F.F. Bruce on the Period Between the Testaments

The following articles are now on-line:

F.F. Bruce, "The Period Between The Testaments: I, Political Development," The Bible Student ns 20.1 (Jan. 1949): 9-15.

F.F. Bruce, "The Period Between The Testaments: II, Religious Development," The Bible Student ns 20.2 (April 1949): 59-64.

Quotable quote (from pp.61-62):

While Greek-speaking Jews were the first and direct beneficiaries of the Septuagint, others profited by it as well. It performed a sort of missionary function, for by its means Gentiles were able to read the Old Testament Scriptures in their own tongue. In this way the Septuagint helped to pave the way for the preaching of the Gospel to the Gentile world. For the Septuagint was the Bible which the earliest Christian missionaries took in their hands as they went on their journeys through the provinces of the Roman Empire, in the earliest decades of Church history when as yet there was no New Testament. The Septuagint provided the form in which most of the New Testament writers quote Old Testament Scripture, and it also provided them with a theological vocabulary. The New Testament writers did not have to invent a Greek theological vocabulary; the words they required to express the great concepts of divine revelation such as righteousness, mercy and truth, sin and atonement, and the [p.62] like, lay ready to their hand in the Greek translation of the Old Testament. When we meet such terms in the New Testament, we must remember that their background is not to be looked for in the senses which they bore in pagan Greek speech, but in the senses which they bear in the Septuagint as the equivalents of the corresponding Hebrew terms.