The Septuagint, abbreviated LXX, is an ancient Greek translation of Hebrew scripture and was a version of those scriptures commonly referred to by the authors of the New Testament and other early Greek-speaking Christians.  Its earliest surviving manuscripts are actually much older than the earliest surviving Hebrew manuscripts (which are mostly medieval manuscripts). There are some places where the LXX and Hebrew texts diverge, and with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls it has become apparent that there were in some cases several different versions of various books of the Hebrew Bible.  The LXX preserves some of these traditions, the Hebrew manuscripts preserve others.¹

This diversity is the result of something that modern readers tend not to think much about, which is that prior to the invention of the printing press, copies of books were all handwritten! This means that human errors are more common than in mass-produced texts. Because travel was more time consuming and dangerous, it was also more common for there to be local or regional variations in text. For the most part this variety is fairly innocuous: the LXX, for example, has at least one instance where a single Hebrew Psalm has been divided into two Greek Psalms. Sometimes there are also differences in wording in particular passages as well.  

We see similar variations among New Testament manuscripts.  For example, in the earliest surviving copies of the Gospel of John, the story in which they bring to Jesus a woman convicted of adultery in John 8:1-11 does not appear.  This text is typically included in the Bible because the story is attested by many early Christian writers who lived during the time period of manuscripts of John that did not include it, and it appears to have been a story widely told in the early church that was included in a text that is now lost and did end up becoming canonical, but was important enough that it was interjected into a text that did become canonical. Another major example of difference within the manuscript tradition is the ending of Mark, for which we have surviving manuscripts with two different endings.  

Manuscripts also developed some interesting patterns in the middle ages. Some of these are the result of simple scribal errors, some of these involve inserted liturgical element into the manuscripts in cases where liturgy quoted scripture and scribes did not realize where scripture ended and liturgy began, and some of these were the result of efforts of harmonize differences among divergent manuscripts. 

This variation in manuscripts means that when we talk about “the text of the Bible,” there are really many possible texts that we could be describing. The order of books, for example, in the LXX is different from the order of books in the Hebrew text. Based on the manuscript tradition it is possible to make an argument to omit John 8:1-11 (which is the passage that includes “let he who is without sin cast the first stone”). There are many variations in phrasing, both major and minor, that exist. 

This is all to say that the text of the Bible as we experience it is influenced by human judgment.  There is a committee of scholars who make decisions about which manuscripts should be included in the standard Greek text of the New Testament.  There is a committee of scholars who decide how that text (and the text of the Hebrew Bible) should be translated.  This isn’t a bad or nefarious thing, necessarily, but it is important to recognize this reality before we, for example, take the verbatim text of the King James Version to be the REAL BIBLE, and the other translations to be pernicious changes to the REAL BIBLE (which is something that a stranger tried to convince me of in a Barnes & Noble once).

Footnotes

[1] The book that actually sent me down this current rabbithole of reading the Bible closely in Greek is about the use of the Septuagint by early Christians, and is called When God Spoke Greek: The Septuagint and the Making of the Christian Bible.  I highly recommend this book, it is both very interesting and pretty accessible to read.  <back to top >