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Greek Bible

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While the Old Testament portion of the Bible was written in Hebrew and Aramaic, the New Testament was originally written in Koine Greek. The Greek language, however, has several different dialects or denominations. This required several different translations done by several different individuals and groups of people. These translations can be categorized into translations done before and after 1500 AD.

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62-637: Greek Bible may refer to: Bible translations into Greek The Septuagint , a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament) The Kaige revision , group of revisions to the Septuagint made in order to more closely align its translation with the proto-Masoretic Hebrew. The New Testament Greek Vulgate , a polysemic expression Textus Receptus , an edition of

124-496: A New Testament translation by professor Nikolaos Sotiropoulos was published after he revisioned many hundreds of New Testament passages's interpretations in his 4 volumes work: «Ερμηνεία δύσκολων χωρίων της Γραφής» (Interpretation of difficult passages of the Bible). The new interpretations were judged positively and by professors including Ioannis Karmiris , also Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople Demetrios I as it published in

186-468: A Yevanic translation on one side and a Judaeo-Spanish translation on the other. At the initiative of the pro- Reformed Patriarch Cyril Lucaris of Constantinople, Maximos of Gallipoli (or Kallioupolites, died 1633) translated a vernacular New Testament from 1629 which was printed at Geneva in 1638. An edition of the New Testament into Modern Greek translated by Seraphim of Mytilene

248-647: A different order for the books in Nevi'im and Ketuvim . This order is also cited in Mishneh Torah Hilchot Sefer Torah 7:15. The order of the books of the Torah is universal through all denominations of Judaism and Christianity. The disputed books, included in most canons but not in others, are often called the Biblical apocrypha , a term that is sometimes used specifically to describe

310-866: A few historic Protestant versions; the German Luther Bible included such books, as did the English 1611 King James Version. Empty table cells indicate that a book is absent from that canon. Several of the books in the Eastern Orthodox canon are also found in the appendix to the Latin Vulgate , formerly the official Bible of the Roman Catholic Church. Some of the stories of the Pentateuch may derive from older sources. Scholars such as Andrew R. George point out

372-525: A professor of Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism at the University of Edinburgh , identifies the Old Testament as "a collection of authoritative texts of apparently divine origin that went through a human process of writing and editing." He states that it is not a magical book, nor was it literally written by God and passed to mankind. By about the 5th century BC, Jews saw the five books of

434-547: A school known as biblical minimalism rejected the historical value of the Hebrew Bible for the study of ancient Israel during the Iron Age, "but this extreme approach was rejected by mainstream scholarship." The first five books— Genesis , Exodus , Leviticus , book of Numbers and Deuteronomy —reached their present form in the Persian period (538–332 BC) , and their authors were the elite of exilic returnees who controlled

496-531: A set period and be followed by the other-worldly age or World to Come . Some thought the Messiah was already present, but unrecognised due to Israel's sins; some thought that the Messiah would be announced by a forerunner, probably Elijah (as promised by the prophet Malachi , whose book now ends the Old Testament and precedes Mark 's account of John the Baptist ). However, no view of the Messiah as based on

558-695: Is based on the belief that the historical Jesus is also the Christ , as in the Confession of Peter . This belief is in turn based on Jewish understandings of the meaning of the Hebrew term Messiah , which, like the Greek "Christ", means "anointed". In the Hebrew Scriptures, it describes a king anointed with oil on his accession to the throne: he becomes "The L ORD 's anointed" or Yahweh's Anointed. By

620-530: Is known, though there is plenty of speculation. For example, it is speculated that this may have provided motivation for canon lists and that Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus are examples of these Bibles. Together with the Peshitta and Codex Alexandrinus , these are the earliest extant Christian Bibles. There is no evidence among the canons of the First Council of Nicaea of any determination on

682-610: Is neither read nor held among the Hebrews, but does not explicitly call it apocryphal or "not in the canon". The Synod of Hippo (in 393), followed by the Council of Carthage (397) and the Council of Carthage (419) , may be the first council that explicitly accepted the first canon which includes the books that did not appear in the Hebrew Bible ; the councils were under significant influence of Augustine of Hippo , who regarded

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744-646: Is the other part of the Christian Bible, have been completed for similar reasons. Agapius of Crete translated and published in 1543 the book of Psalms into modern Greek. A Greek and polyglot edition of the Pentateuch commonly called " Constantinople Pentateuch " published in Constantinople in 1547 by Romaniote Jews has the Hebrew text in the middle of the page, the Aramaic on the base, with

