<P> Following Martin Luther, Protestants regard the deuterocanonical books as apocryphal (non-canonical). According to J.N.D. Kelly, "It should be observed that the Old Testament thus admitted as authoritative in the Church...always included, though with varying degrees of recognition, the so - called Apocrypha or deuterocanonical books ." </P> <P> The Early Christian Church used the Greek texts since Greek was a lingua franca of the Roman Empire at the time, and the language of the Greco - Roman Church (Aramaic was the language of Syriac Christianity). </P> <P> The Septuagint seems to have been a major source for the Apostles, but it is not the only one . St. Jerome offered, for example, Matt 2: 15 and 2: 23, John 19: 37, John 7: 38, 1 Cor. 2: 9 . as examples not found in the Septuagint, but in Hebrew texts . (Matt 2: 23 is not present in current Masoretic tradition either, though according to St. Jerome it was in Isaiah 11: 1 .) The New Testament writers, when citing the Jewish scriptures, or when quoting Jesus doing so, freely used the Greek translation, implying that Jesus, his Apostles and their followers considered it reliable . </P> <P> In the Early Christian Church, the presumption that the Septuagint (LXX) was translated by Jews before the era of Christ, and that the Septuagint at certain places gives itself more to a christological interpretation than 2nd - century Hebrew texts was taken as evidence that "Jews" had changed the Hebrew text in a way that made them less christological . For example, Irenaeus concerning Isaiah 7: 14: The Septuagint clearly writes of a virgin (Greek παρθένος) that shall conceive . While the Hebrew text was, according to Irenaeus, at that time interpreted by Theodotion and Aquila (both proselytes of the Jewish faith) as a young woman that shall conceive . According to Irenaeus, the Ebionites used this to claim that Joseph was the (biological) father of Jesus . From Irenaeus' point of view that was pure heresy, facilitated by (late) anti-Christian alterations of the scripture in Hebrew, as evident by the older, pre-Christian, Septuagint . </P>

The old testament canon of the protestant reformation was the same as that of