Scroll to follow Paul's framing line and the Old Testament texts behind Romans 3:10–18 — and watch how his chain of quotations was later absorbed back into the Psalter itself.
Romans 3:10 is Paul's own framing line (οὐκ ἔστιν δίκαιος οὐδὲ εἷς), not a verbatim LXX quotation. Verses 11–12 then move into the Psalm 14 wording that anchors the paragraph.
The left column is Paul's paragraph. The right column is his library. Verse 10 states the thesis; verses 11–12 draw closely from Psalm 14; then verse 13 begins braiding in five more texts.
Jewish exegetes called this technique charaz — "stringing beads" on a common thread. Paul is doing it in Greek.
Psalm 14 and Psalm 53 are a doublet — nearly the same psalm preserved twice in the Hebrew Psalter. Psalm 14 sits in Book I; Psalm 53 sits in the Elohistic Psalter (Pss 42–83), which tends to prefer the divine name Elohim over YHWH. Both open identically, so the divine-name difference doesn't appear in verse 1 — it shows up later, and the psalms end differently too. Two fingerprints point to Psalm 14 as the one Paul has in hand: the Greek word he uses, χρηστότητα, and the expanded text tradition that later absorbs his catena.
Taken together: the divine-name pattern, the reworked judgment line, the Greek word Paul uses, and which Greek psalm the catena attaches to in later manuscripts all point the same direction. Paul is most likely drawing on Psalm 14 (LXX 13), not its doublet. No single thread is decisive on its own; together they make a strong case.
Each color is a different Old Testament book. Hover any phrase for its English gloss. Click for the Greek and Hebrew sources side by side.
Pick any phrase. Compare Paul's Greek against the Greek source, the Hebrew source, and the Psalm 14 traditions that don't contain it. Verse 10 is treated as Paul's framing line.
Psalm 14 and Psalm 53 are Hebrew doublets — almost the same psalm, twice in the Psalter. In Greek they're numbered Psalm 13 and Psalm 52, and at one word they split: Paul's word matches Psalm 13, not Psalm 52.
One word isn't decisive on its own. But across the catena, Paul's wording tracks the Greek often enough that a Greek text form is the simplest explanation for what he has in front of him.
On the left: Paul's paragraph. On the right: what some later Greek manuscripts of Psalm 13(14) contain. Watch each borrowed line leave Paul and arrive in the psalm.
Every line that lands in the expanded Psalm is a phrase from Paul — Psalms 5, 140, 10, Isaiah 59, Psalm 36. Critical editors judge this expansion secondary. The most plausible explanation: later scribes, familiar with Romans, wrote Paul's catena back into the margins of the Psalter, and from there it entered the text. The witnesses themselves split on it — some preserve the short form, some the long, and one of the very oldest preserves the long form but flags it as foreign to the psalm.
Four of the most important Greek Psalter witnesses split on whether these lines belong to Psalm 13. The disagreement is itself evidence.
The earliest surviving continuous Greek Psalter treats the expansion as part of Psalm 13 itself. The catena sits in the body of the text, indistinguishable from the rest of the psalm.
Vaticanus preserves the same lines, but not in the psalm's body. They are written in the margin alongside Psalm 13 — with a scribal note observing that the lines are foreign to the Psalter.
nusquam exstant in Psalmis; undenam vero Apostolus excerpserit eos quærendum est.
Alexandrinus preserves Psalm 13 without the catena — the shorter form that matches the Hebrew. The Lucianic recension likewise transmits the short text.
The standard critical edition of the Septuagint prints the short form in the body, relegating the expansion to the apparatus and explicitly tying it to Romans 3:13–18.
The direction of influence becomes visible only when you line up the transmission across centuries.
Three levels of certainty. Each claim on this site sits at one of them — named, not hidden.
Ancient source-language text is shown for study. English is paraphrastic, written fresh — no modern copyrighted translation is reproduced.
Some claims here are directly documented in surviving manuscripts and critical apparatuses — these are shown without hedging. Others are scholarly judgments most text critics accept but which rest on inference. One gap is named, not hidden: no Greek manuscript of Psalm 13/14 survives from before Paul, so the direction-of-influence argument turns on later evidence rather than a dated pre-Pauline witness. The Vaticanus marginal note is itself a piece of that later evidence — an ancient scribe, centuries after Paul, already treating the expansion as foreign to the psalm.