How the Church Fathers Read the Bible E-Book

Gerald Bray

• Herausgeber: Lexham Press
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 305

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Read the Scriptures with the insight of our forebears Christians live in the house built by the church fathers. Essential Christian doctrines were shaped by how figures such as Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Augustine read the Bible. But appreciating patristic interpretation is not just for the historically curious, as if it were only a matter of literary archaeology. Nor should it be intimidating. Rather, the fathers gleaned insights from Scripture that continue to be relevant to all Christians. How the Church Fathers Read the Bible is an accessible introduction to help you read Scripture with the early church. With a clear and simple style, Gerald Bray explains the distinctives of early Christian interpretation and shows how the fathers interpreted key Bible passages from Genesis to Revelation. Their unique perspective is summed up in seven principles that can inspire our Bible reading today. With Bray as your guide, you can reclaim the rich insights of the fathers with reverence and discernment.

Leseprobe

A Short Introduction

HOW the CHURCH FATHERS READ the BIBLE

Gerald Bray

How the Church Fathers Read the Bible: A Short Introduction

Copyright 2022 Gerald Bray

Lexham Press, 1313 Commercial St., Bellingham, WA 98225

LexhamPress.com

You may use brief quotations from this resource in presentations, articles, and books. For all other uses, please write Lexham Press for permission. Email us at [email protected].

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are the author’s own translation or are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Print ISBN 9781683595830

Digital ISBN 9781683595847

Library of Congress Control Number 2021947097

Lexham Editorial: Todd Hains, Ryan Davis, Kelsey Matthews, Jessi Strong, Mandi Newell

Cover Design: Lydia Dahl, Brittany Schrock

COLLECT FOR THE SECOND SUNDAY IN ADVENT, BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER (1549).

Blessed Lord,

who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning:

Grant that we may in such wise hear them,

read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them,

that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word,

we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life,

which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ.

Amen.

TABLE of CONTENTS

I.What is Patristic Biblical Interpretation?

II.The Clash of Worldviews

III.The Four Senses of Interpretation

IV.The Search for Consensus

V.Case Studies

VI.Seven Theses on How the Church Fathers Read the Bible

General Index

Scripture Index

I

WHAT IS PATRISTIC BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION?

THE ORIGIN OF PATRISTIC STUDIES

Patristic biblical interpretation is the study of how the Bible was understood by those ancient Christian writers who are collectively known as the “fathers of the church.” That term is nowhere near as old as the men to whom it refers, and it did not come into general use until relatively modern times. The adjective “patristic” was popularized by the German Lutheran scholar Johann Franz Buddeus (1667–1729), though he was not the first to group the early Christian writers together as “fathers.”1 That honor belongs to another German Lutheran scholar, Johannes Gerhard (1582–1637), whose study of them was posthumously published under the title Patrologia.2 Both men were drawing on an ancient tradition whereby Christians looked back to the postapostolic founders and leaders of their local communities as “fathers,” whether they left any written remains or not. Those who did write were accorded the status of “doctors of the church” as early as the fourth century, when Jerome (c. 347–420) wrote brief biographies of the ones known to him (De viris illustribus), and it was as doctors that they were generally cited before the seventeenth century. Printed editions of their works began to appear shortly after printing was invented, but it was the Benedictine monks of Saint Maur (France) who produced the first critical editions of them in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Their achievement is known today mainly through reprints published by Jacques-Paul Migne (1800–1875), whose Patrologiae Cursus Completus, despite its many inadequacies, remains a standard reference work.3 Since that time there have been many translations into modern languages, and new critical editions of the original texts are slowly being produced, though the process is still far from complete.

