HistoricalChristian.Faith

Was the apostles' Bible the Greek Septuagint — and does that make the deuterocanon canonical?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: contested — the load-bearing half is sound: the apostles' working Old Testament was a Greek one, and the New Testament's quotations follow its readings against the Hebrew that became the Masoretic text, hundreds of times. But the inference built on it — that because "the Septuagint" in its later Christian manuscripts carried the deuterocanon, the apostles thereby received those books as canonical Scripture — outruns the evidence: there was no closed, deuterocanon-inclusive Greek canon in the first century to inherit, and the books' presence in the great codices is a fourth-century Christian fact. The honest residue is reception, not a clean apostolic verdict — the same graded standing the silence argument leaves from the other side · the apostolic Greek Bible is the timeline's opening witness (the Septuagint); the readings are weighed against the Hebrew-canon stream and the origin doctrine

Here the sub-claim is the standard Catholic/Orthodox answer to the Protestant "the New Testament never quotes the deuterocanon": that the apostolic Bible was the Greek Septuagint, the same Bible whose later manuscripts carried the disputed books — so the apostles' own Scripture was the longer one.

The claim

The argument runs in two linked steps. First, a historical observation about which Bible the apostles used:

"By the first century, the LXX was the Bible of Greek-speaking Jews and so was the most frequently used version of the Old Testament in the early Church … the New Testament writers, when they quote from the Old Testament, usually quote from the Septuagint."

— Catholic Answers, "In Which Passages Does Jesus Quote the Septuagint…?" The point is bolstered by the demonstrable cases where the New Testament follows a Greek reading against the Hebrew that became the Masoretic text, and by the patristic articulation of the same fact — Irenaeus: "the apostles … agree with this aforesaid translation [of the Septuagint]; and the translation harmonizes with the tradition of the apostles."¹ The second step is the canonical inference drawn from the first: since the Greek Bible the apostles used — "the Septuagint" — is, in its surviving Christian manuscripts, the one that contains Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, and 1–2 Maccabees, the apostolic Scripture was the longer canon, and the deuterocanon belongs to it.

It is the standard Catholic and Orthodox rejoinder to the argument that the New Testament never quotes the deuterocanon as Scripture: never mind the silence on those particular books — the whole Bible the apostles quoted from was the Greek one that held them. The careful form of the claim, however, supplies its own brake, and the brake is the crux of the assessment: what "the Septuagint" contained around AD 30 is precisely what we cannot read off the fourth- and fifth-century codices. The books were in the Greek Bible by 400; who can say what "the Septuagint" of Jesus' day contained?

Who advances it

The proponents. "The apostles used the Septuagint, and the Septuagint had the deuterocanon" is a fixture of Catholic and Orthodox apologetics — Catholic Answers, the catalogues of New-Testament use at sites like Scripture Catholic, and popular defenders who tie the canon question to the apostles' demonstrable Greek Bible. The point is even pressed in reverse by Protestant teachers: Mike Winger argues that Protestants use "the same Old Testament Jesus used," which only relocates the dispute to which Greek (or Hebrew) Bible that was and what it held. The historical core — the apostles quoted a Greek Old Testament — is not a confessional claim at all: it is the common ground of mainstream scholarship, registered on this timeline's opening Septuagint entry and in the standard tally of citations.¹ The adversaries. Protestant apologists answer that "used the Septuagint" does not entail "received the Septuagint's canon," since the books in question sat in Greek manuscripts the church compiled later; and — decisively — mainstream canon scholarship holds that there was no fixed, deuterocanon-inclusive "Alexandrian" Greek canon in the first century to inherit. Albert Sundberg's The Old Testament of the Early Church (1964) is the watershed: it dismantled the old hypothesis of a wider Alexandrian Jewish canon and argued that the broader Christian Old Testament was a Christian formation after the parting from Judaism. Martin Hengel and Timothy Lim carry the point forward — there was no closed Greek-Jewish canon, and "the Septuagint" as a single, deuterocanon-bearing codex is a Christian artifact of the fourth century, not a Bible Jesus could have held.²