806-423: Is to worship , or the one "true God", that only Yahweh (or YHWH ) is Almighty. The Old Testament stresses the special relationship between God and his chosen people , Israel, but includes instructions for proselytes as well. This relationship is expressed in the biblical covenant (contract) between the two, received by Moses . The law codes in books such as Exodus and especially Deuteronomy are

868-605: The Septuagint (Latin for 'Seventy') from the supposed number of translators involved (hence its abbreviation " LXX "). This Septuagint remains the basis of the Old Testament in the Eastern Orthodox Church . It varies in many places from the Masoretic Text and includes numerous books no longer considered canonical in some traditions: 1 Esdras , Judith , Tobit , the books of Maccabees ,

930-482: The Babylonian exile ) upon his people. The theme is played out, with many variations, in books as different as the histories of Kings and Chronicles, the prophets like Ezekiel and Jeremiah , and in the wisdom books like Job and Ecclesiastes. The process by which scriptures became canons and Bibles was a long one, and its complexities account for the many different Old Testaments which exist today. Timothy H. Lim,

992-576: The Book of Wisdom , Sirach , and Baruch . Early modern biblical criticism typically explained these variations as intentional or ignorant corruptions by the Alexandrian scholars, but most recent scholarship holds it is simply based on early source texts differing from those later used by the Masoretes in their work. The Septuagint was originally used by Hellenized Jews whose knowledge of Greek

1054-643: The Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Churches comprise up to 49 books; the Catholic canon comprises 46 books; and the most common of the Protestant canons comprises 39 books. There are 39 books common to essentially all Christian canons. They correspond to the 24 books of the Tanakh , with some differences of order, and there are some differences in text. The greater count of books reflects

1116-513: The Hellenistic time (332–198 BC), though containing much older material as well; Job was completed by the 6th century BC; Ecclesiastes by the 3rd century BC. Throughout the Old Testament, God is consistently depicted as the one who created the world. Although the God of the Old Testament is not consistently presented as the only god who exists , he is always depicted as the only God whom Israel

1178-586: The Israelites . The second division of Christian Bibles is the New Testament , written in Koine Greek . The Old Testament consists of many distinct books by various authors produced over a period of centuries. Christians traditionally divide the Old Testament into four sections: the first five books or Pentateuch (which corresponds to the Jewish Torah ); the history books telling the history of

1240-570: The Old Testament . Other early Greek translations of Hebrew Scripture that survive only in fragments are those of Aquila of Sinope (2nd century AD), Theodotion (2nd century AD), Symmachus (3rd century AD) and Fragments of the Samareitikon . There are also fragments of recensions toward the Hebrew text, such as the kaige revision . The New Testament part of the Christian Bible was originally written in Koine Greek , as most of

1302-685: The Orthodox Church . Meanwhile, a team of 12 professors from the theological schools of the Universities of Athens and Thessaloniki had been working since the mid 1960s on another translation into the modern vernacular ( Demotic Greek ), with support from the Hellenic Bible Society . The translation of the New Testament, first published in 1985 , was based on a critical text of the Koine Greek (κοινή) in which

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1364-627: The Pentateuch (Torah) , the historical books , the "wisdom" books and the prophets. The table below uses the spellings and names present in modern editions of the Christian Bible, such as the Catholic New American Bible Revised Edition and the Protestant Revised Standard Version and English Standard Version . The spelling and names in both the 1609–F10 Douay Old Testament (and in the 1582 Rheims New Testament ) and

1426-682: The Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition ) use the same "standardized" (King James Version) spellings and names as Protestant Bibles (e.g. 1 Chronicles as opposed to the Douaic 1 Paralipomenon, 1–2 Samuel and 1–2 Kings instead of 1–4 Kings) in those books which are universally considered canonical: the protocanonicals . The Talmud (the Jewish commentary on the scriptures) in Bava Batra 14b gives

1488-578: The Temple at that time. The books of Joshua , Judges , Samuel and Kings follow, forming a history of Israel from the Conquest of Canaan to the Siege of Jerusalem c.  587 BC . There is a broad consensus among scholars that these originated as a single work (the so-called " Deuteronomistic History ") during the Babylonian exile of the 6th century BC. The two Books of Chronicles cover much

1550-760: The Torah (the Old Testament Pentateuch) as having authoritative status; by the 2nd century BC, the Prophets had a similar status, although without quite the same level of respect as the Torah; beyond that, the Jewish scriptures were fluid, with different groups seeing authority in different books. Hebrew texts began to be translated into Greek in Alexandria in about 280 BC and continued until about 130 BC. These early Greek translations – supposedly commissioned by Ptolemy II Philadelphus – were called

