep it honest: the proven claim is the text-form (non-Septuagintal, Hebrew-aligned), not the mechanism — a fresh Hebrew translation, a Hebraizing/revised Greek (Menken), or a testimonia source all fit, and Matthew’s agreement with the Hebrew is also agreement with Aquila/Symmachus/Theodotion, so the strong “the apostle translated the Hebrew” is possible, not demonstrated; the phenomenon is confined to the fulfilment citations (Matthew’s other quotations are largely Septuagintal), so Jerome’s universal “wherever the Evangelist quotes… he follows the Hebrew” is an overstatement, flagged on his detail page; and the three verses usually cited together fall into three classes — Hosea 11:1 MT-distinctive, Jeremiah 31:15 at Matthew 2:18 neither/free, the “Nazarene” of Matthew 2:23 a Hebrew-only word-play — so the bundle evidences Hebrew attention, not one uniform text-form.¹⁵

Zechariah 12:10 at John 19:37 — “whom they pierced”: does the pierced-Messiah proof follow the Hebrew against the Greek? (assessment: sound)

The catalog’s John-19:37 row, adjudicated — the Gospels’ single strongest MT-distinctive datum. When John 19:37 proves the crucifixion from Zechariah 12:10 — “they shall look on him whom they pierced” (ἐξεκέντησαν) — he follows the Hebrew dāqārû (“they pierced”), not the Old Greek, which had misread the near-identical dālet and rêš and rendered “they danced / mocked” (κατωρχήσαντο, as if rāqadû) — so the “MT-distinctive” tag holds. The same “pierced” form stands at Revelation 1:7 and is exactly the reading the later Hebraizing revisers Aquila and Theodotion carry against the Old Greek. Two refinements keep it honest: because ἐξεκέντησαν is the revisers’ word, John’s agreement with the Hebrew is also agreement with a revised Greek, so what is proven is the text-form (Hebrew-aligned, not Old-Greek), not the mechanism — a fresh translation (Jerome: John “translated word for word, as he had read it in Hebrew”), a Hebraizing revised Greek (Menken), or a fixed testimonium (shared with Revelation and the second-century Fathers) all fit, so Jerome’s strong form is possible, not demonstrated (flagged on his detail page); and John has already adapted the verse (“to me” → “on him”) and keeps distinctively Septuagintal readings elsewhere (John 12:38), so the row evidences Hebrew attention at a key proof-text, not a uniform Hebrew Bible.¹⁶

Isaiah 53:4 at Matthew 8:17 — is bodily healing “in the atonement,” and does the claim turn on the Hebrew over the Greek? (text-form sound; the healing-in-the-atonement doctrine built on it weak)

The catalog’s Matthew-8:17 row, adjudicated — and the group’s one row that carries a doctrinal claim past the text-form. When Matthew 8:17 glosses an evening of cures with “Himself took our infirmities, and bare our sicknesses,” he quotes Isaiah 53:4 in a form that follows the Hebrew’s bodily illness (ḥŏlî “sickness,” mak&702;ōb “pain”) against the Septuagint, which had spiritualized the same colon to “this one bears our sins” — so the “MT-distinctive” tag holds, and this is a third Gospel case of the New Testament reaching past the Greek to the Hebrew. Jerome, reading the Hebrew, set the two forms side by side (“he has borne our infirmities… the Septuagint: he carries our sins”). On that correct text-form the divine-healing tradition (A. J. Gordon, A. B. Simpson, F. F. Bosworth) builds a further, load-bearing claim — that because Christ “bore our sicknesses” as he bore our sins, bodily healing is provided in the atonement and claimable now by faith. That doctrinal step is weak: Matthew ties the fulfilment to Jesus’ healing ministry before the cross (Isaiah 53:4 is “fulfilled” in Galilee, not at Calvary); the verb βαστάζω here leans toward diseases removed by cure, not carried penally (so Tertullian); the New Testament’s own second use of the Servant song reads its “healed” of rescue from sin (1 Peter 2:24); and even the moderate form — bodily redemption as an ultimate fruit of the cross, where Gordon himself locates it — is an “already/not yet” hope, not a present entitlement (Trophimus, Timothy, Epaphroditus, the unremoved Pauline thorn). So the row’s text-form is sound and the doctrine built on it over-reads it.¹⁷

