The LXX was the Old Testament of the Christian Church for the first several centuries since its founding. It remains so today for the Eastern Orthodox churches, even though the Roman Catholic Church had used Jerome's Latin Vulgate until recently, and the Protestant churches follow the more restricted Jewish Palestinian Canon as embodied in the Hebrew Masoretic text.

The Church in the Middle East may have translated their Peshitta version from the LXX and Greek NT (this is the common view) between the 2nd and 5th centuries, or, as our Middle Eastern brethren believe (and the Aramaic Primacy Movement is now promoting), the Peshitta's Syriac or Aramaic texts may have come from more original sources than our Greek NT text. Indeed, the Aramaic Primacy people are working hard to overturn traditional scholarship by alledging evidence that their Aramaic versions are closer to the originals, the Greek (New Testament) coming later -- in fact, they think the Greek is a translation of the Aramaic. In the "standard" tradition of the Greek and Latin churches we have statements by early historians such as Eusebius (4th century) that 'Matthew first wrote his gospel in the Hebrew language... then everyone translated as best he could into his own language'...'in fact his gospel in Hebrew is still preserved to this day at the library of Caesarea'. This "Hebrew" gospel is thought, in actuality, to be in "Aramaic"; at any rate they are sister languages and shared the same script for many years, until Syriac scripts such as Estrangelo began to be used in the Christian city of Edessa (located in what is now the country of Turkey), etc. The Old Syriac, the Diatessaron, and the Peshitta/Peshitto were written in these later Syriac scripts. Because of the inevitable effects of history, language difference, wars and conquests, and doctrinal disputes, the 5th century and afterward saw a separating of the Greek and Middle Eastern Christian cultures, just as in later years the Latin (Roman Catholic) culture found itself more and more at odds with the Greek (Orthodox).

So we Westerners, heirs via history to the Latin Church, have come to be fairly ignorant of the history, influence and Scripture versions of the Syriac/Aramaic/Assyrian Church. The next several years promise to get quite interesting, inasmuch as there is now a concerted effort to revive consciousness of that culture and languages, along with a challenging of some of our most cherished views on the history of the transmission of the Bible text. Time will tell who the winner of the debates will be.

Nevertheless, in the history of the gentile Church as it has come down to us, it was the Greek branch that was favored to hold the torch for Christianity in its early centuries, and that early Church inherited the Greek Septuagint (LXX) from the Jewish Synagogue, as its Old Covenant scriptures. And until scholarship is overturned by hard evidence to the contrary, we believe that the New Covenant scriptures (New Testament) were also written in Greek (with the possible exception of an early 'Hebrew' Gospel of Matthew) which was the 'universal' language of the era-- the perfect vehicle for the spread of the Good News of Jesus Christ at the time.

This means that the early Church used a Greek version of the Hebrew-Aramaic Scriptures...which is somewhat different from the Hebrew here and there, with significant differences in some books. History tells us that there were fingers pointed back and forth between Christians and Jews as to who was guilty of altering bible texts to suit their own purposes. The Jews of Alexandria had originally produced the LXX, beginning around 280 BC, but when the Christians started using it to prove that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah (whom they had rejected), and especially after the Romans destroyed the Temple of Jehovah in Jerusalem in 70 AD, the Rabbis saw the need to define their canon, decide on a standard Hebrew text, and dump the use of the LXX completely, some of them cursing the day of its appearance. So the Church adopted the orphan LXX, the Jews accused them of altering it in places, the Christians accused them of doing the same with the Hebrew text, and today's messianic "Hebrew Roots Movement" accuses the Church of fabricating the whole Septuagint in the AD -- not BC -- era! Undoubtedly, discoveries involving the Dead Sea Scrolls will eventually be called upon to assist in clearing up some of this debate, as some LXX fragments have already been found among them.

The LXX with the 'Apocrypha'

The LXX contains all the 39 books of the Hebrew Old Testament (Protestant reckoning), plus about 10 other books (and parts of books: extra verses, an extra Psalm, and other writings) whose canonicity has been disputed for many centuries. These books are called the Apocryphal books by Protestants, Deuterocanonical by Catholics, and Anaginoskomena by the Greek Orthodox. Throughout much of the Church's history, they were seen as good books to read, edifying and full of examples of faith for the catechumens (new converts). And, despite Protestant objections that the Apocryphal books are not quoted by New Testament writers, Catholic and Orthodox expositors insist that there are several allusions or references to these books, if not direct quotes, throughout the New Testament.

Looking at the value of a knowledge of the Apocrypha from another point of view, we learn some inter-testamental history: The first book of Maccabees tells the story of Jewish struggles during the "silent period" between the Old and New Testament times-- which involves stories such as the origin of the Hanukkah (Chanukah), the Jewish Festival of Lights, celebrated by Jesus in the gospels as the feast of Dedication of the temple... whose observance was not mentioned or mandated in the Old Testament to which Jews and Protestants limit themselves. But the Apocrypha supply us with that background. Indeed, it has been said that to have a knowledge of the Apocrypha is to be able to understand the New Testament itself that much better.

I was particularly concerned that all of the Deuterocanonical /Apocryphal books be included here (they're not included in most of the LXX web sites I've found on the Internet) since the LXX has traditionally had them interspersed among the 'normal' canon. I also wanted to include both versions of Daniel -- the "LXX Old Greek" version and Theodotion's version. The former was deemed poor enough a rendering that the early Church opted to replace it with Theodotion's version, which is what appears in most LXX's today. But the old Greek version has been rediscovered, and I include it here, however dubious its value as a translation of the Hebrew Daniel, along with the dual versions of Susanna and the Elders, and Bel and the Dragon (old LXX and Theodotion's version).

So whether your particular brand of Christianity views these "Apocrypha" as inspired, merely for edification, or as uninspired, I include them here for completeness, since the Septuagint contains them, and the pre-Reformation Church as a whole used them and preserved them through the centuries.

Text Sources

About the HTML format

By "gotchas" I mean the following: I wanted plain vanilla HTML files, of separate chapters, of each book. Some sites use .PDF files; I find them to be slow-loading annoyances, even though I understand why so many use them (for security from tampering, publisher-ready layout, etc.)-- still, I hate them and won't use them if I don't have to.

Then there's the Unicode stuff... I'm sure somebody is making good use of the "morphologically tagged and parsed LXX" available out there, but my simple machine gags on some of the formats used and I get missing characters, or gibberish if I try converting to a straight text file. The power of the Internet was in its use of HTML; all the new bells and whistles that keep coming along inevitably end up muddying the waters and somehow causing my PC to be perpetually obsolete-- last year the system ran lickety-split, yet somehow, mysteriously, this year things load too slowly and suddenly I need to upgrade and put more bloatware on my hard drive...

So snicker at me if you will, but I prefer to go with straight HTML that anybody can view and download very quickly -- yet I can still get bold and italics and I can use a neat font and put up a "parchment"-like background.

Textual Details

Occasionally I have changed the verse numbering; an example is at Joel 2:28 where the Brenton LXX follows the same numbering as the Revised Standard Version and other English versions, having a total of 3 chapters. The Rahlfs text downloaded from the Internet starts chapter 3 after Joel 2:28, then starts chapter 4 where chapter 3 begins in the RSV and Brenton. Checking several of my collection of English bibles, I note that the Catholic New American Bible follows Rahlfs with a 4-chapter Joel. What is behind this particular verse-numbering discrepancy I do not know, but have decided to follow the majority here.

Future Additions/Improvement

The Divine Name in the LXX