1612-592: The 1749 revision by Bishop Challoner (the edition currently in print used by many Catholics, and the source of traditional Catholic spellings in English) and in the Septuagint differ from those spellings and names used in modern editions which are derived from the Hebrew Masoretic Text . For the Orthodox canon, Septuagint titles are provided in parentheses when these differ from those editions. For

1674-537: The Bible into Greek is called the Septuagint (LXX; 3rd–1st centuries BC). The LXX was written in Koine Greek . It contains the Hebrew Bible translated from Hebrew and Aramaic. It also includes several other documents which are considered to have differing levels of authority by various Christian churches. Some of these other documents are believed to have been written originally in Greek. The LXX contains

1736-642: The Catholic canon, the Douaic titles are provided in parentheses when these differ from those editions. Likewise, the King James Version references some of these books by the traditional spelling when referring to them in the New Testament, such as "Esaias" (for Isaiah ). In the spirit of ecumenism , more recent Catholic translations (e.g. the New American Bible , Jerusalem Bible , and ecumenical translations used by Catholics, such as

1798-458: The Church and scholars believe, and is therefore not a translation (notwithstanding that some reference material may have been from Aramaic). However, like other living languages, the Greek language has developed over time. Therefore, various translations have been completed over the centuries to make it easier for Greek speakers to understand Holy Scripture. Translations of the Old Testament , which

1860-618: The Greek New Testament published by Desiderius Erasmus Patriarchal text , published in 1904 by the Ecumenical Patriarchate See also [ edit ] Greek Orthodox Church Bible translations into Greek Greek New Testament (disambiguation) Topics referred to by the same term [REDACTED] This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the title Greek Bible . If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change

1922-563: The Hebrew Bible, and are also Jewish in origin. Some are also contained in the Dead Sea Scrolls . In general, Catholic and Orthodox churches include the deuterocanonical books in the Old Testament. Most Protestant Bibles do not include them in their canon, but some versions of Anglican and Lutheran Bibles place such books in a separate section called Apocrypha . The Old Testament contains 39 (Protestant), 46 (Catholic), or more (Orthodox and other) books, divided, very broadly, into

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1984-667: The Hebrew, Greek and Latin versions of the Hebrew Bible are the best known Old Testaments, there were others. At much the same time as the Septuagint was being produced, translations were being made into Aramaic, the language of Jews living in Palestine and the Near East and likely the language of Jesus : these are called the Aramaic Targums , from a word meaning "translation", and were used to help Jewish congregations understand their scriptures. For Aramaic Christians, there

2046-614: The Holy Scriptures . Then, in 1997, they released the complete Holy Scriptures (Bible) in modern Greek, being "the result of some seven years of painstaking work.” A revision of the Vamvas translation of the Bible into the modern vernacular ( Demotic Greek ) by Spyros (Spiros) Filos (Σπύρος Φίλος) was first published in 1994. This translation is used in the Greek Evangelical Church and is also recognized by

2108-540: The Israelites, from their conquest of Canaan to their defeat and exile in Babylon ; the poetic and " Wisdom books " dealing, in various forms, with questions of good and evil in the world; and the books of the biblical prophets, warning of the consequences of turning away from God. The books that compose the Old Testament canon and their order and names differ between various branches of Christianity . The canons of

2170-622: The New Testament was originally written. The translation of the Old Testament from Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic texts of the Jewish Scriptures was first published in 1997. This translation has the blessing and approval of the Holy Synod of the Church of Greece and is also used in Evangelical and Charismatic churches. It is known in English as "Today's Greek Version (TGV)". In 2002, with the latest edition published in 2012,

2232-405: The Old Testament predicted a Messiah who would suffer and die for the sins of all people. The story of Jesus' death, therefore, involved a profound shift in meaning from the Old Testament tradition. The name "Old Testament" reflects Christianity's understanding of itself as the fulfillment of Jeremiah's prophecy of a New Covenant (which is similar to "testament" and often conflated) to replace

2294-400: The Old Testament. Of the remainder, the books of the various prophets— Isaiah , Jeremiah , Ezekiel , and the twelve " minor prophets "—were written between the 8th and 6th centuries BC, with the exceptions of Jonah and Daniel , which were written much later. The "wisdom" books— Job , Proverbs , Ecclesiastes , Psalms , Song of Songs —have various dates: Proverbs possibly was completed by

2356-648: The Septuagint ( 3 Ezra and 3 and 4 Maccabees are excluded); the Anglicans after the English Civil War adopted a compromise position, restoring the 39 Articles and keeping the extra books that were excluded by the Westminster Confession of Faith , both for private study and for reading in churches but not for establishing any doctrine, while Lutherans kept them for private study, gathered in an appendix as biblical apocrypha . While

2418-511: The Septuagint's, and Theodotion's. The so-called "fifth" and "sixth editions" were two other Greek translations supposedly miraculously discovered by students outside the towns of Jericho and Nicopolis : these were added to Origen's Octapla. In 331, Constantine I commissioned Eusebius to deliver fifty Bibles for the Church of Constantinople . Athanasius recorded Alexandrian scribes around 340 preparing Bibles for Constans . Little else

2480-713: The Slavs and the Turks in order to break Greek religious and national unity. All translations were confiscated. The Holy Synod of the Greek Orthodox Church resolved that any translation of the Holy Gospels is “profane” and redundant. It also “contributes to scandalising the consciousness [of Greeks] and to the distortion of [the Gospels’] divine concepts and didactic messages. In 1967 a team of academic staff of

2542-408: The University of Athens led by Basil (Vasilios) Vellas (Βασίλειος Βέλλας) translated the New Testament, with support from the Hellenic Bible Society . This translation was based on the Textus Receptus . In 1993, the Jehovah's Witnesses circulated the translation of the "Greek Christian Scriptures" (New Testament) in modern Greek originating from the English edition, the New World Translation of

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2604-419: The Western Church, specifically as the Sixto-Clementine Vulgate , while the Churches in the East continued, and continue, to use the Septuagint. Jerome, however, in the Vulgate's prologues , describes some portions of books in the Septuagint not found in the Hebrew Bible as being non- canonical (he called them apocrypha ); for Baruch , he mentions by name in his Prologue to Jeremiah and notes that it

2666-407: The books in the Catholic and Orthodox canons that are absent from the Jewish Masoretic Text and most modern Protestant Bibles. Catholics, following the Canon of Trent (1546), describe these books as deuterocanonical, while Greek Orthodox Christians, following the Synod of Jerusalem (1672) , use the traditional name of anagignoskomena , meaning "that which is to be read." They are present in

2728-417: The canon as already closed. In the 16th century, the Protestant reformers sided with Jerome; yet although most Protestant Bibles now have only those books that appear in the Hebrew Bible, the order is that of the Greek Bible. Rome then officially adopted a canon, the Canon of Trent , which is seen as following Augustine's Carthaginian Councils or the Council of Rome , and includes most, but not all, of

2790-417: The canon. However, Jerome (347–420), in his Prologue to Judith , claims that the Book of Judith was "found by the Nicene Council to have been counted among the number of the Sacred Scriptures". In Western Christianity or Christianity in the Western half of the Roman Empire , Latin had displaced Greek as the common language of the early Christians, and in 382 AD Pope Damasus I commissioned Jerome ,

2852-414: The leading scholar of the day, to produce an updated Latin Bible to replace the Vetus Latina , which was a Latin translation of the Septuagint. Jerome's work, called the Vulgate , was a direct translation from Hebrew, since he argued for the superiority of the Hebrew texts in correcting the Septuagint on both philological and theological grounds. His Vulgate Old Testament became the standard Bible used in

2914-413: The link to point directly to the intended article. Retrieved from " https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Greek_Bible&oldid=1256771266 " Category : Disambiguation pages Hidden categories: Short description is different from Wikidata All article disambiguation pages All disambiguation pages Bible translations into Greek The first known translation of

2976-425: The oldest existing translation of Holy Scripture into any language. It was widely disseminated among ancient Hellenistic Jews , and was later used by Greek-speaking Christians for their Old Testament (see canon ). The LXX is the source of the majority of quotations from the Old Testament by writers of the New Testament . It is studied along with Hebrew and Aramaic texts as an ancient source of information about

3038-402: The patriarchs" and "the unified conquest of the land" were widely accepted in the United States until about the 1970s. Contrarily, Grabbe says that those in his field now "are all minimalists – at least, when it comes to the patriarchal period and the settlement. ... [V]ery few are willing to operate [as maximalists]." In 2022, archaeologist Avraham Faust wrote that in the 1990s

3100-413: The same material as the Pentateuch and Deuteronomistic history and probably date from the 4th century BC. Chronicles, and Ezra–Nehemiah , was probably finished during the 3rd century BC. Catholic and Orthodox Old Testaments contain two (Catholic Old Testament) to four (Orthodox) Books of the Maccabees , written in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC. These history books make up around half the total content of