Isaiah 6:9–10 in the New Testament — one verse in two text-forms: does the divine-hardening theology ride on Matthew’s Septuagint against John’s Hebrew? (text-form sound; the “doctrine rides on the text-form” claim weak)

The bridge between the two groups above — the catalog’s one verse quoted in the New Testament in both text-forms at once, and the doctrine’s tightest internal proof of a plural text. Isaiah’s commissioning oracle is Septuagintal at Matthew 13:14–15 and Acts 28:26–27 — the descriptive “this people’s heart is waxed gross… their eyes they have closed” (a people self-hardening) — but Hebraizing at John 12:40, which recasts it to active divine agency (“He hath blinded their eyes, and hardened their heart”). So the two-form text-form call is sound, and it was already seen by Cyril, Jerome, and Augustine. The doctrinal claim built on the difference — that the New Testament’s theology of divine judicial hardening rides on the text-form, standing on John’s causative Hebrew and dissolving into mere self-hardening on Matthew’s descriptive Greek — is weak: the doctrine is underdetermined by the form. The Septuagint form keeps a divine judicial note (God withholds the healing, “and I should heal them”) and is quoted by Paul at Acts 28 to announce a God-authored turning-away, so Jerome concludes the hardening difficulty “remains in the churches” whichever text one reads; John’s form neither names God as the blinder nor compels efficient reprobation — Cyril, who identified it as the Hebrew, and Theophylact both read it as permission/abandonment, and even Augustine, who builds his hardest reading on it, glosses it “by forsaking and not supporting”; and John’s wording is in any case a free recast keeping the Septuagint’s first-person healer, so the evangelists’ forms track working-Bible and argument, not rival hardening-systems. What is fair is a difference of emphasis (Greek foregrounds human culpability, John divine sovereignty); the systematic doctrine is decided on Romans 9–11 and Pharaoh, where the New Testament holds a judicial hardening that ratifies a self-hardening — the two forms naming the two sides of one event. The underlying divine-hardening reading is itself a genuinely contested doctrine (strong by Augustinian–Reformed lights, resisted by Greek-patristic and Arminian ones), left where it belongs and not settled by Isaiah 6’s wording.¹⁸

Galatians 3:10–13 — the “curse of the law”: does Paul’s argument depend on the Septuagint’s text-form? (assessment: sound)

Paul’s curse-of-the-law proof, adjudicated — and the one row where a Hebrew witness shares the divergent reading, so the doctrine’s central fork is genuinely live. At Galatians 3:10 the load-bearing “cursed is every one that continueth not in all things” carries the universalizing “all” (πᾶς … ἐν πᾶσιν) that the Septuagint and the Samaritan Pentateuch read into Deuteronomy 27:26 against a Masoretic Hebrew that lacks it — so the “LXX-distinctive” tag holds, and Paul’s Bible is here a Greek Bible. Three refinements keep it honest. First, because a Hebrew witness (the Samaritan Pentateuch) shares the “all” — as Jerome verified by hand, and pressed toward “deleted by the Jews” — this is not the Greek glossing a stable Hebrew (unlike Isaiah 7:14); yet because Deuteronomy 27:26 is unattested at Qumran, the Samaritan text is expansionist, and “all the words of this law” is a stock formula standing twice in the immediate context, the plus is most probably a harmonization, not a demonstrable older Hebrew the Masoretes trimmed — so the row stays LXX-distinctive. Second, the argument does not depend on the plus: Deuteronomy 27:26 is the summary curse of the whole law, and 28:15’s “to do all his commandments” supplies the comprehensiveness in the Hebrew, so the Greek makes explicit what the context implies (the wording is exploited, as at Psalm 40:6, not load-bearing as at Isaiah 7:14). Third, at 3:13 Paul reshapes an LXX-based Deuteronomy 21:23 — catchword ἐπικατάρατος in, “of God” out — best read as theological disambiguation that trades on the real ambiguity of the Hebrew qilelat ʾəlōhîm, the crucifixion-curse reading itself a pre-Christian Jewish move (11QTemple, 4QpNahum).¹⁹

Deuteronomy 32:43 at Hebrews 1:6 — “let all God’s angels worship him,” the Septuagint preserving an older Hebrew? (assessment: sound)

