Tuesday Tome - When God Spoke Greek

Dr. Timothy Michael Law's new book, When God Spoke Greek: The Septuagint and the Making of the Christian Bible, arrived at my door just last week. It explores the fascinating subject of early Christianity and its relationship to Scripture. What texts did they read and how did they understand those texts? How is that similar or divergent to the Christians of later centuries and today? How did the Septuagint shape their view of the Hebrew canon? This is fascinating stuff with important implications for both historical and contemporary perspectives of the Bible.

The Publisher's Description:
How did the New Testament writers and the earliest Christians come to adopt the Jewish scriptures as their first Old Testament? And why are our modern Bibles related more to the rabbinic Hebrew Bible than to the Greek Bible of the early Church?

The Septuagint, the name given to the translation of the Hebrew scriptures between the third century BC and the second century AD, played a central role in the Bible's history. Many of the Hebrew scriptures were still evolving when they were translated into Greek, and these Greek translations, along with several new Greek writings, became Holy Scripture in the early Church.

Yet, gradually the Septuagint lost its place at the heart of Western Christianity. At the end of the fourth century, one of antiquity's brightest minds rejected the Septuagint in favor of the Bible of the rabbis. After Jerome, the Septuagint never regained the position it once had. Timothy Michael Law recounts the story of the Septuagint's origins, its relationship to the Hebrew Bible, and the adoption and abandonment of the first Christian Old Testament.

Back Cover Blurb from Diarmaid MacCulloch:
"Law overturns the assumptions of most Christians about their sacred scripture. He points out that the Greek text of the Septuagint was the early Church's Bible, that it predates the Hebrew Scripture now commonly accepted, and that it presents plural traditions of ancient Hebrew biblical texts, many now lost to us. Fundamentalists will find these unpalatable truths; others will find that Law points to new delights in their reading of scripture." --Diarmaid N.J. MacCulloch, Professor of the History of the Church, Oxford University

About the Author:
Timothy Michael Law is founder, publisher, and Editor-in-Chief of The Marginalia Review of Books (http://themarginaliareview.com). He is currently an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in the Seminar für Altes Testament in the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (with Prof. Dr. Reinhard Kratz) and affiliated with the Septuaginta Unternehmen. He spent 2009-2012 as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Oriental Institute at the University of Oxford, and until 2014 remains Junior Research Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies.