It is important to know that the scriptures used by the New Testament writers and the first Old Testament of the Church is not the Hebrew Bible but the Greek Septuagint (pronounced Sep-tu-a-gint). This is the name given to the translation of the Hebrew Bible from about the third century BC.

Is the Septuagint inspired by God? Consider this fact: the NT authors sometimes use Septuagint readings we know to be mistranslations of the original Hebrew Bible. And they use these mistranslations to prove important points of Christian doctrine.

Professor of Biblical Hebrew at Oxford University James Barr comments:

‘As a translation the Septuagint is a work of very mixed quality. It differed from book to book, since different techniques of translation were used; at some places it must have had a Hebrew text different from ours, while at others it seriously misread or misunderstood the Hebrew.  No scholar…