The Septuagint’s role

The Septuagint’s role in early Christianity operated across multiple dimensions—textual authority, theological interpretation, and ecclesiastical practice.

Textual Authority and Scripture Citation

Early Christians adopted the Septuagint as their foundational Old Testament text, with many New Testament quotations drawing directly from it rather than the Hebrew Bible.[1] This wasn’t incidental—when New Testament authors cited the Old Testament, they frequently selected Septuagint wording precisely because it conveyed their theological purposes more effectively than the Hebrew phrasing.[2] First Clement demonstrates this priority concretely: nearly a quarter of that early Christian letter consists of Septuagint quotations, underscoring how central this Greek version was to apostolic-era church life.[3]

Theological Interpretation and Patristic Exegesis

The Septuagint shaped how early Christian thinkers understood Scripture itself. Church fathers constructed their theological arguments against both Jewish and pagan opponents by building on the distinctive wording of the Septuagint.[2] Patristic theology and exegesis became rooted in Septuagint readings, and when Christian missionaries translated Scripture into other languages between the second and tenth centuries, they often worked from the Septuagint as their source text.[2]

Ecclesiastical Language and Identity

Even the church’s self-understanding drew from the Septuagint. The term “church” itself derives from the Septuagint’s translation of the Old Testament, where it designated Israel as a divinely called congregation—a title early Christians appropriated to express their identity as the true people of God.[4]

Decline and Displacement

The Septuagint functioned as the church’s Bible from the apostolic fathers through Augustine and Jerome, with only the Syriac church at Edessa as an exception.[2] However, Origen’s Hexapla and Jerome’s advocacy for the Hebrew Bible eventually shifted Western Christianity’s preference toward the original language text.[2]

[1] Edward Andrews, How We Got the Bible (Cambridge, OH: Christian Publishing House, 2023). [See here.]
[2] Chee-Chiew Lee, “Review of When God Spoke Greek: The Septuagint and the Making of the Christian Bible by Timothy Michael Law,” Themelios (2015), 40:1:106–107.
[3] Matthew A. Wilcoxen, “Clement, First Letter of,” in The Lexham Bible Dictionary, ed. John D. Barry et al. (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2016). [See here.]
[4] Williston Walker, A History of the Christian Church (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1919), 22–23.