As defined by Gerhard, Buddeus, and the monks of Saint Maur, the fathers were prominent men of unimpeachable orthodoxy whose literary legacy shaped and defended the theological formulations of the four great “ecumenical” councils of antiquity: Nicaea I (325), Constantinople I (381), Ephesus I (431), and Chalcedon (451). To the conciliar decrees should be added the Apostles’ Creed and the Quicunque vult, or Athanasian Creed, which were not authorized by any church council but which stand in the same tradition. As time went on, the boundaries of who might be counted among the fathers were expanded. Migne included Latin writers up to the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 along with Greek writers of an even later period, but today most scholars limit the time frame considerably and exclude the Middle Ages. There is no universally agreed cutoff date, but even by the most generous modern calculation, the last authors regarded as fathers are Bede (673–735) in the Latin West and John of Damascus (c. 650–750) in the Greek East. At the same time, ancient Christians who wrote in oriental languages such as Coptic (Egypt), Syriac, and Armenian, though they remain much less well known than those who used Latin or Greek, are now often regarded as church fathers too. One of the reasons for this is that a number of Greek patristic writings that have been lost in the original are preserved in one or more of these oriental languages (or in Latin), making it necessary to include them.4

It has always been known that the fathers saw themselves as guardians and interpreters of the Bible, and for a thousand years their interpretations, often filtered through collections and extracts from their writings, were regarded as authoritative for the church. The first major break with that tradition came in a series of lectures by Martin Luther (1483–1546) on Galatians, which he delivered in 1519. In those lectures, Luther engaged with the fathers in considerable depth and dissented from their interpretations at many points. His main argument was that they had not properly grasped the apostle Paul’s theology, and in particular his doctrine of justification by faith alone. That failure had led to centuries of misunderstanding that obscured the way of salvation and concealed the truth of the gospel.

Luther’s disagreement with many (though not all) of the fathers’ conclusions was matched by a realization among Renaissance scholars that the text of the Bible on which they relied was in many respects faulty.5 The Bible that everyone in sixteenth-century Western Europe used was Jerome’s Latin translation, known as the Vulgate (from the Latin word vulgata, “popular”), which, despite its generally high quality, was inadequate for the needs of those who had been influenced by the new approach to ancient sources that characterized the Renaissance. Thanks in large measure to the work of Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536), there was a renewed interest in the textual study of the New Testament in its original Greek and of the Old Testament in Hebrew, which transformed the way that biblical studies were done. It was difficult (though not impossible) to fault the fathers on their Greek, especially since for many of them it was their mother tongue, but their ignorance of Hebrew was another matter. Hardly any of the fathers had been familiar with that language, and few had appreciated the extent to which Semitic thought patterns underlie the New Testament, which in some places is little more than a translation from Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus.6

Jerome knew that the standard Greek translation of the Old Testament, known as the Septuagint, was faulty, and he insisted on translating the text from the original Hebrew, which he attempted to learn for that purpose.7 But even he had been forced to rely on three more accurate Greek translations made by Jews in later times (Aquila, Symmachus, and especially Theodotion) and to consult rabbis when difficulties arose. It was therefore easy for the Renaissance scholars to argue that the fathers’ interpretations of the Old Testament were questionable on the ground that the text they used was unreliable, and some of them were unsparing in their criticisms. The result was that although the fathers continued to be read for their theological and spiritual insights, the quality of much of their biblical exegesis was increasingly doubted and their commentaries were quietly set aside.

The rise of what we now call the historical-critical method in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries confirmed this negative assessment and relegated patristic biblical interpretation to the level of premodern, nonscientific guesswork that could be disregarded for practical purposes. Even scholars who specialized in the history of the early church either ignored it or mentioned it mainly to demonstrate how unacceptable it was. In their view, whatever the Bible said, it was seldom what most of the fathers imagined it to be saying, and so the fathers’ understanding, fascinating though it sometimes was, was dismissed as quaint and essentially irrelevant to any serious study of the subject.

In recent years this consensus has been challenged by a number of scholars who have wanted to go back behind the rise of historical criticism and reevaluate the methods and conclusions of earlier times. Students of the early church have come to appreciate just how central the Bible was to its concerns, and that, whether we agree with the fathers or not, the interpretive principles that guided them must be taken seriously if we are ever to understand how Christianity developed. Among this new wave of scholars are several who have sought to recover the methods (and even many of the conclusions) of the fathers. In their opinion, historical criticism has devastated the Christian world and left it defenseless against the forces of secularism, but by going back to the sources and reactivating them for modern use—a process sometimes known by the French word ressourcement—there is hope that the spirit that animated the first Christians can reinvigorate their descendants and revive the church today.

