[FONT=Bookman Old Style, Arial, helvetica, san-serif]The foregoing will have shown why it is most unsatisfactory when Orthodox Christians have to use Old Testament translations that are made from the Hebrew. It is very important that we Orthodox know and use the Septuagint version of the Old Testament either in the original Greek or in translation. Our church formularies and services (certainly the most theologically complex and profound of all Christian church services) are a virtual mosaic of scripture quotation from the Septuagint or of the Church Fathers paraphrasing and commenting on Septuagint texts. For an example of this take the very first line of the very first Book of the Bible, Genesis. In the Hebrew Bible and the English translations made from it we have ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’. In the Septuagint it is ‘In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth’. The first clause of the Nicene Creed, following the Septuagint, has Maker of heaven and earth, not Creator. (The Apostles’ Creed of the Roman Catholic Church, following St Jerome’s translation from the Hebrew, has Creatorem, Creator.) In the next sentence of Genesis the Septuagint describes the earth at the moment of creation as ‘invisible and without form’. The Septuagint’s word ‘invisible’ is taken into the next clause of the Nicene Creed, where we have ‘…and of all things visible and invisible’. In the Hebrew the passage reads ‘without form and void (or empty)’. It is a truism that learning the Orthodox Faith comes very largely through attending its services. If we cannot recognise these scriptural quotations when we encounter them in the services, our apprehension of our faith is handicapped. [/FONT]
[FONT=Bookman Old Style, Arial, helvetica, san-serif]English-speaking Orthodox have long been so handicapped. It is true that for a long time there have been two English translations of the Septuagint. At the end of the eighteenth century Charles Thomson, one of America’s Founding fathers, recognising the vital connection of the Septuagint with the New Testament, produced the first English translation of the Septuagint, made from J Field’s printed Greek text of 1665. Then in 1851 Sir Lancelot C L Brenton published his translation of the Septuagint. It is this latter that is generally available and fairly widely known today in bilingual editions in book form or on the internet. However it is a diplomatic text (i.e. one that is based on one codex, in this case Vaticanus), which does not entirely agree with the Greek text of the Orthodox Church. Now several other English translations are completed or are in progress. The most significant of these are the New English Translation of the Septuagint (NETS) and The Orthodox Study Bible (OSB). Others include Peter Papoutsis’ translation of the official Greek Orthodox Greek text (in progress), and the Eastern Orthodox Bible (EOB), a project which is intended eventually to include the Septuagint text in a modern English revision of Brenton’s translation, noting also variant texts from the Syriac Peshitta, the Masoretic and other ancient versions. And the present writer has produced an unpublished version based on the text of the Church of Greece’s Apostoliki Diakonia, with the King James Bible as its English template but changing it where it differs from the Greek, which it does very often. [/FONT]
[FONT=Bookman Old Style, Arial, helvetica, san-serif]The New English Translation of the Septuagint is a scholarly eclectic text translated from the Gottingen/Rahlf5 critical edition of the Septuagint. The first volume of this translation, Psalms, appeared in 2000. Oxford University Press published the complete translation in October 2007. The text of NETS is based on the Old Testament of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. Because it is based on an eclectic Greek text, this version of the Septuagint is unsuitable for use by English-speaking Orthodox. [/FONT]
[FONT=Bookman Old Style, Arial, helvetica, san-serif]The second of these translations is of more direct significance to Orthodoxy. The Orthodox Study Bible, New Testament and Psalms (OSB) was originally published in 1993. The New Testament text of the OSB is the New King James Version (NKJV), which is itself based on the Byzantine Received Text, the traditional text of the Greek-speaking churches, indeed of all Christendom until the nineteenth century. In the absence at that time of a suitable English translation of the Septuagint, the Psalms were taken directly from the New King James Version’s translation of the Masoretic Hebrew. This first OSB received much adverse critical comment. Now, under the direction of Fr Jack Sparks, a new Septuagint translation has been published in the USA as part of The Orthodox Study Bible: Septuagint and New Testament. [/FONT]
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[FONT=Bookman Old Style, Arial, helvetica, san-serif]The new Orthodox Study Bible was published in February 2008. It has study notes and theological guides. It is a ‘word for word’ translation of the Greek by a number of contributors in a formal modern English but with echoes of the King James Bible. Like its 1993 predecessor the new OSB uses the New King James Version as its base, but claims to have changed it where it differs from the text of the Septuagint. However, this is by no means always the case. The OSB’s dependence on the NKJV Bible is at times a decided liability: there seems to be a marked reluctance to deviate from the text of the NKJV even when the plain meaning of the Greek demands it. One egregious example of this occurs in the key Messianic text of Genesis 49:10. The Greek means, ‘A ruler shall not be wanting from Juda and a leader from his thighs, until the things stored up for him come, and he is the expectation of nations’. The OSB, following NKJV exactly, has: ‘The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from his loins until Shiloh come: and to him shall be the expectation of the nations’. However, despite its very obvious shortcomings, it seems that the OSB, with a major publisher (Thomas Nelson) behind it, will remain the standard Orthodox translation of the Septuagint for the immediate future. [/FONT]
[FONT=Bookman Old Style, Arial, helvetica, san-serif]1 Ware, Kallistos (Timothy): The Orthodox Church, p.208; Penguin 1963, [/FONT]
[FONT=Bookman Old Style, Arial, helvetica, san-serif]2 Turpie, DH: The Old Testament in the New’;, Williams and Norgate 1868[/FONT]
[FONT=Bookman Old Style, Arial, helvetica, san-serif]3 Muller, M: The First Bible of the Church, pp.115-6; Sheffield Academic Press 1996.[/FONT]
[FONT=Bookman Old Style, Arial, helvetica, san-serif]4 Muller, M: op.cit, p.23[/FONT]
[FONT=Bookman Old Style, Arial, helvetica, san-serif]5 Septuaginta. Id est Vetus Testamentum Graece iuxta LXX Interpretes. Stuttgart: Wurttembergische Bibelanstalt, 1935 [/FONT]
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