July 6, 2026
There is a passage in Matthew’s Gospel, early in the first chapter, where the author quotes a prophecy from Isaiah to explain the meaning of Jesus’s birth. The quotation reads: “Look, the virgin shall conceive and give birth to a son.” Matthew cites Isaiah as the source and moves on.
Biblical scholars have long noted something important about this quotation. When you compare it to the Hebrew text of Isaiah 7:14, the word Matthew translates as “virgin” — the Greek parthenos — does not match the Hebrew. The Hebrew uses the word almah, which simply means “young woman.” There is a separate Hebrew word for virgin (betulah), and Isaiah did not use it.
This discrepancy has been cited, variously, as evidence of scribal corruption, deliberate theology, or mistranslation — depending on who is doing the citing and what they want it to prove. But there is a simpler explanation, one that illuminates the whole world the New Testament emerged from: Matthew was not reading from the Hebrew text at all.
In the third and second centuries BCE, a significant portion of the Jewish population was no longer living in Judea. Alexandria, Egypt, had become home to one of the largest Jewish communities in the ancient world. These Jews spoke Greek as a primary language — many were more fluent in Greek than in Hebrew. For practical and liturgical reasons, a translation of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek was produced.
Tradition attributes the work to seventy-two scholars brought from Jerusalem to Alexandria, working in seventy-two days. This is almost certainly legend, but it gives the translation its name: the Septuagint, from the Latin for “seventy,” abbreviated in scholarship as LXX.
The Septuagint was not a curiosity for specialists. It was the Bible that millions of Greek-speaking Jews used in daily life, in synagogue reading, in theological argument. By the first century CE, it was the scripture that most literate people in the Mediterranean Jewish world had actually encountered. The Hebrew original was still authoritative, but for most diaspora Jews it was the LXX they opened, the LXX they quoted, the LXX they knew.
The early Christian movement began in Jewish communities, but it spread rapidly through the Greek-speaking world of the eastern Mediterranean. Paul was writing to communities in Corinth, Galatia, and Rome. The gospel writers were composing in Greek for audiences who would read in Greek.
When these writers quoted the scriptures, they quoted the text their readers already knew. That text was the Septuagint. In many cases, the NT quotations match the LXX closely enough that scholars can identify direct dependence. In a handful of significant cases, the NT quotation matches the LXX but diverges from the Hebrew Masoretic text. These divergences are not errors. They are evidence of which Bible was in the room.
This is also where the work of understanding manuscript traditions becomes essential: the LXX was itself not a single stable text but a family of translations and revisions, and tracking which version a given NT author may have been reading is its own sub-discipline. The textual history is layered, and every layer is instructive.
When the Septuagint translators encountered almah in Isaiah 7:14, they rendered it parthenos — virgin. The reasons for this choice are debated: the translators may have understood almah as a term of exceptional honor, they may have been reading contextually against a broader prophetic tradition, or they may simply have been making a judgment about how the verse would read in Greek. What is clear is that the LXX reading of this verse was in circulation for at least two centuries before Matthew wrote his Gospel.
Matthew, writing for a Greek-speaking audience and quoting from the Greek scriptures, used the word parthenos because that is what Isaiah said — in the text he was reading. This is not a conspiracy, and it is not a fraud. It is what happens across early Christian history and within every translation tradition: choices made by translators in one century become the received text in the next, shaping how later readers understand the original. The translation does not simply carry meaning; it makes meaning.
The implications extend further than any single verse. The Septuagint’s widespread use tells us something foundational about the world the New Testament grew from: it was not a world primarily shaped by Hebrew scholarship in a narrow, liturgical sense. It was a Greek-speaking Jewish world, one that had already translated its foundational texts, already argued over their meaning in Greek, already read its prophecies through the lens of Greek vocabulary.
Early Christianity did not emerge from a hermetically sealed Hebrew tradition and then translate itself for Gentiles. It emerged from a Jewish world that was already bilingual, already interpreting its scriptures in translation, already asking in Greek what its ancient texts meant. The LXX was not a secondary document. For most of its first readers, it was simply scripture.
The Septuagint is not a footnote to biblical scholarship. It is closer to a foundation — the text beneath the text, the translation that shaped how early Christians read their own origins. When you understand that Matthew was quoting from a Greek translation made two centuries before he was born, parthenos stops looking like a mistake and starts looking like a tradition handing something down.
The Oldest Fragment: The Judean Variant arrives August 15, 2026.
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