Whether, or to what extent, that can be done successfully must remain a matter of debate and will not be known for some time yet. But what is certain is that the biblical interpretation of the early church period has returned to the forefront of academic research and has to be taken seriously, even by those who are inclined to disregard (most of) it. This has the great advantage of making it possible for us to examine it more or less objectively, in a way that would have been more difficult a generation or two ago. The witnesses of past ages are now free to speak to us on their own terms, and we are willing to hear them out, even if any modern appropriation of their legacy is bound to be complex and possibly controversial. Christians have benefited from this new openness to the premodern past, but the motives behind it are often secular and do not necessarily lead to a greater acceptance of the validity of what the fathers had to say. In the words of the late French theologian Charles Kannengiesser (1926–2018), when describing the revival of patristic studies after 1945,

Instead of being isolated from their secular context for more narrowly theological purposes—too frequently the practice in patristic studies of the past—the founding achievements of men and women in the early church became more and more perceived as exemplifying the social, political, and spiritual behavior proper to their own time. This changed perspective of Christian origins underlines the shifts currently at work in patristic scholarship. Thus, in becoming more open to secular questions, the basic status of Christian origins found itself profoundly changed, at long last released from the confines of confessional apologetics. The corresponding modifications within the discipline of patristic exegesis reflects an ongoing process of a much broader foundational re-modeling of Christian traditions among theologians and historians of Christian thought.8

Kannengiesser’s analysis is a fair assessment of patristic studies as they are now pursued in academic circles, but this modern approach is bound to leave Christians dissatisfied. The fathers of the church believed that they were interpreting a revelation from God. That revelation was to be found in the Bible, and the true meaning of the text was to be sought in what it says about God and not in what it tells us about the human writers who recorded his word to them. Since God does not change, what the Bible says about him must be consistent from beginning to end, regardless of the circumstances in which knowledge of him was revealed or the form which that revelation took. From the Christian point of view, modern scholars who think of the Bible as a record of ancient Jewish and Christian beliefs that changed and developed over time miss the point. To the fathers, as to Christian believers today, a common theological thread ties the Bible together and forms the basis for interpreting it. They would have rejected the modern secular view that this theological unity has been superimposed on texts that originally had little if anything in common.

As for the traditional distinction between orthodoxy and heresy, many modern scholars believe that it was largely the impossibility of reconciling these disparate sources that forced the fathers to choose which ones to accept and which to reject, thereby creating divisions that split the church. Their choices may not have been entirely arbitrary, of course, but they were decided by theological, and sometimes even political, criteria, which then became the basis for interpreting the texts themselves. The result was that many of those texts were distorted in order to fit a predetermined pattern. Obviously those who agree with the fathers’ theological presuppositions will be more inclined to accept their conclusions (or at least some of them) as valid, and that is what motivates many believing Christians today. Those who do not share that outlook may record the fathers’ interpretations for what they were, but will probably reject them as a guide to what we should accept today, either about the Bible or about the God of whom the Bible purports to speak.

Patristic biblical interpretation is therefore not just a form of literary archaeology of interest only to specialists. It is a battleground of ideas, in which the credibility of the Christian tradition is at stake. Retreating into a kind of patristic fundamentalism, in which everything the fathers said and did must be accepted as infallible, is not an option, despite the fact that something like it is occasionally found in the Eastern Orthodox churches.9 On the other hand, categorical rejection of the patristic tradition can no longer be justified either. One way or another we have to come to terms with it and decide how we should appreciate (and to what extent we can appropriate) it today. But before we can consider that, we must be clear in our minds what it is that we are talking about. What do we mean by the Bible? Who exactly were the fathers and what authority do they possess in the history of the church? And finally, what do we classify as interpretation, as opposed to mere quotation or allusion to texts that were broadly familiar to many?

WHAT IS THE BIBLE?

To understand the mindset of the early Christian church, we must start with its most important single legacy to us—the Bible. For most people today, it seems obvious that the Bible is a book, or perhaps a collection of books, subdivided into two Testaments. The first of these contains the pre-Christian legacy of ancient Israel, and the second is the revelation given to us by Jesus Christ and his disciples. Most Christians own at least one copy of this composite Bible and many have several, often in different translations. A few even read the original texts in Hebrew and Greek, which are readily available in scholarly editions.10 Dictionaries and commentaries abound and can easily be consulted to explain the meaning of obscure words and passages. It would be an exaggeration to say that every problem of interpretation has been resolved, but modern readers have more resources of scholarship at their disposal and are better placed to handle the remaining difficulties than has ever been true in the past.

It may therefore come as something of a shock to discover that the first Christians did not have Bibles as we understand them and did not think of their sacred writings as a single collection in the way that we do. They faced difficulties that are unknown to us, and unless we understand what they were up against, we shall find it very hard to appreciate the greatness of their achievement. Books were expensive and few people could afford them, and even the ones that existed often looked nothing like what we would call a book today. The Jews wrote their Scriptures on scrolls, which were awkward to handle and took up a lot of storage space. There were bookstores in the ancient world, but they were few and far between, and it is not clear that the Hebrew Scriptures were ever produced for sale on the open market. The Jerusalem temple had moneychangers, but we never hear anything about a bookstall, and the sacred nature of the writings probably ensured that there were none. Acts 8:27–35 tells us about the Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of his queen, who was reading a scroll of the prophet Isaiah on his way back home from Jerusalem, but we do not know where he got the scroll from. Perhaps it was a gift from the high priest to the Ethiopian queen. We do not even know whether it was in Hebrew or in Greek. All we can say is that it is the only record in the New Testament of a private individual reading a copy of Scripture by himself. The story does not suggest that there was anything particularly unusual about this, so perhaps it was a more common occurrence than we have evidence for, but the high status of the eunuch must make us wonder about that. A man reading a scroll then was probably like a man wearing an expensive Rolex watch today—not an impossibility, but not something you see every day as a matter of course either.

Scrolls came in different shapes and sizes, but none contained the whole of the Old Testament. The eunuch was reading Isaiah, and that may have been all that he had. Synagogues would typically own a collection of scrolls, though how many had a complete set is impossible to say. Jewish boys would learn to read them, even if they were not particularly scholarly. Jesus was brought up on them, even though he was a carpenter’s stepson and received no formal theological training. His ability to discuss the meaning of the Hebrew texts was exceptional, but the fact that he had studied them was not. When he went to the synagogue in Nazareth at the beginning of his public ministry, he was allowed to take the Isaiah scroll and knew how to find the passage that he was looking for. Nobody seemed to be surprised by that, though his interpretation of the selected passage was controversial to say the least (Luke 4:16–21)! Later on, when Paul preached the gospel to the Jews of Berea, we are told that “they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so” (Acts 17:11). The Bereans must have had the Scriptures readily available, but where they were kept, how they were read, and even what language they were written in are questions to which there is no answer.

The existence of many scrolls helps explain why there was no readily available term to describe the sacred writings as a whole. They were usually called the graphai in Greek (scripturae in Latin), but that word just means “writings” and in theory could refer to anything. Later they came to be called ta biblia (“the books”), from which our word “Bible” is derived, but the word is plural in both Greek and Latin, not singular as it is in English and most other modern languages.11 The idea that there was a single book containing the word of God was simply unknown in ancient times. It must also be remembered that there were different versions of the sacred texts, even when in principle they were identifiable as one. For example, in the time of Jesus the prophecies of Isaiah came in at least three distinct forms—two in Hebrew (preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls) and one in Greek. We can be fairly sure that Jesus did not use the Greek one when he spoke in Nazareth, but which of the two Hebrew texts he quoted from is unknown, because the passage he cited happens to be the same in both of them. Let us look briefly at the options that were available.