3162-458: The second volume of «Interpretation of difficult passages of the Bible», p. 12-28. The Bishop and professor Gortynos ( Ieremias Foundas ) described it as the best of all translations. Old Testament The Old Testament ( OT ) is the first division of the Christian biblical canon , which is based primarily upon the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible , or Tanakh, a collection of ancient religious Hebrew and occasionally Aramaic writings by

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3224-408: The similarity of the Genesis flood narrative and the Gilgamesh flood myth . Similarities between the origin story of Moses and that of Sargon of Akkad were noted by psychoanalyst Otto Rank in 1909 and popularized by 20th-century writers, such as H. G. Wells and Joseph Campbell . Jacob Bronowski writes that, "the Bible is ... part folklore and part record. History is ... written by

3286-412: The splitting of several texts ( Samuel , Kings , Chronicles , Ezra–Nehemiah , and the Twelve Minor Prophets ) into separate books in Christian Bibles. The books that are part of the Christian Old Testament but that are not part of the Hebrew canon are sometimes described as deuterocanonical books . These books are ultimately derived from the earlier Septuagint , the earliest extant Greek translation of

3348-544: The term to refer to a pledge. Further themes in the Old Testament include salvation , redemption , divine judgment , obedience and disobedience, faith and faithfulness, among others. Throughout there is a strong emphasis on ethics and ritual purity , both of which God demands, although some of the prophets and wisdom writers seem to question this, arguing that God demands social justice above purity, and perhaps does not even care about purity at all. The Old Testament's moral code enjoins fairness, intervention on behalf of

3410-442: The terms of the contract: Israel swears faithfulness to God, and God swears to be Israel's special protector and supporter. However, The Jewish Study Bible denies that the word covenant ( brit in Hebrew) means "contract"; in the ancient Near East, a covenant would have been sworn before the gods, who would be its enforcers. As God is part of the agreement, and not merely witnessing it, The Jewish Study Bible instead interprets

3472-435: The time of Jesus, some Jews expected that a flesh-and-blood descendant of David (the " Son of David ") would come to establish a real Jewish kingdom in Jerusalem, instead of the Roman province of Judaea. Others stressed the Son of Man , a distinctly other-worldly figure who would appear as a judge at the end of time . Some expounded a synthesised view of both positions, where a messianic kingdom of this world would last for

3534-429: The victors, and the Israelis , when they burst through [ Jericho ( c.  1400 BC )], became the carriers of history." In 2007, a historian of ancient Judaism Lester L. Grabbe explained that earlier biblical scholars such as Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918) could be described as 'maximalist', accepting biblical text unless it has been disproven. Continuing in this tradition, both "the 'substantial historicity' of

3596-457: The vulnerable, and the duty of those in power to administer justice righteously. It forbids murder, bribery and corruption, deceitful trading, and many sexual misdemeanours . All morality is traced back to God, who is the source of all goodness. The problem of evil plays a large part in the Old Testament. The problem the Old Testament authors faced was that a good God must have had just reason for bringing disaster (meaning notably, but not only,

3658-402: Was a Syriac translation of the Hebrew Bible called the Peshitta , as well as versions in Coptic (the everyday language of Egypt in the first Christian centuries, descended from ancient Egyptian ), Ethiopic (for use in the Ethiopian church , one of the oldest Christian churches), Armenian (Armenia was the first to adopt Christianity as its official religion), and Arabic . Christianity

3720-482: Was better than Hebrew. However, the texts came to be used predominantly by gentile converts to Christianity and by the early Church as its scripture, Greek being the lingua franca of the early Church. The three most acclaimed early interpreters were Aquila of Sinope , Symmachus the Ebionite , and Theodotion ; in his Hexapla , Origen placed his edition of the Hebrew text beside its transcription in Greek letters and four parallel translations: Aquila's, Symmachus's,

3782-510: Was edited in London in 1703 by the English Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts . This translation was formally condemned in 1704 by the reigning Patriarch Gabriel III of Constantinople . Frangiskos Soavios published in the year 1833 the Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua translated from the Hebrew Original into the Modern Greek Language. A translation of the Bible (Old and New Testaments) in literary Katharevousa Greek (Καθαρεύουσα) by Neofytos Vamvas and his associates

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3844-404: Was first published in 1850 following nearly 20 years of work. Vamvas was dean and a professor of the University of Athens. In 1901, Alexandros Pallis translated the Gospels into Modern Greek . This translation was known as Evangelika (Ευαγγελικά). There were riots in Athens when this translation was published in a newspaper. University students protested that he tried to sell the country to

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