HistoricalChristian.Faith

Did the New Testament authors quote the Septuagint?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: sound — at its core the claim is mainstream, near-consensus: the Greek Septuagint was the working Old Testament of the Greek-speaking apostolic churches, and the majority of the New Testament's explicit Old-Testament quotations reflect its wording, including a solid block that follows the Greek precisely where it diverges from the Hebrew (Matthew 21:16, Hebrews 10:5, Acts 7:43, and more). Two things are routinely overstated and should be trusted only in their measured form: the headline tally "340 of 386 quotations are from the Septuagint" is rhetorically inflated — most of that 340 is made up of passages where the Hebrew and Greek simply agree, so they show nothing about a preference — and "follows the Greek against the Hebrew" is not always "preferred a translation over the original," since the Septuagint sometimes preserves an older Hebrew reading the Masoretic tradition later lost · advanced in modern apologetics on the authority of G. Archer & G. C. Chirichigno's complete survey, and grounded in the wider scholarly consensus (Swete, Metzger, Fernández Marcos, Jobes & Silva)

This argument takes the substantive scholarly claim behind a common apologetic move — that Christ and the New Testament writers used the Greek Septuagint as their Bible — and asks how far the evidence carries it, and where the popular version overreaches. (In its original apologetic setting the claim is a sub-premise: if the apostles read their Old Testament in Greek, one may weigh a disputed New-Testament word — adelphos, "brother" — against Septuagint usage. That further, lexical step is a separate question, flagged at the end; here the object is the dependence-on-the-Septuagint claim itself.) For the exhaustive expansion of this argument — a reception-history timeline of the church's growing awareness of which text the New Testament used, and a tagged catalog of the quotations sorted by text-form — see the hub page Which text did the New Testament quote?

The claim

"… many of their quotations of the Old Testament in the New Testament come directly from the Septuagint — and the same verse in the Masoretic Text is rendered differently… of the 386 times that the New Testament explicitly quotes from the Old Testament, 340 of those are from the Septuagint translation."

— a representative modern statement of the argument, resting the tally on G. Archer & G. C. Chirichigno, Old Testament Quotations in the New Testament: A Complete Survey (Chicago: Moody, 1983), pp. 25–32.1 The asserted interpretation has two levels. The strong, well-grounded level: the Septuagint was the Old Testament of the Greek-speaking Church, and the New Testament's quotations predominantly reflect it. The headline datum layered on top: a precise count — 340 of 386 explicit quotations "from the Septuagint" — offered as if it measured how far the apostles preferred the Greek. The first is sound; the second needs unpacking.

Who advances it

The claim is a staple of modern Catholic and Orthodox apologetics (and of Septuagint-advocacy generally), where it does double duty: it explains why the New Testament's Old-Testament citations often fail to match a Hebrew-based English Bible, and it underwrites appeals to the Greek text on contested points. Its usual scholarly prop is the complete survey of the evangelical Old-Testament scholars Gleason L. Archer and Gregory Chirichigno, whose three-column comparison (Masoretic Hebrew | Septuagint | Greek New Testament) yields the "340 of 386" figure — pointedly cited as coming from Protestant authors, to pre-empt a charge of confessional bias. Behind that single book stands a long and broadly agreed line of scholarship — H. B. Swete, Bruce Metzger, Natalio Fernández Marcos, and the standard textbook of Karen Jobes & Moisés Silva — for the general proposition that the New Testament writers, working in Greek for Greek-speaking congregations, drew their Old Testament overwhelmingly from the Greek tradition.2

The evidence for

The divergence proof-texts are real and cumulative. The heart of the case is a set of quotations where the New Testament reproduces the Septuagint's Greek precisely at the point where the Greek departs from the Masoretic Hebrew — so that the citation cannot have come from the Hebrew as we have it. The King James Version is a convenient control, since its Old Testament follows the Masoretic Hebrew while its New Testament follows the Greek: the seam shows plainly.