The catalog’s one older-Hebrew row, adjudicated — the honest counterweight to the gloss group above. When Hebrews 1:6 proves the Son greater than the angels from “let all the angels of God worship him,” it quotes a clause the Masoretic Deuteronomy 32:43 does not contain but the Septuagint does — and which a Hebrew scroll from Qumran (4QDeut^q, c. 100 BC) also carries (“bow down to him, all gods”). So unlike Isaiah 7:14, Psalm 40:6, and Amos 9:12 this is not the Greek reading a stable Hebrew but the Greek preserving an older Hebrew the Masoretes lost (Hebrew-over-Hebrew, the same phenomenon made christologically-neutral at Goliath’s height) — the finding that turns the ancient corruption-charge on its head. Two refinements keep it honest: the word narrows down the chain (Qumran “gods” → Greek “sons/angels of God” → Hebrews “angels of God”), so Qumran vindicates the line, not the exact christological word; and 4QDeut^q is a distinct textual form and the extant Greek is itself conflate, so the Septuagint preserves an older Hebrew, not demonstrably the one behind the Greek.²⁰

Isaiah 25:8 at 1 Corinthians 15:54 — did Paul quote a revised Greek (a Theodotion/kaige-type text) against the Old Greek? (assessment: sound)

The catalog’s showcase revised-Greek row, adjudicated — a third species alongside the gloss and the older-Hebrew cases. When Paul clinches the resurrection chapter with “Death is swallowed up in victory” (κατεπόθη ὁ θάνατος εἰς νῖκος), he quotes Isaiah 25:8 in a form the Old Greek does not carry: the Old Greek runs the sentence the other way — “Death, having prevailed, swallowed [them]” — making death the conqueror, while Paul’s passive restores the Hebrew direction (death the thing swallowed) and renders lā-neṣaḥ by “victory,” exactly as the later Hebraizing revisers Aquila and Theodotion do against the Old Greek. So the “revised-Greek” tag holds: the New Testament sides here with a Greek already corrected back toward the Hebrew — the doctrine’s clearest single sign that the apostolic “Septuagint” was a plural family of texts. Four refinements keep it honest: the paired Hosea 13:14 half of the taunt (15:55) is Paul’s own catchword redaction — importing “victory” to weld the two prophets — not a revised text, so the claim rests on the Isaiah line alone; the word-for-word agreement with “Theodotion” rests on a uncial-Q gloss that may itself have been assimilated to Paul, so the non-circular anchor is Aquila’s independent “victory”; the single word could in principle be reached independently, so it is the composite agreement (direction, voice, and word together) that carries the case; and because the datable kaige manuscript (8ḤevXIIgr) is of the Minor Prophets, not Isaiah, “the kaige recension of Isaiah 25:8” is a reconstruction — what is proved is a pre-Christian Hebraizing reading of the kaige type surfacing in Paul.²¹

Isaiah 28:11–12 at 1 Corinthians 14:21 — “other tongues”: a revised Greek (Aquila-like), or Paul’s own rendering of the Hebrew? (assessment: contested)

The catalog’s neither / free row on 1 Corinthians 14:21, adjudicated — and the doctrine’s hardest text-form to call. When Paul argues that tongues are a sign of judgment he cites Isaiah 28:11–12 as “the law” in a form owing to neither received text: the Old Greek had reversed the verse (“they [the heathen] will speak… through the contempt of lips”), and Paul undoes the reversal, restoring the Hebrew’s God-as-speaker judgment (“I will speak unto this people… yet… will they not hear me”). So the “neither / free” tag holds and the row is a genuine Pauline counterweight, standing closer to the Hebrew than to the divergent Old Greek — the honest question is only the mechanism. Two answers split the evidence. The strong reading — that the wording witnesses a pre-existing Hebraizing Greek of Isaiah (of the type Aquila later codified), so Paul’s Isaiah was itself textually plural — has an ancient champion (Origen reported that Paul’s form “lies in the translation of Aquila”), one hard non-Septuagintal word (ἑτερογλώσσοις), and the fact, established at Isaiah 25:8, that a pre-Aquila Hebraizing revision demonstrably existed. Against it: the changes that most look “Hebraizing” (the first-person “I will speak,” the added “not even so,” the appended “me,” the future tense, the dropped positive half of the verse) are exactly what Paul’s argument needs and are credited by Conzelmann to Paul’s own hand; the citation matches no known text verbatim (Stanley calls it “one of the greatest challenges in the entire corpus of Pauline citations”); and one word cannot prove a lost Vorlage without an argument from silence. Strong text-critically, weak by the lights of citation-technique analysis — the mark of a genuinely contested case, unlike the tighter composite match that makes Isaiah 25:8 sound. What to trust is the non-Septuagintal, Hebrew-leaning text-form; what to hold loosely is the specific claim that Paul copied a revised Greek text here.²²