The evidence for the affirmative reading

The apostles quote a Greek Old Testament — and its readings against the Hebrew. This is the strong, uncontested core. The New Testament's Old-Testament quotations track the Greek so closely that Gleason Archer and Gregory Chirichigno count roughly 340 citations agreeing with the Septuagint against only 33 with the (later-named) Masoretic Hebrew.³ The point is not a count of coincidences but of places where the Greek and the Hebrew genuinely diverge and the apostle follows the Greek — sometimes resting an entire argument on it:

• Acts 15:16–17 ↔ Amos 9:11–12. At the Council of Jerusalem James clinches the admission of the Gentiles by quoting Amos: "that the residue of men might seek after the Lord, and all the Gentiles." That is the Septuagint. The Hebrew (so the King James Old Testament) reads "that they may possess the remnant of Edom, and of all the heathen" — a verse about Israel conquering, not the nations seeking. James's whole case for the Gentile mission turns on the Greek wording (Hebrew אדם, "men," for אדום, "Edom"; ידרשו, "seek," for יירשו, "possess").⁴
• Hebrews 1:6 ↔ Deuteronomy 32:43. "And let all the angels of God worship him" — a whole clause the Masoretic Deuteronomy 32:43 simply lacks. It stands in the Septuagint, and a Hebrew copy from Qumran (4QDeut^q) preserves a longer reading too ("bow down to him, all you gods"), so the Greek here witnesses a genuine variant Hebrew text, not a Christian invention.⁵
• Hebrews 10:5 ↔ Psalm 40:6. "A body hast thou prepared me" (Greek) for the Hebrew "mine ears hast thou opened" — and the argument of Hebrews 10 about Christ's offered body leans on the Greek.⁶
• Matthew 1:23 ↔ Isaiah 7:14. Matthew's "a virgin shall be with child" follows the Septuagint's παρθένος ("virgin") where the Hebrew has עלמה ('almah, "young woman") — though this case is lexical, not textual (the Hebrew word can denote a virgin), and is the long-contested one the timeline weighs at length under Aquila and Simeon the Just.⁷

So the apostolic Bible really was, overwhelmingly, a Greek Old Testament. That much is settled, and any argument from apostolic usage about the canon has to start from it. The further claim is that this Greek Bible was the Septuagint of the great Christian codices — the one with the deuterocanon shelved among the protocanonical books — so the apostles' Scripture already held the disputed books.

Adversarial assessment

What holds. The first step is sound and important. The apostles cite a Greek Old Testament; they follow its readings against the Hebrew that became the Masoretic text, in passages where the two diverge and where the New Testament's own argument depends on the Greek. This is not apologetic spin but the mainstream picture, and it cuts hard against any attempt to settle the canon by the later rabbinic Hebrew table alone (the move weighed on the "oracles of God" page): the Bible the apostles actually used was the Greek one, in the wider Greek-Jewish literary world where Sirach, Wisdom, Tobit, and the Maccabees were read, treasured, and echoed.

What overstates. The second step — from "used a Greek Old Testament" to "received the deuterocanon-inclusive canon of the codices" — is where the argument outruns its evidence, at three joints.

1. There was no closed, deuterocanon-inclusive Greek canon in the first century to inherit. The argument quietly assumes a fixed object — "the Septuagint," a settled Greek Bible with a known table of contents that the apostles took over whole. That object is an anachronism. The older hypothesis that Diaspora Jews kept a wider "Alexandrian canon" than the Palestinian one — and that the church inherited it — was dismantled by Albert Sundberg in 1964 and is no longer held: Alexandrian Jewish writers such as Philo show no wider canon, the Jewish canon was not yet closed on either side in the first century, and the broader Christian Old Testament looks like a Christian formation after the parting from Judaism, not a pre-packaged Jewish inheritance. "The apostles used the Septuagint" is true; "the Septuagint they used was a fixed canon that included the deuterocanon" is the very thing in dispute.²

2. The deuterocanon's presence in "the Septuagint" is a fourth-century codex fact. When we point to "the Septuagint" as the Bible with the disputed books, we are pointing to the great Christian uncials — Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, Alexandrinus (fourth–fifth century) — which interleave Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, and the Maccabees among the protocanonical books. But a multi-book single codex did not exist in the apostolic age; the Greek Scriptures circulated as separate scrolls, one work (or a few) to a roll, and no scroll's table of contents declared a canon. The notion of "the Septuagint" as one deuterocanon-bearing volume is itself a Christian achievement of the fourth century — the very era this site's origin timeline shows the inspiration legend hardening. Reading the codices' contents back onto Jesus' Bible is reading a later book's binding into an earlier age. That the books were in the Greek Bible by 400 tells us what the fourth-century church received; it does not tell us what "the Septuagint" of AD 30 contained, which the proponent's own careful form concedes.⁸