The Hebrew Bible (Old Testament)

This was the original text, recognized as such by everybody in the ancient world. It was preserved by the Jewish priests and rabbis almost unchanged over many centuries and has come down to us in three distinct parts—the Torah (a word that is usually, if somewhat inaccurately, translated as “law”), the Prophets, and the Writings. The Torah was ascribed to Moses, the great lawgiver of ancient Israel, and was the foundational document of Jewish religion. All theological argument proceeded from it, a pattern that we see both in the ministry of Jesus and in the preaching of his followers, especially the apostle Paul. It can be reasonably assumed that every synagogue had a copy of it, that Jewish boys committed large parts of it to memory, and that it was the first part of the Scriptures to be translated into Greek in the third century BC. It is also the only part of the Hebrew Bible that was accepted by the Samaritans, who broke away from the Jews sometime around 500 BC, so it must have been in existence in more or less its present form by then. But the text of the Samaritan Torah is not identical to the Hebrew one we now use, and modern scholars sometimes use it to correct what they believe are mistakes in the Jewish versions that crept in later on. It is hard to be certain about this, of course, but when the Samaritan Torah agrees with the ancient Greek translation against the generally accepted Hebrew, there is a fair chance that the Hebrew is wrong, and some modern translations (such as the English Standard Version) prefer the Samaritan text for that reason.

In addition to the Torah there are the Prophets, a collection of records and sayings that were accumulated for about a thousand years after the time of Moses. Before 750 BC or so, the prophetic writings are mainly accounts of what prophets like Elijah and Elisha said and did, written by other people who are unknown to us. Beginning around 750 BC, however, the prophets speak for themselves, and their sayings have been preserved in books that bear their names—Isaiah, Jeremiah, and so on—though the exact relationship between these prophets and the books attributed to them remains obscure. We have evidence that the book of Jeremiah was originally composed by the scribe Baruch, who worked with him, and the existence of different editions of it indicate that the prophet’s sayings were collected over a fairly long period, but whether, or to what extent, the same can be said for the others is unknown. Most modern scholars hold similar views about the origins of Isaiah, but there is no objective textual evidence to support their reconstructions of the book’s prehistory—it is largely guesswork on their part, based on what appear to be different strands of composition in the book, and not on any existing manuscript tradition.12 Ancient Jews and Christians knew that the book of Jeremiah had a complex history, but they were ignorant as far as the other books were concerned, and so by default they usually took them to be the compositions of the prophets whose names they bore.

Finally, the Hebrew Bible as we now know it contains a number of other Writings, notably the Psalms, which were collectively ascribed to King David, and the wisdom literature (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs), which was connected to his son Solomon. The exact status of these books in ancient Israel was uncertain, though it appears that by the time of Jesus they were gradually acquiring a collective identity of their own. The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, who wrote shortly after the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70, recognized the existence of sacred books that were neither Torah nor Prophets, but he did not put them in a third category. Whether, or to what extent, the early church shared his view is unclear. The Hebrew Writings are all in the Christian Bible, but they are not sectioned off in the way that they now are in the text. Ruth and Lamentations, for example, which the Jews came to regard as Writings, were attached by Josephus to prophetic books—Ruth was read as an appendix to Judges, and Lamentations to Jeremiah—and Christians have followed the same pattern. Among the Jews the order of the books varied considerably, but the overall collection was fairly standardized by the first century AD, with doubts lingering only over Esther, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs, none of which is quoted in the New Testament.13

One little-appreciated problem with the Hebrew Bible as we know it is that it is the product of editorial work carried out by the Masoretes, a group of Jewish scholars whose task it was to preserve the tradition (masorah) of the sacred texts. They were at work for several centuries, from about AD 500 to 1000, which means that the text current today was given its final shape after the patristic period came to an end. We therefore cannot expect that the church fathers would have conformed to it. This is particularly important because one of the main contributions made by the Masoretes was the addition of vowels to texts that were written with consonants only. The lack of vowels seems strange to us, but the structure of the Semitic languages is such that the written forms do not need them, and modern Hebrew and Arabic both do without them to a degree that would be impossible with a European language. Even so, there are times when a consonantal text can be vocalized in different ways, making it difficult to determine what the original meaning was. A good example of this is the Hebrew word h-mth, which occurs in Genesis 47:31 and is read in the Masoretic Text as ha-mittah (“the bed”). The sentence is describing the death of Jacob, who laid his head down on the bed and expired. But the Hebrew word could also be vocalized as ha-matteh (“the staff”), making the text read that Jacob bowed his head on his staff.14 That sounds less likely, given the context, but it is what the Greek translators in the third century BC took it to be saying. They translated it as hē rhabdos (“the staff”), and that is how the verse was quoted in Hebrews 11:21. This is a minor point without theological significance, but it shows what could—and in this case did—happen. The fathers obviously followed the Greek translation and had scriptural warrant for doing so, even if that reading is questionable on a purely text-critical level.