1 Corinthians 2:9 — “eye hath not seen”: a free rendering of Isaiah, or a lost source Paul quoted? (assessment: contested)

The catalog’s neither / free / targumic row on 1 Corinthians 2:9, adjudicated — the doctrine’s classic source-puzzle. Paul introduces “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard…” with the citation formula “as it is written,” yet the words reproduce neither the Old Greek nor the Masoretic Hebrew of Isaiah 64:4 (the nearest candidate) verbatim — the divergences are substantive (both text-forms confess “no God beside thee,” which Paul drops; both put ear before eye, which Paul reverses; both end with those who “wait for” God, where Paul has those who “love” him). So the “neither / free” tag holds; the honest question is the source. Two readings split the evidence. The free-Isaiah reading — that Paul freely conflates Isaiah 64:4 with the “come up upon the heart” idiom of Isaiah 65:16 — has the one Father who read the Hebrew (Jerome dismissed the apocryphal ascription as “the ravings of the apocryphal books”), a fully canonical source that supplies the whole verse, and a mechanism Paul demonstrably uses. The lost-source reading — that Paul quotes a now-lost fixed Jewish saying (Origen named a “Secrets of Elijah”; Stone & Strugnell revive it) — rests on the oldest witness naming a book, the saying’s stable wide circulation with its un-Isaianic “love him” ending intact, and a citation that fits Paul’s sentence awkwardly, like an imported block. Neither lands a decisive blow: the extant Elijah-apocryphon is too late and lacks the phrase, while the independent-circulation evidence is all downstream of Paul — so the source stays genuinely underdetermined, the mark of a contested case. What to trust is the no-extant-text form; what to hold loosely is any confident source. (The separate question of whether the verse proves a wider apostolic canon is rated weak on its own page.)²³

Does the Epistle to the Hebrews argue from a Greek Old Testament? — the book-level synthesis (assessment: sound)

The doctrine’s one book-level argument, gathering the per-row adjudications into a single question. Hebrews is the most quotation-saturated book in the New Testament, and it is the strongest single-book case that the apostolic church did its theology from a Greek Bible: its citations reproduce a Greek text-form throughout, show no independent recourse to the Hebrew, and a whole chain of its arguments turns on distinctively Greek wording — the Son made “a little lower than the angels” (Psalm 8:5 LXX for Hebrew “than God”), “the coming one” who will not “draw back” (Habakkuk 2:3–4), the vocative “Lord” addressed to the Son (Psalm 102:25), and the “body” of Psalm 40:6. Three refinements keep it honest: the dependence is graded (sometimes the Greek word is the proof, as at Psalm 8 and Habakkuk 2; sometimes only a bridge the argument survives without, as at Psalm 40:6); “Septuagint-shaped” is not “Greek-invented,” since at Hebrews 1:6 the Greek preserves an older Hebrew now attested at Qumran; and “the Septuagint” was a plural family of Greek texts, so the verdict is reached citation by citation, not by a blanket “LXX-only.”²⁴

Habakkuk 2:4 at Romans 1:17 & Galatians 3:11 — “the just shall live by faith”: does Paul’s pronoun-less form match either received text? (assessment: sound)

The doctrine’s most compact internal proof of a plural text — one verse quoted three times in the New Testament in three divergent forms. Habakkuk 2:4 carries a possessive in both received traditions — the Masoretic Hebrew “the just shall live by his faithfulness” (be-ʾəmûnātô, the righteous man’s own fidelity), the Septuagint “by my faith” (ἐκ πίστεως μου, God’s faithfulness) — yet Paul at Romans 1:17 and Galatians 3:11 quotes it with no pronoun at all: “the just shall live by faith,” while Hebrews 10:38 keeps the Greek “my” but shifts it to modify the righteous one (“my righteous one shall live by faith”). So the “neither / free” tag holds, and the row is the catalog’s tightest single sign that no standardized wording stood behind the citations — the divergence lies within the New Testament, not only between the Testaments. Two refinements keep it honest: Paul’s form is an abridged Septuagintal one (the Greek word order with the possessive removed; no Old-Greek copy lacks the pronoun entirely), not a fresh rendering of the Hebrew — so it is a free trim of the Greek, and Jerome and Aquinas, who both read Paul as siding with the Septuagint, catch only half of it (Jerome, quoting Paul, gives the clause pronoun-less while calling it the Septuagint); and the omission is exploited, not load-bearing — the argument’s weight rests on “live by faith,” which stands in every text-form, so the dropped pronoun sharpens Paul’s absolute “faith” without founding the justification argument (as at Psalm 40:6 and Amos 9:12). The large, separate question of whose faith Habakkuk means is a soteriological debate left where it belongs.²⁵