3. The divergent readings prove text-form, not canon-extent. The strong evidence — Acts 15 / Amos 9, Hebrews 1 / Deuteronomy 32, Hebrews 10 / Psalm 40 — establishes which text of shared, undisputed books the apostles read (a Greek one, sometimes resting on a Hebrew Vorlage older than the Masoretic, as Qumran's Deuteronomy shows). It says nothing about the extent of their canon, because every one of these proof-cases is a protocanonical book. To move from "they preferred Greek Isaiah and Greek Amos" to "they received Greek Tobit and Greek Maccabees as Scripture" is to change the subject from textual form to canonical list. The New Testament does allude to the deuterocanon (Hebrews 11:35 to 2 Maccabees 7, Romans 1 to Wisdom — catalogued on the companion silence page; the Hebrews 11:35 case weighed in full on its own page), which is real evidence of acquaintance and esteem; but allusion is reception, not a citation as γραφή, and the leap to canonization is not in the data.⁹

What the apostolic Greek Bible really shows. Strip the over-reach and a substantial, true residue remains, and it tells for the deuterocanon's standing as far as the evidence can carry: the apostles' Scripture was a Greek Old Testament, breathed in a Greek-Jewish world that read and prized these books, and the church that received that Bible went on — demonstrably, by the fourth century — to bind the disputed books among the Scriptures. That is a real and weighty datum for reception, the same one the early-church and silence pages reach from their own angles. What it is not is a clean apostolic verdict closing the canon on the longer list. Nor was that canonical inference uncontested in antiquity: the most Hebrew-competent of the Latin fathers, Jerome, pressed the textual point in reverse — that wherever the Greek and Hebrew diverge the evangelists and apostles followed the Hebrew, not the Septuagint — and made it a standing challenge to his critics.¹⁰ His blanket form overshoots, for the strongest cases above (Acts 15 / Amos 9, Hebrews 1 / Deuteronomy 32) are themselves apostolic quotations of the Greek against the Hebrew; but it shows that even within the patristic period the slide from apostolic Greek usage to a settled apostolic canon was disputed — by a father who actually read the Hebrew. The canon question turns on weighing that reception, list by list, across the centuries this timeline charts — not on retrojecting a fourth-century codex onto the apostles' scroll-shelf.

Assessment

Contested. The interpretation is strong by one discipline's lights and weak by another's, which is just what a contested verdict marks. By the lights of textual and reception history, its core is sound and barely disputed: the apostolic Bible was a Greek Old Testament, and the New Testament's quotations follow its readings against the proto-Masoretic Hebrew, sometimes with the argument riding on the Greek (Acts 15 / Amos 9 is the textbook case). By the lights of canon history, the inference it is enlisted to carry — that apostolic use of "the Septuagint" establishes the deuterocanon as apostolic Scripture — does not hold: there was no closed, deuterocanon-inclusive Greek canon in the first century to inherit (Sundberg's demolition of the "Alexandrian canon"), and the books' presence in "the Septuagint" is a fourth-century codex fact, not a feature of the scrolls Jesus read. The strong proof-cases all involve protocanonical books, so they fix the apostles' text-form, not their canon-extent. The honest residue is genuine but graded: powerful evidence that the apostolic and early church received a Greek Bible in whose world these books lived and were used — converging with the longer-canon stream this timeline traces (the Septuagint, the codices, the African councils, Augustine) — but not a clean apostolic close on the wider list. It is the mirror image of the Protestant silence argument, and lands in the same place from the opposite side: the deuterocanon is a long-disputed inheritance, neither apostolically canonized nor apostolically excluded, to be weighed by its reception. (Proponents who state the modest form — "the apostles' Bible was Greek, and these books lived in that world" — say something true; those who press it to "the apostles' Bible already was the Tridentine canon" overreach a first-century scroll into a fourth-century codex.)

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