When Jesus sat down on that Galilean hillside and began, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” He wasn’t inventing a new theology. He was doing what every great rabbi did: He was opening the Scriptures.
But here’s what most Christians miss: the Scriptures Jesus was opening weren’t in Hebrew. They were in Greek.
By the first century, the Septuagint had become the Bible of the Jewish diaspora and even many Jews in Palestine. It was the text Matthew knew, the text the early church quoted, and almost certainly the text Jesus’ disciples would have heard read in synagogues throughout the Hellenized Roman world.
Bravo!
That is the exact issue (along with a few key differences between the Septuagint and the Hebrew text) that led me down this path!