When we read the New Testament, there are many words we easily recognize as having their origin in the Old Testament: sin, circumcision, Passover, Israel, etc. However, there are some NT words which have an OT origin that can escape our notice. This is due to the complications of translating two different languages – Hebrew in the OT, Greek in the NT – into English. Below you will find a list of English words that appear in the New Testament but not in the Old Testament, yet the underlying Greek NT word is found in the Septuagint (LXX) – which is the Old Testament in Greek. What this means is that the NT is using an OT word…but that we can’t recognize it because the respective Hebrew and Greek words were translated differently into English. The purpose of this list is to bring to light as many of these hidden connections as possible – especially of the more important words.
These NT words are not intentionally hidden in the OT. It’s just part of the curse of Babel (Gen 11:1-9) that is still with us today. Translating is hard, especially when there are two source languages and one target language…and the source languages are ancient while the target language is modern. The process is also complicated by the fact that the Bible is so large and people don’t want to wait forever for the finished product, so the translating must be divvied up among committee members – making it harder to have the sort of consistency that could be achieved with a single translator. A silver lining to this “cloud” of difficulties is that study of the Bible, such as you are engaging in, can be very rewarding.
Remember: There’s nothing in the New Testament indicating that there was a need for a New Testament; Jesus and the apostles spoke of what we call the Old Testament as if it was all the Bible anyone would ever need. The point for us to realize that is that NT thinking is much more prevalent in the OT than we can easily see from our 21st-century vantage point. The point of a list like this is to help us see more of the unity that exists in the two testaments.
Details:
- I am using the NASB 1995 for this analysis as I do throughout all my work, but what is true of it in this case is generally – though definitely not always – true of other translations.
- An asterisk indicates that while the NT word in view does appear in the OT, it would appear much more frequently if the relevant cognates in Hebrew and Greek had been translated more consistently to English. The absence of an asterisk means that there are zero occurrences of this English word in the OT.
List
- CHRIST – (OT 0x; LXX 39x; NT 528x) – Strong’s Gk 5547
- CHURCH – (OT 0x; LXX 78x; NT 112) – Strong’s Gk 1577
- GOSPEL – (OT 0x; LXX 3x; NT 97) – Strong’s Gk 2098
- GRACE* – (OT 11x; LXX 81x; NT 114x) – Strong’s Gk 5484, 85
- JESUS – (OT 0x; LXX 0x; NT 990x) – Strong’s Gk 2424
- SYNAGOGUE – (OT 0x; LXX 195x; NT 68x) – Strong’s Gk 4864
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