Gleason Leonard Archer (1916–2004)

An excellent New Testament version, the New American Standard Bible, with enhancements such as symbols showing underlying grammatical forms from within the text and important theological vocabulary in the back. I’ve only read this Discovery Bible once all the way through. It seems like you need to read it through a few times before you receive the whole benefit from the enhancements. The NASB is the Bible version I’m most familiar with, though. It’s nice to try to go deeper into it with these enhancements.… (mehr)

Want a book that compares nearly all(or perhaps all) New Testament quotations of the Old? This book does that in a chart form. Made up of nearly a hundred and seventy pages of charts made up of four columns on two large pages. The first column gives the Masoretic text of the verse, the second gives the Septuagint rendering, the third gives the New Testament quotation of the verse and the fourth offers commentary on the differences. Now, keep in mind that each of these texts are given in their original languages, not in English. English is used in the introductions ,instructions and commentary(which also translates some of the texts). Now, I don't know Hebrew and am just learning Koine Greek, but I still find this book very useful. Since all of the text references are given in English, I can look up and compare the English verses in the Old and New Testaments, and use my English translations of the Septuagint. I also used the free Bible program E-Sword with which you may download free Bibles, including ones Keyed to Strong's(such as the Apostolic Bible Polyglot LXX).

What I didn't like about this book was the unapologetic bias towards the Masoretic Text(The late Hebrew text that most of our English Old Testaments are based upon). The New Testament quotations of the Old are generally held up to the Masoretic Text as the judge of their accuracy. And so we end up with statements like this: ""But perhaps Paul was content to let the insertion stand (even though he knew it was not in the Hebrew text) because…" What if the 'insertion' wasn't an insertion at all, but actually a part of the Hebrew text of Paul's day?

And when the Septuagint(the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament aka the LXX) is quoted in the New testament and when it differs from the MT, often apologetic commentary like this is used, speaking of the quotation of part of Isaiah 53 in Acts 8:32-33: "Here we have a gravely deviant translation quoted from the LXX. This, however, poses no problem for biblical inerrancy, since Acts 8 simply records the wording of the LXX which the Ethiopian eunuch was reading. There is no apostolic approval or endorsement of the errors in his rendition, and no doctrinal teaching is built upon them…enough of the truth of Isaiah 53 came through, even in this somewhat defective translation, to lead the Ethiopian to a saving knowledge of Christ. This furnishes a classic example, incidentally, of the missionary strategy used by the early apostles in making the best use they could of the Septuagint - which with all of its faults was still the only form of the OT available to Diaspora Jews and to the Gentile converts." The quotations from the Septuagint are older than our Hebrew text of today, wouldn't we be more biased towards the Apostle's quotations rather than making our approx. eight or nine hundred years later Hebrew text the judge? There are a few places where the commentary concedes that the quotation of the Apostles may actually be the correct quotation of the Old Testament, but not half as many concessions as I would like.

I still would recommend it though, simply for the collection of references or allusions to the Old Testament in the New.

Thanks to Wipf and Stock Publishers for sending me a free copy of this book to review(My review did not have to be favorable)!




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So which is more of a problem for you, your curiosity or your blood pressure?

This book can satisfy your curiosity, because it really and truly is the most comprehensive catalog currently available of Old Testament quotations in the New Testament. But its attitude toward those quotations amounts to an irritating refusal to admit that the New Testament doesn't always get the quotations right.

It is generally agreed that many of the New Testament authors spoke Aramaic as their primary language -- Mark, whose Greek is very bad, is an obvious example. Very likely many of them knew Hebrew as well. But they wrote in Greek. And if they are writing in Greek, they naturally must quote the Hebrew Bible in Greek. This gives them two basic choices: They can create their own translations, or they can quote an existing translation.

Most of them chose the latter course. Matthew is the leading exception; for the most part, he translated himself. But the others quoted the Septuagint, or LXX, the earliest known Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible.

It was a translation that often doesn't match the text of the Hebrew Bible as now quoted. There are places where the difference can be substantial. The Hebrew of Isaiah 40:3 should be understood as "A voice cries out, 'Prepare the way of the Lord in the wilderness.'" But the LXX, and the gospels which quote it, render this as "A voice in the wilderness cries out, 'Prepare the way of the Lord.'"

Most of the other differences between LXX and the Hebrew are smaller than this. But they exist. And a study of Old Testament quotations should be prepared to note these significant differences.

Instead, this study consistently tries to pretend that the differences between LXX and Hebrew don't exist, and that the New Testament is quoting something that quotes the Hebrew pretty exactly. But it doesn't. Anyone truly wanting to know about Old Testament quotations will want this book -- but anyone truly wanting to know about Old Testament quotations will also need a Greek New Testament, and a Greek Old Testament, and will have to sit down and make the comparisons all over again. And that should not have been necessary.… (mehr)