these books. Paul calls the old dispensation the old covenant; and that
phrase came into general use among the early Christians as contrasted
with the Christian dispensation which they called the new covenant;
therefore Greek-speaking Christians used to talk about "the books
of the old covenant," and "the books of the new covenant;" and by and by
they shortened the phrase and sometimes called the two collections
simply "Old Covenant" and "New Covenant." When the Latin-speaking
Christians began to use the same terms, they translated the Greek word
"covenant" by the word "testament" which means a will, and which does
not fairly convey the sense of the Greek word. And so it was that these
two collections of sacred writings began to be called The Old Testament
and The New Testament. It is the former of these that we are first to
study.

When Jesus Christ was on the earth he often quoted in his discourses
from the Jewish Scriptures, and referred to them in his conversations.
His apostles and the other New Testament writers also quote freely from
the same Scriptures, and books of the early Christian Fathers are full
of references to them. What were these Jewish Scriptures?

At the time when our Lord was on the earth, the sacred writings of the
Jews were collected in two different forms. The Palestinian collection,
so called, was written in the Hebrew language, and the Alexandrian
collection, called the Septuagint, in the Greek. For many years a large
colony of devout and learned Jews had lived in Alexandria; and as the
Greek language was spoken there, and had become their common speech,
they translated their sacred writings into Greek. This translation soon
came into general use, because there were everywhere many Jews who knew
Greek well enough but knew no Hebrew at all. When our Lord was on earth,
the Hebrew was a dead language; it may have been the language of the