This project is dedicated to find citations of the Septuagint in the Greek New Testament.
The Bible, a book that has been translated into many languages, is maybe the most important book has ever existed. Believers have evidence that it is God's word, written by various people being inspired by God himself.
The Bible has many internal references. Many of them connect the two parts of the Bible: the Old Testament and the New Testament. The books of the Old Testament are usually written in Hebrew, while the books of the New Testament are Greek. A natural question can arise: How can Hebrew texts be cited in the Greek text?
There are several research projects on this, and today it seems to be clear that many authors of the New Testament cite a Greek translation of the Hebrew text, namely the Septuagint, that was widely popular in the first centuries, and still popular in some Christian churches. Many Bible translations, however, mostly use only the Hebrew text as a basis of the Old Testament, because the importance of the Septuagint is not yet widely identified.
This software project attempts to support finding citations of the Septuagint in the New Testament automatically. The work is based on The SWORD Project.
The provided software tool compares all verses of the Septuagint with all verses of the Greek New Testament. The texts are provided by the SWORD project from the modules LXX and SBLGNT.
Before comparing two verses, two steps are required:
- All accents are removed. (This step is performed only on the text of SBLGNT.)
- All letters are converted into lowercase.
After these steps an exact match is checked between two verses, using substrings of whole words, leaving them in the same consecutive order.
It is very important that the matches should be double checked before concluding any assertions. Also, both the modules LXX and SBLGNT contain just one plausible text of the originals, based on several scientific results which may be, unfortunately, outdated for the moment. The texts therefore cannot be surely the same as the prototypes (that are known to be lost). See also some recent research on this topic, for example, in
- Karrer, Kreuzer and Sigismund: Von der Septuaginta zum Neuen Testament: Textgeschichtliche Erörterungen (Arbeiten zur neutestamentlichen Textforschung, Band 43), ISBN 3110240017, de Gruyter, 2010
On the other hand, comparing the plausible texts results in surprisingly good matches, even when considering the newest scientific results.
All matches are printed on the standard output (on the terminal), line by line, like this first match:
Genesis 1:1: εν αρχη εποιησεν ο θεος τον ουρανον και την γην → Luke 16:17: ευκοπωτερον δε εστιν τον ουρανον και την γην παρελθειν η του νομου μιαν κεραιαν πεσειν
At the moment the project was tested on Ubuntu Linux 17.10 but it should work on many other systems.
The following commands should be entered on command line:
sudo apt install libsword-common libsword-dev git cmake build-essential
git clone https://github.com/kovzol/lxx.git
cd lxx
cmake .
make
Then the modules LXX and SBLGNT need to be downloaded from The SWORD Project. Finally the steps at the For Linux section on the website of The SWORD Project should be followed.
Enter the command
./lxx
There are some command line options available. Please use the switch -h to learn more on this.
The full output of a simple run of a previous version of the tool can be found in the file output.txt. It was produced in about 10 minutes by using a modern personal computer, but there were some issues with the used method, hence this output is not accurate and should be handled carefully.
The current version runs much slower, but it should give all matches properly. This is, however, not fully checked yet. The output for verses in the book of Genesis can be found in the file Genesis.txt. It took more than an hour to create this output.