Isaiah 59:20 at Romans 11:26 — the Deliverer “out of Zion”: does Paul’s form match either received text? (assessment: sound)

The second of the three Romans citations the catalog tags neither / free, and one of the sharpest. At the hinge of his “all Israel shall be saved” argument Paul quotes Isaiah 59:20 with a preposition found in no known copy of Isaiah: “there shall come out of Sion (ἐκ Σιων) the Deliverer” (Romans 11:26), where the Old Greek reads “for the sake of Sion” (ἥνεκεν Σιων) and the Masoretic Hebrew “to Zion” (lə-Ṣiyyôn) — three prepositions, three directions — and closes (11:27) with “when I shall take away their sins,” a clause absent from Isaiah 59 and spliced from Isaiah 27:9. So the “neither / free” tag holds — a genuine conflation, not a continuous excerpt — and Origen, reading the Greek against the Hebrew, flagged both moves verse by verse (“in place of… ‘out of Sion,’ it is written, ‘for the sake of Sion’; and… ‘when I shall have taken away their sins’ is not written there at all”). Two refinements keep it honest: the divergent ἐκ is best read as Paul’s deliberate harmonization to the Psalter’s stock “out of Zion” deliverance formula (Psalm 14:7 / 53:6, 110:2) — a scriptural, motivated change, not a lost Greek Vorlage (the “from Zion” Jerome and Aquinas later found in “the Septuagint” is a copy already assimilated to Paul); and, as at Habakkuk 2:4, the change is exploited, not load-bearing — the argument rests on “turn away ungodliness from Jacob,” which stands in every text-form, so the preposition sharpens the Deliverer’s provenance (from Zion) without founding the case.²⁶

Does the Epistle to the Romans argue from a Greek Old Testament? — the book-level synthesis (assessment: sound)

The doctrine’s second book-level argument, and the companion to the Hebrews synthesis — but a deliberately harder case, because Romans, the densest quotation-field in the Pauline corpus (some fifty explicit citations), does not come out uniformly Septuagintal. Where the Greek and Hebrew diverge it leans predominantly on the Greek, and at its sharpest hinges the Greek word is the proof — “shall not be ashamed” (Isaiah 28:16 at 9:33 / 10:11, the Hebrew “make haste” would not serve), “their sound… into all the earth” (Psalm 19:4 at 10:18, the Hebrew “line” would not prove universal preaching), the “mind of the Lord” (Isaiah 40:13 at 11:34), “every tongue shall confess” (Isaiah 45:23 at 14:11) — forks the ancient collators marked in situ (Origen, Jerome, and Aquinas’s recurring “our text has this… the Apostle uses the Septuagint”). But the residue is real and rules out any “LXX-only” account: Job 41:11 at 11:35 stands with the Hebrew against a wholly different Greek Job (MT-distinctive), and three of Paul’s sharpest citations match neither received text — Habakkuk 2:4 at 1:17, Isaiah 59:20 at 11:26, and the Targum-shaped Deuteronomy 32:35 at 12:19. Three refinements keep it honest: the dependence is graded (the Greek word is the proof at Isaiah 28:16 and Psalm 19:4, only a bridge at Isaiah 40:13 and 45:23); the residue makes Paul plural, not Septuagint-only; and — unlike Hebrews — Romans has no clean older-Hebrew row (its Septuagintal forks sit on a stable Hebrew, and the one shared clause of the expanded Song of Moses it quotes, 15:10, does no such work), so its counterweight is the MT-distinctive and match-neither residue, not an older-Hebrew rescue. The verdict is the doctrine’s own headline instantiated in one book: predominantly Greek, but a plural text quoted plurally.²⁷