Individually any one of these might be explained away; together they establish that the apostolic authors read, quoted, and built arguments on the Greek text. And the pattern reaches the words attributed to Jesus himself: in Mark 7:6–7 he indicts the Pharisees with Isaiah 29:13 in its Septuagint form — "in vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men" — a clause whose force depends on the Greek; the Hebrew reads only that their "fear toward me is taught by the precept of men."3 Most famously, the christological load-bearer Isaiah 7:14 is quoted at Matthew 1:23 in the Septuagint's "virgin" (παρθένος) — the very reading whose defense drives the whole origin-legend and corruption timelines.4

The wider scholarship agrees on the direction. That the New Testament's quotations "most… follow the text of the LXX in one of its known forms" (Fernández Marcos) is not a partisan claim but the settled view of the field; the Greek Old Testament was the Bible the Greek-writing apostles and evangelists naturally reached for.2

Adversarial assessment

What holds. The core thesis — the Septuagint was the operative Old Testament of the New Testament writers, and their explicit quotations predominantly reflect it — is sound and mainstream. The divergence proof-texts above are genuine and are not seriously contested; the apostolic authors demonstrably read and argued from the Greek.

What is overstated or imprecise.

  1. The "340 of 386" tally is rhetorically inflated. Archer & Chirichigno really do reach that figure, but their own categories dissolve most of its force. Of the roughly 400 quotations they survey, about 268 (64%) fall in their category A — passages where the Hebrew, the Greek, and the New Testament all substantially agree, so that "from the Septuagint" and "from the Hebrew" are indistinguishable and the case proves nothing about a preference. The tally that actually bears on the question is the residue: on their count about 50–72 (~12–18%) follow the Greek where it diverges from the Hebrew (categories B and F), against about 33 (~8%) that adhere more closely to the Hebrew than the Greek (category C) — suggesting the authors sometimes consulted the Hebrew directly. So the honest reckoning is not "340 of 386 prefer the Greek" but "where Greek and Hebrew part ways, the New Testament follows the Greek roughly twice as often as the Hebrew" — a real and telling lean toward the Septuagint, but a far more modest number than the headline suggests. Citing the 340 as though it measured preference double-counts the agreements.5

  2. "What counts as a quotation" is itself a soft edge. The precise number depends on decisions no two surveys make alike — where a loose allusion or a conflated citation begins and ends, whether to count a passage cited twice once or twice, how to treat quotations that blend two Old-Testament texts. Estimates of the total range from about 300 to over 400 precisely because the boundary is fuzzy. A single decimal-pointed figure ("340 of 386") lends a false exactness to a genuinely fluid count.6

  3. "Follows the Greek against the Hebrew" is not always "preferred a translation to the original." The neat Septuagint-versus-Masoretic contrast is partly an artifact of comparing the first-century Greek with the medieval Masoretic vowel-pointing. In the first century the Hebrew text itself was pluriform: the Dead Sea Scrolls preserve Hebrew manuscripts that agree with the Septuagint against the later Masoretic Text (in Jeremiah, in Samuel, and elsewhere). So in a number of cases where the New Testament "follows the Septuagint," it is following an older Hebrew reading that the Greek happened to preserve and the Masoretic line later lost — not choosing a Greek gloss over the Hebrew. This wiki weighs two concrete, christologically-neutral instances on their own pages: Goliath's height, where the Septuagint and the Qumran Samuel scroll (4QSamuela) keep the older, shorter "four cubits" against the Masoretic "six," and the slayer of Goliath, where the Greek itself carries the corruption. The two together are a standing caution: the Greek is sometimes the better witness to the original and sometimes the worse, so "the New Testament used the Septuagint" must not be inflated into "the Greek is always primary" or "the Hebrew is corrupt."7

  4. "The Septuagint" in the first century was not one fixed book. The Greek Old Testament already circulated in divergent forms and early revisions (the kaige recension, proto-Theodotionic readings) that pulled the Greek back toward the Hebrew. Several New-Testament quotations agree with none of the Greek manuscripts we have, or with a revised Greek rather than the "Old Greek" — which is why the field speaks carefully of "the Septuagint in one of its known forms." The apostles used a Greek Bible; identifying it flatly with any one surviving edition oversimplifies.6

