The Work

Translation Method

This page states the Society's working method in advance of its full methodology paper, which will be published here on completion. It is written for scholars first. The commitments below are the ones by which the published translation asks to be judged.

Base texts

The Old Testament is translated from the Septuagint in its modern critical editions: the Göttingen Septuaginta where volumes exist, and Rahlfs–Hanhart where they do not. The translation renders the critically established Old Greek. It does not render Codex Vaticanus as a diplomatic text, Brenton's nineteenth-century base, or a Greek text silently corrected toward the Hebrew. Where a book survives in more than one Greek form, the choice of form is a documented editorial decision: for Esther, the Old Greek rather than the Alpha-Text, with the Alpha-Text's principal divergences recorded in the apparatus.

The New Testament is translated fresh from current Greek critical editions, engaging the Editio Critica Maior and the results of the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method as they continue to reshape the text of the letters and the Catholic Epistles. The New Testament work is a translation of the Greek text of the ancient Church made with the best tools of the present, the same posture the Old Testament work takes toward the Septuagint.

A text, not a crib

Existing scholarly English versions of the Septuagint were designed for a different purpose. NETS, the standard academic rendering, works from an interlinear paradigm: it treats the Greek as a window onto its Hebrew parent and keys its English to an existing Hebrew-based translation, so that the reader can see the Greek's relationship to the Hebrew. That is a legitimate scholarly instrument, and the Society's translators will keep it on the desk. But it is the opposite of this project's aim. The Septuagint was received, read, preached, and prayed as a text in its own right, for the Greek-speaking synagogue first and then for the Church. This translation renders the Greek as Greek: its syntax, its semantic choices, its theology of translation, on the same terms any translator gives an original.

Between the traditions

The relationship between the Septuagint and the Masoretic Text is the central question of the discipline, and the Society's position is stated plainly. The Greek and Hebrew traditions are both ancient, both mixed, and both indispensable; neither is a monolith, and neither can be presumed original wholesale. For this project's purposes the working presumption favors the Greek; that is what it means to translate the Septuagint. But the presumption governs the base text, not the historical judgment. Where the evidence indicates the Greek translator misread, paraphrased, or worked from a secondary Hebrew edition, the apparatus will say so. Where Qumran evidence corroborates the Greek's Vorlage against the medieval Hebrew, the apparatus will say that too. The translation's claims will be text-critical claims, argued from manuscripts, and kept distinct from theological argument, a distinction the methodology paper treats at length.

One example shows the discipline this requires, because it cuts against the project's own grain:

σῶμα δὲ κατηρτίσω μοι

but a body you prepared for me

Psalm 39:7 · the reading of the Greek manuscript tradition, quoted at Hebrews 10:5

Virtually the entire Greek manuscript tradition reads σῶμα, “body,” the text Hebrews quotes. Rahlfs's critical edition nonetheless prints ὠτία, “ears,” an emendation toward the Hebrew. A translator of the Septuagint must decide whether to follow the edition or the tradition the edition emended, and must show the work either way. Critical editions embed judgments; this project's apparatus exists to make such judgments visible rather than to hide behind them.

Scholarly governance

Final authority over the translation rests with a Translation Oversight Committee of five to seven senior scholars appointed for expertise in Septuagint studies, Greek and Hebrew philology, New Testament textual criticism, patristics, and English literary style. That authority covers the base text, the translation philosophy, and every disputed reading. The Committee engages book-level translators, assigns each book a primary translator and a secondary reviewer, and reviews every draft. The Society's bylaws bar the governing board from directing translation outcomes: the board raises funds and bears fiduciary duty; the scholars decide what the text says. This separation is codified and non-negotiable, because a translation is only as credible as the independence of the people who make it.

Pilot books: Esther and Job

The project begins where the method is hardest tested. Esther and Job are the two books where the Greek and Hebrew traditions diverge most extensively in length, in structure, and in substance, and a method that handles them convincingly has earned the right to proceed. The Esther pilot integrates the Greek sections in their narrative positions and resolves the Old Greek/Alpha-Text question in print; the Job pilot works from the Göttingen edition and confronts the shorter Greek text and the 42:17a ending directly. Both pilots publish with full annotation, on this site, for open scholarly criticism before the main phase begins.

Apparatus and transparency

Every published book carries an apparatus recording the base-text decisions, significant divergences between the Greek and Hebrew traditions, relevant Qumran and hexaplaric evidence, and the readings of the Three where they illuminate the Old Greek. Methodology working papers documenting the Committee's decisions will be published as the work proceeds. The standard is simple: a competent critic should be able to reconstruct why the translation reads as it does at every disputed point.

The full methodology paper is in preparation. Scholars interested in the project, critically or otherwise, are invited to correspond.