The Orthodox Study Bible, Hardcover: Ancient Christianity Speaks to Today's World

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Departing Horeb: The Masoretic Hebrew vs the LXX Part 1 by Eric Jobe. A series of articles on the Masoretic Text and Septuagint from a scholarly perspective. Part 2, Part 3, A Clarification The Septuagint was produced in the Helleno-Roman cultural world, that is the period roughly from Alexander the Great’s conquests (c325 B.C.) to the establishment of the Roman Empire. The lingua franca of that world was the κοινη διαλεκτος, (common) Greek. Then as now many more Jews lived outside the Holy Land than lived within it, and the great majority of them did not speak Hebrew. There arose, therefore, a need for a version of the Hebrew Bible in Greek. The Septuagint was that version. It was written by Greek-speaking Jews of the Judaeo-Greek Diaspora, employing, not, as has sometimes been said, a separate Semiticform ofGreek, but the common κοινη with a specialised vocabulary, including idioms, and a style that reflected its own distinctive interests. For an apt comparison one might perhaps think of the legal or journalistic English of our own day. What is the Septuagint? Prof Dr. Wolfgang Kraus, R. Glenn Wooden. Septuagint Research: Issues and Challenges in the Study of the Greek Jewish Scriptures. Society of Biblical Literature, 2006. 414 pp. ISBN 9781589832046 Prof. Dr. Carsten Peter Thiede. The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Jewish Origins of Christianity. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 256 pp. ISBN 9781403961433 ( See discussion of Septuagint) C. P. Lincoln, " A Critique of the Revised Standard Version," Bibliotheca Sacra, Volume 110 (Jan. 1953) pp. 50-66, Sept. 1, 2006 < http://www.bible-researcher.com/rsv-bibsac.html>.

Commentary notes, or annotations, serve as the defining characteristic of study Bibles. The OSB is no different except that its comments originate not from the interpretation of modern Bible scholars, but rather from over 50 early church sources. These notes not only draw upon the biblical and theological understandings of individuals such as Athanasius, Irenaeus, and Chrysostom, they also gear themselves toward the life and practice of Orthodox Christians. Accordance users have always enjoyed the freedom to pair any translation or original language text of the Bible with any set of study Bible notes, and this remains true with the OSB. However, since the Old Testament of the OSB follows the Septuagint (LXX) and not the Hebrew Bible, included with every copy of the OSB is the St. Athanasius Academy Septuagint, a new English version of the LXX created specifically to accompany the Old Testament annotations of the OSB. The SAAS began with the New King James Version as its base, but changes were made at any point where the LXX differed from the Hebrew text. Moreover, brand new translations were created for the additional books (often referred to as Apocrypha or Deuterocanon) not found in the NKJV. The translation of these additional Old Testament books use the NKJV style and vocabulary as a template to maintain a consistent look and feel throughout the OSB. Thus, when the Apostles quote the Jewish Scripture in their own writings, the overwhelmingly dominant source for their wording comes directly from the Septuagint (LXX). Given that the spread of the Gospel was most successful among the Gentiles and Hellenistic Jews, it made sense that the LXX would be the Bible for the early Church. Following in the footsteps of those first generations of Christians, the Orthodox Church continues to regard the LXX as its only canonical text of the Old Testament. There are a number of differences between the canon of the LXX and that of Roman Catholic Church and Protestant Christians, based on differences in translation tradition or doctrine. Clement of Alexandria. Chapter XXII.—On the Greek Translation of the Old Testament. In: THE STROMATA (MISCELLANIES), BOOK I.Prof. Dr. Tim McLay. The Use of the Septuagint in New Testament Research. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2003. 207 pp. ISBN 9780802860910 Russian Israeli writer Israel Shamir is a Jewish convert to the Greek Orthodox Church of Jerusalem. Arguing for the veracity of the Septuagint over the Masoretic text, he states that there is an urgent need for a distinctly Christian Old Testament in Hebrew; he recommends reconstruction of the Hebrew source of the Septuagint, as a means of witnessing to the Jews today from a truly Christian Hebrew Bible)

There were some things I didn't like about it. For instance, the fact that it used the New King James Version for the New Testament, rather than a more accurate translation. Orthodox Christianity is the face of ancient Christianity to the modern world and embraces the second largest body of Christians in the world. In this first-of-its-kind study Bible, the Bible is presented with commentary from the ancient Christian perspective that speaks to those Christians who seek a deeper experience of the roots of their faith. We are pleased to announce the release of the Orthodox Study Bible Notes for the Accordance Library! This unique study Bible, offering insights and commentary from the early centuries of Christianity, will be of interest not only to Eastern Orthodox Christians but also to anyone interested in church history. Next year I plan to do some “extra-curricular” reading: I’ll read some of the Apocrypha, and I’ve got a collection of gnostic texts that I’ll work my way through as well. I also plan to do a long reading of the Quran at some point. Insightful commentary drawn from the Christian writers and teachers of the first ten centuries after Christ