  5. "The apostles used the Greek" does not by itself settle what a Greek word means in a given New-Testament sentence. In its home setting the claim is enlisted to license reading a disputed New-Testament term against Septuagint usage — the perennial example being adelphos ("brother"), where the Septuagint's broad, Hebraic use (kinsman, ally, fellow-countryman, rendering Hebrew אָח) is offered to show that "brothers of the Lord" need not mean uterine brothers. That the New Testament writers knew the Septuagint is a genuine and useful premise for such a reading; but it does not follow that every word must carry its widest Septuagintal sense in every context — usage is settled by the individual passage, not by a global statistic. The lexical argument stands or falls on its own evidence, weighed on the perpetual-virginity timeline; this page establishes only its foundation, that the Greek Old Testament was in the apostolic writers' hands.8

Assessment

Sound. The interpretation this argument serves — that the Septuagint was the Old Testament of the Greek-speaking apostolic Church and that the New Testament's explicit quotations predominantly reflect it — holds up and is close to a scholarly consensus. The divergence proof-texts (Matthew 21:16, Hebrews 10:5, Acts 7:43, Acts 8:33, Mark 7:6–7, and others) genuinely show the New-Testament authors, and the words they ascribe to Jesus, reading and reasoning from the Greek. What should be trusted only in its measured form is the popular statistic: "340 of 386 quotations from the Septuagint" is real but misleading, because the large majority of that 340 are passages where the Hebrew and Greek agree and so prove no preference at all; the probative subset — quotations that follow the Greek precisely where it parts from the Hebrew — is smaller (on Archer & Chirichigno's own categories, roughly twice the number that lean the other way, toward the Hebrew), which is a real but far more modest result. What must be flagged is the slide from "the New Testament used the Septuagint" to two further claims it does not license: that the Greek is therefore textually primary and the Hebrew corrupt (sometimes the reverse is true, as Goliath's height shows), and that Septuagint word-usage governs the meaning of every disputed New-Testament term (a separate, context-by-context question). Kept to its core, the claim is solid; stretched to its headline number or to lexical governance, it overreaches.

Sources

  1. G. L. Archer & G. C. Chirichigno, Old Testament Quotations in the New Testament: A Complete Survey (Chicago: Moody Press, 1983), which sets the Masoretic Hebrew, Septuagint, and Greek New Testament in parallel columns for each quotation and classifies them (categories A–F); the much-cited summary tally is that the New Testament agrees with the Septuagint in about 340 places and adheres more closely to the Masoretic Text in about 33. The "340 of 386" formulation and the page range (pp. 25–32) are as reported in the argument's popular circulation; the figure and the category breakdown used here are drawn from the secondary analyses in n. 5, not from an independent collation of the book. ↩

  2. On the scholarly consensus that the New Testament quotations predominantly follow the Septuagint: Natalio Fernández Marcos, The Septuagint in Context: Introduction to the Greek Version of the Bible (Leiden: Brill, 2000) — "most of the Old Testament quotations in the New follow the text of the LXX in one of its known forms"; H. B. Swete, An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek (Cambridge, 1900), Part III ch. ii, tabulating the quotations and their Septuagint agreement; Karen H. Jobes & Moisés Silva, Invitation to the Septuagint, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2015), ch. 8, which surveys the same data while stressing the difficulty of defining and counting "quotation." The general proposition — a Greek-writing Church using a Greek Old Testament — is not in dispute; only the precise numbers and their interpretation are. ↩

  3. The divergence proof-texts, each verifiable at the linked verse: the King James Old Testament follows the Masoretic Hebrew and its New Testament the Greek, so the reader can see the seam directly. Septuagint readings quoted: Psalm 8:2 αἶνον ("praise") at Matthew 21:16; Psalm 39:7 [40:6] σῶμα δὲ κατηρτίσω μοι ("a body you prepared for me") at Hebrews 10:5; Genesis 47:31 ῥάβδου ("staff") at Hebrews 11:21; Amos 5:26 Ραιφαν at Acts 7:43; Habakkuk 1:5 καταφρονηταί ("despisers") at Acts 13:41; Proverbs 3:34 ὑπερηφάνοις… ταπεινοῖς ("proud… humble") at James 4:6; Proverbs 11:31 ("scarcely saved") at 1 Peter 4:18; Isaiah 53:7–8 at Acts 8:33; and Isaiah 29:13 μάτην δὲ σέβονταί με ("in vain do they worship me") on the lips of Jesus at Mark 7:6–7. A convenient tabulation of Septuagint quotations in the New Testament is Joel Kalvesmaki, "Table of Old Testament Quotes in the New Testament, in English Translation." ↩

  4. On Isaiah 7:14 at Matthew 1:23: the Septuagint's παρθένος ("virgin") for Hebrew עַלְמָה (ʿalmah, a young woman of marriageable age; virginity connoted, not denoted) is the reading whose defense drives the origin legend and the corruption charge alike. The philological question is weighed on the Aquila-revision argument; its hagiographic dramatization on the Simeon-the-Just argument. ↩

  5. The category breakdown behind the tally, which deflates the headline figure. Archer & Chirichigno sort the quotations into six classes: A (~268, ~64%) reasonably or completely accurate agreement of Hebrew, Greek, and New Testament — i.e. cases where "from the Septuagint" is indistinguishable from "from the Hebrew"; B (~50, ~11%) closely follow the Septuagint even where it deviates from the Hebrew, though without distorting the sense; C (~33, ~7%) adhere more closely to the Masoretic Hebrew than to the Septuagint, implying direct use of a Hebrew text; D (~13, ~3%) match neither precisely; E (~32, ~8%) not marked as quotations but closely resembling an Old-Testament source; F (~22, ~6%) closely follow the Septuagint despite a serious deviation from the Hebrew. The "340" sums the Septuagint-leaning classes (chiefly A+B+F), but A is evidentially inert. The subset that actually shows a preference — following the Greek against the Hebrew (B and F, ~72) — outweighs the reverse (C, ~33) by roughly two to one: a real lean, far short of the headline. Breakdown as reported and analyzed in "Did the Apostles Favor the Septuagint?", Purely Presbyterian (a critic of the strong form, drawing the counts from Archer & Chirichigno pp. 25–32), and cited from the same survey in "In Which Passages Does Jesus Quote the Septuagint?", Catholic Answers (a proponent). The two confessional sides agree on the numbers and differ on their weight — which is exactly the point: the raw 340 is agreed, its rhetorical use is not. ↩

  6. On the softness of the count and the plurality of the Greek: what counts as an "explicit quotation" (versus allusion, echo, or conflated citation) is not fixed, and totals in the literature range from ~300 to ~400 accordingly; see Jobes & Silva, Invitation to the Septuagint (n. 2), ch. 8, on the definitional problem, and Swete, Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek, Part III ch. ii, on the range of quotation-types, and on the early Greek revisions (kaige, proto-Theodotion) that already in the first century pulled the Greek back toward the Hebrew, so that a number of New-Testament quotations agree with a revised Greek or with none of the extant manuscripts — hence the field's careful phrase "the LXX in one of its known forms" (Fernández Marcos, n. 2). "The Septuagint" the apostles used was a family of Greek texts, not a single fixed edition. ↩

  7. That "follows the Greek against the Masoretic" is sometimes "follows an older Hebrew the Masoretic line later lost": the Dead Sea Scrolls preserve Hebrew manuscripts agreeing with the Septuagint against the Masoretic Text (notably the shorter Hebrew of Jeremiah and the Samuel scroll 4QSamuela). Two concrete cases are weighed on this wiki: Goliath's height (Septuagint and 4QSamuela "four cubits" against Masoretic "six") and the slayer of Goliath (where the Greek itself carries the corruption) — together a caution that the Greek is sometimes the better witness to the original and sometimes the worse. See also the rabbinic-corruption timeline, where the inspired-Septuagint premise is turned into the charge that the synagogue's divergent Hebrew is corrupt — a charge these cases warn against over-generalizing. ↩

  8. On the lexical step: the perpetual-virginity debate uses the apostles' familiarity with the Septuagint to read adelphos ("brother") in its broad Septuagintal/Hebraic range — kinsman or ally, rendering Hebrew אָח (e.g. of Abraham and Lot at Genesis 14:14; 29:15) — so that "the brothers of the Lord" need not denote uterine brothers. That the New Testament writers knew the Septuagint is a sound premise for the reading, but it does not by itself fix the sense of the word in any given verse (context does); the lexical argument is weighed on its own on the perpetual-virginity timeline. Here the point is only that the premise — a Greek Old Testament in apostolic hands — is well founded. ↩