Whether, or to what extent, the Masoretes may have been influenced by anti-Christian bias in their editing is impossible to say, but given that Christianity was a major threat to their survival in the centuries when they were working, that may have been the case. What is certain is that when we examine the readings of the Old Testament in the fathers and find that they disagree with the Masoretic Text, we cannot automatically assume that the fathers were wrong. It is at least possible that the version they were quoting was acceptable in their own time, even if it did not survive the editing process of later centuries.

The Greek Old Testament

The Torah was translated into Greek in the reign of King Ptolemy II Philadelphus (r. 285–246 BC), who wanted the wisdom of the Jews to be housed in the famous library that he built in Alexandria, though the rest of the Old Testament was not completed until some time later and may not have been fully available until the early years of the first century AD. The quality of this Septuagint (LXX) translation is variable, but comparison with the Samaritan and Babylonian Torah traditions, along with the evidence of the Dead Sea Scrolls, shows that differences from the Masoretic Text are by no means always to be regarded as mistakes made by the translators. There are, however, several features of the LXX that are not found in any Hebrew text, and these have to be noted:

1.The books of the Torah have proper titles (Genesis, Exodus, etc.), whereas in Hebrew they are known by their opening word.

2.The Hebrew Prophets are separated into Historical Books (Joshua to 2 Kings) and the Prophets proper (Isaiah to Malachi), which are grouped together as a third category of Writings.

3.There is no separate category of Writings. The wisdom literature is placed in between the Historical Books and the Prophets, and the others writings are placed in one or other of those categories. The books of 1 Chronicles to Esther are regarded as Historical, whereas Daniel is put with the Prophets.

4.Jeremiah is much shorter in the LXX than in the Hebrew, presumably because it represents an older version of the text.

5.Esther and Daniel are much longer in the LXX than in the Hebrew, presumably because of additions made to them sometime after their original composition.

6.The Psalms are numbered differently, and the LXX has an extra one that is not in the Hebrew text:

Hebrew

Greek

1–8

1–8

9–10

9

11–113

10–112

114–115

113

116:1–9

114

116:10–19

115

117–146

116–145

147:1–11

146

147:12–20

147

148–150

148–150

–

151

The different numbering of the Psalms is important, because the fathers all used the Greek system, so that our Psalm 23, for example, was Psalm 22 to them. Modern editors and translators are inconsistent in the way they handle this discrepancy. Sometimes they follow the fathers without saying so (standard practice among Catholic and Orthodox writers), sometimes they put both—for example, either “Psalm 22 (23)” or “Psalm 23 (22)”—or they adjust to the Hebrew numbering used in Protestant Bibles and in most modern writing. Occasionally they are good enough to inform the reader of what they are doing, but not always, and often the only way of being sure is to check a reference or quotation against the Bible itself. Another difference to be aware of is that the ascriptions placed at the head of many individual psalms are often not the same in Greek as they are in Hebrew—a relatively minor but sometimes disconcerting detail!

But by far the most important difference between the LXX and the Hebrew Bible is the presence in Greek of several extra books. Many of these were originally written in Hebrew and fragments of them are extant, but no complete Hebrew text of any of them survives because the Jews did not receive them into their biblical canon. Where these extra books came from and why they were included in the LXX is unclear. It is probable that most if not all of them were composed later than the books of the Hebrew Bible and that the ones originally written in Greek originated in Alexandria rather than in Palestine, but even that is debated and we can say no more with any degree of certainty.