The KJV Septuagint - translated from the Septuagint edition published by the Orthodox Church of Greece's Apostoliki Diakonia, using the King James Version as a template. Scheduled to be published by St. Innocent Press in 2013, this will be the only English translation to date using an approved ecclesiastical text of the Septuagint. For a very long time there were only two English translations of the Septuagint, neither of them from Orthodox sources. The first was by Charles Thomson, the Secretary of the U.S. Continental Congress, and one of America’s Founding Fathers, who produced his translation in 1808, which he made from J Field’s printed Greek text of 1665. Thomson omitted the deuterocanonical texts. Then in 1851 Sir Lancelot C L Brenton published his translation of the Septuagint. This is generally available and fairly widely known today in bilingual editions in book form or on the Internet. Both Thomson and Brenton’s are ‘diplomatic’ texts, i.e. they are based on one text – in the case of Brenton it is Codex Vaticanus -, which does not altogether agree with the Greek text of the Orthodox Church. However there are now several other English translations, and more are in progress. Significant recent publications are the New English Translation of the Septuagint (NETS) and The Orthodox Study Bible (OSB). Others include the Eastern Orthodox Bible (EOB). This latter includes the Septuagint text in a modern English revision of Brenton’s translation, noting also variant texts from the Syriac translation, the Peshitta, the Masoretic and other ancient versions. And the present author has completed a traditional English version based on the Apostoliki Diakonia text, using the King James Bible as its English template and amending it where it differs from the Greek. This is the Bible English translation used by the Orthodox Church. As such, those from other branches of Christianity may find it different from other versions with which they are more familiar. What authority then does the Septuagint possess? After all, the Jewish people who made it abandoned it quite early. The Dead Sea Scrolls, which were found in 1947 in a cave in Qumran on the west bank of the river Jordan, date from just before or during the time of our Lord Jesus Christ. They provide indisputable evidence that at the turn of the era, before the birth of Christianity, the texts of at least some books of the Hebrew Bible were circulating in more than one form. Many of the scriptural texts found in the Scrolls are very similar to the text of the Septuagint that we have today. From the first century AD Christians and Jews both used the Greek Bible, but they understood it differently, and as a result tension arose, and much polemical disagreement. The use made of the Septuagint by Christians was the primary reason that Judaism abandoned the Septuagint to the Church and produced new Greek translations of the then Hebrew text. In the second century A.D. the Septuagint began to be supplanted among the Jewish people by the successive recensions of the scholars Aquila, Theodotion and Symmachus, all of which were designed to assimilate the Greek text more closely than the older Septuagint to the then-current Hebrew. Only fragments of these three versions survive. Of them, Aquila’s version seems to have been so extremely literal that it could hardly have been understood without a very good knowledge of Hebrew. It remained in use in the synagogue until the sixth century A.D.

Interestingly, since the New Testament of the OSB is paired with an Old Testament based on the Septuagint—the Bible used by the writers of the New Testament—when the New Testament quotes the Old, the quotations are worded identically, unlike most Bibles with Old Testaments based on the Hebrew text. Well, I actually did it. I read the entire Bible this year. It was something I decided to do on a whim 364 days ago, and I actually followed through with it. I’ve been measuring the passage of the year by crossing off each day’s line in the reading plan I’ve been following, and it’s a strange feeling to get to the end. I should probably have something more substantive to say, but I feel a bit like Forrest Gump after he ran across the country. “I’m pretty tired. I think I’ll go home now.” Kevin Mayhew Publishers has printed the translation by Peter King, SJ, in four volumes ( The Pentateuch 2010, The Historical Books 2012, The Wisdom Literature 2008, and The Prophets 2013), which are now available (along with King's translation of the New Testament) as The Bible. King's work, however, is difficult to obtain in the US.

Separate from the article on the “Seventy” (from Luke 10:1-17) included in the bulleted list earlier, another section lists all 70 “sent ones” according to Orthodox tradition, the date on the church calendar in which each is commemorated, and references in the New Testament which refer to these early missionary-apostles. The Orthodox Study Bible, Ancient Faith Edition, Leathersoft: Ancient Christianity Speaks to Today’s World