Cyberbrethren: A Lutheran Blog

English Translation of the Septuagint Online

For several hundred years, the vast majority of Christians used the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament. This translation, known as the Septuagint, was prepared by Jews, not Christians, during what we call the "Intertestamental Period." It is quoted often in the New Testament. A review copy of the translation is available on the web in PDF format. The value of the Septuagint is that it offers the contemporary reader the most ancient translation of the Old Testament available, thus providing a perspective on how the OT was understood by Jews before the time of Christ. Thus, it is particularly fascinating, and led to no little debate between Jews and Christians in the first centuries of the church, when we read in Isaiah 7:14 an absolutely unambiguous assertion of a birth of a child from a virgin, not young woman, a virgin. The Greek uses the word "parthenos" to translate the Hebrew "almah" which may be translated simply as "young woman" but the Jewish translators of the Septuagint used the word "Virgin." Many other examples of this kind of thing abound in the Septuagint. The Septuagint was "the Bible" for many of the greatest church fathers, for example, St. Augustine who vigorously debated the authority of the Septuagint with St. Jerome, who of course, translated the Hebrew Old Testament into Latin.

Greek New Testament Study Site

And another site I've come across before, but was recently reminded of when browsing a blog site. A web site where you can study the Greek New Testament. Tremendous resources, for free.

HT: Pastor Jonathan Watt

Holy Scripture: An Inexhaustible Mine Full of Treasure

"I beg and admonish faithfully all devout Christians that they not be offended or stumble over the simple stories related in the Bible, nor doubt them. However poor they may appear, they are certainly the words, history, and judgments of the high divine Majesty, Power, and Wisdom. For this is the book which makes all wise and clever people fools, and can only be understood by simple people, as Christ says (Matthew 11:25). Therefore let go your own thoughts and feelings and esteem this book as the best and purest treasure, as a mine full of great wealth, which can never be exhausted or sufficiently excavated. thus you will find the divine wisdom which God presents in the Bible in a manner so simple that it damps the pride of clever people and brings it to nothing. In this book you find the swaddling clothes and the manger in which Christ lies, and to which the angel directs the shepherds. Those swaddling clothes are shabby and poor, yet precious is the treasure wrapped in them, for it is Christ."  --Martin Luther

Source:
WA Tischreden 6:16
translated in:
Day by Day We Magnify Thee
Fortress Press 1982, p. 108
Translated by Margarete Steiner and Percy Scott

Seen this?

http://www.biblemap.org/

Really cool!