The inadequacies of the LXX were recognized by the Jews themselves, and further translations appeared in the early Christian centuries. The one by Theodotion was particularly good, and his version of Job quietly supplanted the original LXX text. The importance of these different versions was well understood by Christians. In the early third century Origen (c. 185–254) compiled a famous Hexapla, a copy of the Old Testament in six parallel columns, which he wanted to serve as an aid to correct interpretation. In the first column he placed the Hebrew text, and in the second he transliterated it into Greek letters so that people could read it. The last four columns were devoted to the four main Greek translations—the LXX and those done later by Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion. The work was never copied out in full, though extracts from it survive, but it was housed in the library at Caesarea Maritima in Palestine, where Jerome consulted it more than 150 years later. It may still have been there as late as 638, when the Arab (Muslim) invaders destroyed the library. But whatever happened to the Hexapla, there can be no doubt that the Greek translations were the main source for patristic interpretation and that the fathers were well aware that different versions of the Hebrew original were available, whether they made use of them or not.

The LXX text, presumably including the extra books as well as the longer versions of Esther and Daniel, was widely used in the synagogues of the diaspora (i.e., the Jewish communities outside Palestine) where Greek was the common spoken language, but knowledge of Hebrew may have survived in some places. A man like Paul, who came from the diaspora community in Tarsus but who studied in Jerusalem, was intimately familiar with versions in both Hebrew and Greek, but after the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70 and the destruction of the temple, his kind of biculturalism died out. One result of this was that the Jews gradually retreated back into the Hebrew text, especially as they realized that Christians were using the LXX to defend their interpretation of the Old Testament. We cannot say for sure when the Jewish synagogues stopped using the LXX, but we do know that all surviving copies of it were made by Christians, which suggests that Jews repudiated it at a relatively early stage.

The Old Testament Apocrypha

By AD 100 the church was using the LXX almost exclusively, presumably with the non-Hebrew books (and parts of books) attached. Did Christians regard these “extra” books as divinely inspired Scripture or not? This is a very hard question to answer, and it still divides the Christian world today. The evidence of the early canon lists shows that many Christians took the Hebrew canon as the standard, but those lists do not explicitly reject the extra books.15 It was Jerome, who knew that these books were not recognized by the Jews, who insisted that the church should not accept them either—for that reason. His contemporary Augustine (354–430) countered that because the books were in the LXX and because the LXX was quoted by Paul and the other apostles in the New Testament, the Greek translation ought to be read by Christians as the word of God. The two men never met, but they exchanged letters on the subject, which have survived, and so we have a firsthand account of the controversy. Jerome grouped the extra books together and called them “Apocrypha,” a word that means “hidden,” though that is hardly an accurate description of them. Today, most Bibles either do not print the Apocrypha or squeeze it in between the Old and New Testaments, but some Bibles, particularly ones that come from Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox publishers, continue to disperse its books throughout the Old Testament as they were in the original LXX.

In favor of Jerome’s position, the New Testament writers never quoted the apocryphal books, nor did the early Christians preach or comment on them explicitly, though there are occasional references to some of them here and there. From what we can tell, the church fathers had the Apocrypha available to them but did not make much use of it, which suggests that they did not consider it as inspired by God for use in the church. On the other hand, no church council ever condemned the Apocrypha and in later times Augustine’s view was the one most widely accepted. But it was not until the sixteenth-century Reformation that any definite pronouncements about it were made. On April 8, 1546, the Roman Catholic Church officially decreed that the Apocrypha was canonical Scripture, and in reaction to that the various Protestant churches sided with Jerome—quite explicitly in some cases.16 In that way, a difference of opinion from the early church period was set in stone as one of the things dividing Protestants from Roman Catholics. Modern scholars of all persuasions tend to agree that the Hebrew Bible has a superior status and that the Apocrypha is “deuterocanonical”—that is to say, of secondary importance—though it is recognized as a valuable witness to the evolution of Jewish religion in the intertestamental period.

The Greek New Testament