Adventures in the Bible of the Apostles

The Apostles had a Bible that looked very different from the one that is found in most churches today. Most notably, they used and read the Septuagint, a pre-Christian translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek. The Septuagint left an indelible imprint on the New Testament and the early Church, and is still the version of authority in the Eastern Orthodox Church. In each 8-week course, we will explore what the Bible of the first century looked like, and closely compare (in English translation) the Hebrew and the Septuagint versions.

Each class will have two parts. The first half will provide a brief overview of some aspect of Biblical culture in antiquity. In the second half, a discussion leader (volunteers will be assigned early in the course), will identify three or more passages that reveal some interesting insights into the Septuagint version. The volunteer will also look at the New Testament quotations or allusions to the assigned block of chapters, and reflect on how the New Testament interacts with the Septuagint or the Hebrew. We will read and discuss these passages. Participants are encouraged to bring and use their Bibles, in a variety of translations or versions. Discovery requires hands-on experience, so come prepared to participate, even if just a bit.

Our study will in no way be exhaustive. We will be discovering some exciting things, and guess what, what we touch on is just the tip of the iceberg. Although we will be engaging with very good scholarship, the class is not focused on academics. Our goal is to read the Septuagint to better understand, and therefore better fulfill, the Apostolic Tradition.

All courses are facilitated by Joel Kalvesmaki at St. Anna Orthodox Church, Louisa, VA.

There are four complete English translations of the Septuagint:

• The most readily-available English translation of the Septuagint is Brenton's, made in the 19th c. It includes a facing Greek text that is rather eclectic, drawing from a few important but select manuscripts. Brenton's translation is an excellent starting resource, but it should not be relied upon for detailed study. This translation can be found many places on the Internet.
• The New English Translation of the Septuagint (NETS|) is a scholarly translation created in 2007, and is marked by an attempt to capture the text as it might have been read in the pre-Christian world. The base translation is the New Revised Standard Version, thoroughly revised to reflect the Göttingen edition of the Septuagint, where available, and Rahlfs's Greek edition otherwise. The translation is also available as read-only PDFs.
• The Orthodox Study Bible is an ecclesiastical translation by Eastern Orthodox clergy and laity published in 2008|. The base translation is the New King James Version, thoroughly revised to reflect Rahlfs's Greek edition of the Septuagint.
• The Lexham English Septuagint|, published in 2020, is a scholarly translation of Swete's edition of the Septuagint, and is based largely on a single manuscript, Codex Vaticanus, one of the oldest and most outstanding Greek Biblical manuscripts. The English translation does not rely upon a preexisting base translation.

Here are some useful links to online study tools:

If you are looking for book-length introductions to the Septuagint, the following may provide good starting points:

• Salvesen, Alison G., and Timothy Michael Law. The Oxford Handbook of the Septuagint. Oxford Handbooks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.
• Lanier, Gregory R., and William A. Ross. The Septuagint: What It Is and Why It Matters. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2021.
• Kreuzer, Siegfried. Introduction to the Septuagint. Baylor University Press, 2019.
• Jobes, Karen H., and Moisés Silva. Invitation to the Septuagint. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2015.
• Aitken, James K., ed. T&T Clark Companion to the Septuagint. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015.
• Law, Timothy Michael. When God Spoke Greek: The Septuagint and the Making of the Christian Bible. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
• Dines, Jennifer M., and Michael A. Knibb. The Septuagint. London: T & T Clark, 2005.
• Fernández Marcos, Natalio. The Septuagint in Context: Introduction to the Greek Versions of the Bible. Leiden: Brill, 2000.
• Septuagint bibliography: an enormous bibliography (more than 18,000 items) of studies published on the Septuagint.

The heart of the Septuagint is the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. In this course we focus on Genesis and Exodus. Although we will be reading these books looking for aspects we haven't seen in the Bibles commonly known, we will also seek a fully immersive experience, attempting to ingest the stories of creation, the patriarchs, and the sojourn and exodus from Egypt in a way similar to how first century Christians might have experienced it. This is difficult to do in translation, but we will make an attempt!