Septuagint Torah Quotations Common to Philo of Alexandria and Luke-Acts

The relation between the quotations in Philo’s works and the text form of the LXX had been a topic of interest in the past. This author’s investigation into the LXX Vorlage of the explicit quotations in Hebrews (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011) has shown that nearly all Hebrews’ quotations from the Torah were also to be found in Philo of Alexandria. Furthermore, apart from the overlap in occurrence, also the form of all the explicit Torah quotations is in agreement with the form of the quotations as found in Philo – against those of the MT and the LXX. Both Hebrews and Philo thus together deviate from the readings of the MT as well as from the LXX witnesses. These findings raise the question whether such an overlap between Hebrews and Philo might be the result of a common LXX Vorlage of the Torah that might have been used by both of these authors, and one that might possibly point in the direction of an earlier LXX text form. The phenomenon begs for further and more careful investigation. It is therefore the intention of this particular contribution to investigate those Torah quotations that overlap between the Lukan literature and that of Philo of Alexandria. After some methodological remarks are noted, a comparative survey of eight such cases in speeches of Luke-Acts, is presented. The study concludes that in the case of Luke-Acts, differences with the LXX and Philo are minute and few in number. There were no traces found of another Textvorlage of the Torah that was used by Luke and/or Philo. In these instances, Luke’s quotations resemble adaptations and interpretations already present in the Christian tradition. Several cases show evidence of conflations and paraphrases of the quoted passages.