Septuagint and Greek as a sacred language

Steve Puluka spuluka at hotmail.com
Mon Dec 27 06:26:54 EST 1999


>From: Cindy Smith <cms at dragon.com>
>
>Subject: Re:  Septuagint and Greek as a sacred language

Cindy,

Thanks for your interest in the Septuagint (LXX).  I love the study of the 
Septuagint.  In fact, this is why I really started to study greek.

The Eastern Christian Churches do use the Septuagint version of the Old 
Testament as our authoritative scripture and the patristic writers did take 
the story of Aristeas at face value and even embellish the details.  You can 
read the original letter yourself at:

http://wesley.nnc.edu/noncanon/ot/pseudo/aristeas.htm

Further discussion on the contents of the letter and patristic 
embellishments are contained in-- Jellicoe, Sidney, "The Septuagint in 
Modern Study", Oxford, 1968.  This work has been republished by Eisenbrauns 
Winona Lake, Indiana.  ISBN0-931464-00-5.  Jellicoe states at the outset 
that he intends to update the information presented by Swete in 1914.

All that being said, Eastern Christians are not in the sacred language camp. 
  You will find translations of scripture in the the national languages of 
the people all over the Orthodox world from the very beginings of the 
Church.  In fact, these earliest translations are important witnesses for 
those who study Text Criticism, the attempt to find the "original text" 
behind the various different manuscripts that survive to our day.

A great on-line resource for Septuagint studies is Joel Kalvesmaki's home 
page at Catholic University.  There you will find a nicely written position 
opposite to the one presented in your on-line discussion.

http://arts-sciences.cua.edu/ecs/jdk/otcanon.htm

Joel also has a Septuagint discussion list here and a ton of resources.  The 
main page is:

http://arts-sciences.cua.edu/ecs/jdk/LXX/

The only full English Translation of the Septuagint currently available is 
Sir Lancelot Brenton's, The Septuagint with Apocrypha:  Greek and English, 
1851.  This is a two column format work, Greek & English.  The Eastern 
Churches have been serving people in the English speaking world now for a 
little over a hundred years so the Antiochian Orthodox jurisdiction is 
working on a modern translation.  Their progress to date is available on the 
web.  This Orthodox Septuagint web site is at:

http://www.lxx.org/

Welcome to the fascinating world of the Old Testament in Greek.  The reason 
this is important to those of us that hold to the Septuagint is there are a 
large number of differences between the Greek and Hebrew. Some are just 
words or phrases, but some entire chapters and books exist in the Greek but 
not the Hebrew.

Feel free to contact me off-list if you would like any further information 
or clarifications.

Steve Puluka
Adult Education Instructor
Byzantine Catholic Archeparchy of Pittsburgh
http://arrive.at/byzantinecatholic

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