Does the Revelation of John render its Old Testament from a Hebraizing Vorlage or the Septuagint? — the book-level synthesis (assessment: contested)

The doctrine’s third book-level argument, and the one whose verdict runs the other way. Where Hebrews reasons uniformly from the Greek and Romans predominantly so, the Revelation of John splits the difference — which is exactly why its handful of near-quotations count out of proportion to their number. The historic majority view (R. H. Charles’s ICC, C. G. Ozanne, L. P. Trudinger; Torrey and Trudinger pushing to an Aramaic antecedent) held that the Seer “thinks in Hebrew” and renders the Hebrew text for himself rather than borrowing the Septuagint — and it has real support: Revelation’s Greek is drenched in Semitisms, its sharpest allusion (Revelation 1:7’s “whom they pierced,” Zechariah 12:10) is MT-distinctive, and its Daniel matter tracks the Hebraizing Greek of Theodotion against the Old Greek. But the strong form does not survive its own author: at Revelation 2:26–27 (repeated at 12:5 and 19:15) the ruler who will “shepherd” the nations follows the Septuagint of Psalm 2:9 against the Masoretic “break”; Daryl Schmidt has shown that much of the alleged “Semitic syntax” is drawn from the Septuagint itself; and the best Hebraizing leg (Daniel/Theodotion) locates the effect in a revised Greek, not a Hebrew autograph. One author, an MT-distinctive datum and an LXX-distinctive datum side by side, pointing opposite ways — so Steve Moyise’s mediating verdict, that John used both and the Semitic-preference reading “remains unproven,” is the honest one. The negative half is secure (Revelation is not a smooth-Septuagint book); the positive strong form overreaches — a genuine standoff, and the catalog’s tightest single proof that the first-century text was plural.²⁸

Ephesians 4:8 at Psalm 68:18 — “he gave gifts unto men”: a targumic text-form, or Paul’s own reversal? (text-form sound; the pre-existing-Targumic-Vorlage mechanism contested)

The Pauline corpus’s most-discussed neither / free / targumic row, adjudicated. Proving that grace is given “according to the measure of the gift of Christ,” Ephesians 4:8 quotes Psalm 68:18 as “he gave gifts unto men” — exactly reversing the “thou hast received gifts among men” that stands in both the Masoretic Hebrew (lāqaḥtā) and the Septuagint (ἔλαβες, Ps 67:19) — so the “neither / free / targumic” text-form tag is sound: the distinctive “gave” matches neither received text but the Aramaic Targum on the Psalms and the Syriac Peshitta, a switch Jerome, Theodoret, and Chrysostom each flagged (and harmonized as “he receives as man, gives as God”). What is contested is the mechanism — whether the reading came from a pre-existing targumic Vorlage (Rubinkiewicz, Taylor, pressing the Peshitta’s “gave”) or from the author’s own interpretive reversal. The strong Vorlage form does not hold up: the Targum of the Psalms is centuries too late to be the source (it witnesses at most an older tradition, itself inferred), the Peshitta’s agreement may be a corruption assimilated to Ephesians, and the fullest rabbinic treatment (b. Shabbat 88b–89a) keeps “received.” The better positive account — Gombis, Lunde–Dunne, folded into Lincoln, Thielman, and Harris — is that the reversal is a motivated adaptation licensed by Psalm 68’s Divine-Warrior logic (the ascending conqueror distributes the spoils) and cued by the “he gave some, apostles” of v. 11 — and it needs no lost text to work. So trust the text-form (a genuine targumic-tradition reading); hold the documented-Vorlage claim loosely — the pattern of Isaiah 28:11–12, secure text-form over an open mechanism.²⁹

See also — did the New Testament authors quote the Septuagint? (assessment: sound)

This hub is the exhaustive expansion of a claim weighed in miniature on a neighbouring page. Did the New Testament authors quote the Septuagint? (its home is under the Septuagint's origin, assessment sound) already runs the big-picture thesis: the divergence proof-texts are real and cumulative, the "340 of 386" tally is rhetorically inflated because most of it is inert agreements, and "follows the Greek against the Hebrew" is not always "preferred a translation to the original" — sometimes the Greek preserves the older Hebrew (as Goliath's height shows). That page and this catalog are two views of one question; the per-row adjudications that populate the table above are the argument pages this section will grow.³⁰

Sources