Ancient Versions. Ancient versions of the Bible are those that were produced in classical languages such as Greek, Syriac, and Latin. The following ancient versions were issued during a 600-year period from about 200 b.c. to a.d. 400.
Greek The oldest Bible translation in the world was made in Alexandria, Egypt, where the Old Testament was translated from Hebrew into Greek for the benefit of the Greek-speaking Jews of that city. A Jewish community had existed in Alexandria almost from its foundation by Alexander the Great in 331 b.c. In two or three generations this community had forgotten its native Palestinian language. These Jews realized they needed the Hebrew Scriptures rendered into the only language they knew—Greek. The first section of the Hebrew Bible to be translated into Greek was the Pentateuch, or the first five books of the Old Testament, some time before 200 b.c. Other parts were translated during the next century.
This version is commonly called the Septuagint, from septuaginta, the Latin word for 70 (LXX). This name was selected because of a tradition that the Pentateuch was translated into Greek by about 70 elders of Israel who were brought to Alexandria especially for this purpose.
Only a few fragments of this version survive from the period before Christ. Most copies of the Greek Old Testament belong to the Christian era and were made by Christians. The John Rylands University Library, Manchester, England, owns a fragment of Deuteronomy in Greek from the second century b.c. Another fragment of the same book in Greek dating from about the same time exists in Cairo. Other fragments of the Septuagint have been identified among the texts known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in 1947.
When Christianity penetrated the world of the Greek-speaking Jews, and then the Gentiles, the Septuagint was the Bible used for preaching the gospel. Most of the Old Testament quotations in the New Testament are taken from this Greek Bible. In fact, the Christians adopted the Septuagint so wholeheartedly that the Jewish people lost interest in it. They produced other Greek versions that did not lend themselves so easily to Christian interpretation.
The Septuagint thus became the authorized version of the early Gentile churches. To this day it is the official version of the Old Testament used in the Greek Orthodox Church. After the books of the New Testament were written and accepted by the early church, they were added to the Old Testament Septuagint to form the complete Greek version of the Bible.
The Septuagint was based on a Hebrew text much older than most surviving Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament. Occasionally, this Greek Old Testament helps scholars to reconstruct the wording of a passage where it has been lost or miscopied by scribes as the text was passed down across the centuries. An early instance of this occurs in Genesis 4:8, where Cains words to Abel, Let us go out to the field, are reproduced from the Septuagint in the NRSV, NIV, and other modern versions. These words had been lost from the standard Hebrew text, but they were necessary to complete the sense of the English translation.
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