The first chapter of the book addresses fundamental questions about the Church's first Bible (the Septuagint) and asks why it should have been Greek, given the Palestinian beginnings of Christianity. It considers the extent to which Greek was spoken in Palestine and, in particular, the evidences of the presence of Greek-speaking Jewish Christians in the Jerusalem milieu at the beginnings of Palestinian Christianity. It envisages a selective use of a Greek Bible, as well as the Hebrew Bible and its Aramaic translations, in order to construct a primitive Christian theology in a Jerusalem context, and supposes that a high value would have been placed on the Greek expression of this theology when the Christian Church broke through the limits of Palestinian Christianity into the Gentile world. The adoption of the Septuagint as the Bible of the Church would then be a natural development. In the final part of the first section of this chapter the distance which was created between the Church and the plain sense of the Hebrew Bible is considered in exegetical terms.

In the second part of the chapter there is a consideration of the contribution of Origen to the study of the Church's Bible, through his work as a textual critic, exemplified in his Hexapla. Here the Hebrew Bible makes its entrance, and through the use which he makes of his synopsis in six columns, Origen, in an indirect way, becomes the first Christian translator of the Hebrew Bible into Greek.