Around 250 BC, Jewish scholars in Alexandria translated their scriptures into Greek. For roughly three centuries, Jewish communities treated that translation with reverence: an annual festival, a curse on altering it, a claim of inspiration. Then, in the century after Christianity spread, new Jewish versions revised and replaced it, while the church kept reading the original. This page lays out the dated record, with sources.
The ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, begun in Alexandria, Egypt, around 250 BC. The name comes from the Latin word for seventy, after the seventy-two translators in its origin story.
It was the Bible of Greek-speaking Jews across the ancient Mediterranean. When the New Testament quotes the Old, it usually quotes this translation's wording.
That Jewish communities revered this specific translation, and that in the century after Christianity's rise they revised and replaced it, while the church kept reading the original. The sources record what happened. They do not record why.
The translation was a Jewish project, and Jewish writers were building on it within a generation or two.
The five books of Moses are translated in Alexandria, home to the largest Greek-speaking Jewish community in the world. The dating rests on scholarly consensus. The famous origin story, seventy-two elders sent from Jerusalem, comes later.
The earliest known Jewish author writing in Greek constructs a chronology of Israel using this translation's Genesis. His figures match its longer genealogies rather than the Hebrew numbers. Within one or two generations, the translation already carried authority.
Ezekiel the Tragedian writes the Exagoge, a Greek drama of the Exodus story that echoes this translation's wording. Scripture in Greek was familiar enough to become literature.
Translating his grandfather's book into Greek, he refers to existing Greek versions of “the Law itself, the Prophets, and the rest of the books,” and remarks on the difficulty of carrying Hebrew into another language.
The surviving Jewish sources speak of this translation in the language of fixed, sacred scripture.
Since so excellent and sacred and accurate a translation had been made, it was only right that it should remain as it was, and no alteration should be made in it… they bade them pronounce a curse, in accordance with their custom, upon any one who should make any alteration, either by adding anything, or changing in any way whatever any of the words which had been written, or making any omission.
The Letter of Aristeas, written by an Alexandrian Jew, tells how seventy-two elders translated the Law, how the assembled community formally accepted the text, and how the community's leaders bound it with the curse quoted above. A curse against changing one word is the strongest form a community has for declaring a text fixed and sacred.
The letter is a founding legend composed generations after the events it describes, not an eyewitness account. It documents how the community regarded the translation.
The most prominent Jewish philosopher of the era calls the translators “prophets and priests of the mysteries” and reports the annual festival on the island of Pharos: “even to this very day, there is every year a solemn assembly held,” with Jews and non-Jews sailing across to honor the place where the translation was made. His own biblical interpretation quotes this translation throughout.
The timing is the point. Philo died around 50 AD, within roughly twenty years of the crucifixion. His “even to this very day” documents the reverence as a living, annual practice during and just after the lifetime of Jesus. The last snapshot of the old order was taken at the exact moment the new one began.
The Wisdom of Solomon is composed in Greek by an Alexandrian Jew with its scripture drawn from this translation. In the following century, 4 Maccabees does the same. It was the base text for new Jewish religious writing.
They, as it were possessed, and, under inspiration, wrote, not each several scribe something different, but the same word for word, as though dictated to each by an invisible prompter.
The paper trail is physical. Copies of this translation made by Jewish hands survive from Egypt and from the Judean desert, marked by a scribal treatment of the divine name that identifies them as Jewish work.
Greek Deuteronomy copied in Egypt around 150 BC. One of the oldest surviving Septuagint manuscripts, written roughly two centuries before Christianity.
Greek Genesis and Deuteronomy, 1st century BC. Inside the Greek text, the name of God is written in square Hebrew letters rather than translated. A Jewish scribal practice.
Among the Dead Sea Scrolls, a Greek Leviticus fragment writes the divine name as Iaō in Greek letters. This translation was present even in a Hebrew-centered community in Judea.
A Greek Minor Prophets scroll from the Judean desert, copied between 50 BC and 50 AD. It carries an early Jewish revision of this translation toward the Hebrew text then becoming standard. The change begins here.
A priest born in Jerusalem, writing in Rome, retells the translation's origin story with approval and works from Greek biblical texts. His Ezra narrative follows the Greek 1 Esdras. His Esther includes material found in the Greek text. His Samuel preserves a paragraph that also appears in a Samuel scroll from Qumran. A Judean priest, at the end of the first century, used this translation too.
The hinge of the claim. The first Christians were Greek-speaking Jews, and the Bible they quoted was this translation.
When the New Testament writers quote the Old Testament, they mostly quote this translation's wording. Matthew's “the virgin shall conceive” is the Greek of Isaiah 7:14, word for word. The quotations in Jesus' own recorded speech are scored one by one in their own page.
The Christian writer Justin Martyr, in debate with the Jewish teacher Trypho, quotes the old translation as authoritative scripture and accuses Jewish teachers of altering the text. By the middle of the second century, the two communities were reading different Greek versions of the same verses, and arguing about it verse by verse.
The claim's second act. A revision effort visible around the turn of the era became, in the century after Christianity spread, full replacement. The new versions were Jewish, they were Greek, and they moved away from the old translation's wording.
Jewish scholars in Palestine revise the old translation so it tracks the Hebrew text then becoming standard, word by word. Scholars named the effort “kaige” after one of its verbal habits.
The date rests on handwriting analysis of a single scroll, and the experts' window spans a full century: the official edition favors the later first century BC, while Barthélemy, who identified the revision, argued for the first century AD. One document with a dating window this wide cannot settle whether the revision began before Christ or after. What it fixes is a latest bound: revision existed by around 50 AD.
Aquila of Sinope, a Greek gentile who converted to Judaism, linked by tradition to the school of Rabbi Akiva, produces an entirely new Greek translation. His source is the Hebrew text of the rabbinic schools of his own day, the early form of what became the Masoretic Text, and he mirrors it almost letter for letter, carrying Hebrew word order and even untranslatable Hebrew grammar particles into the Greek. It replaced the old translation for many Jewish readers: a Greek Bible re-anchored to the new Hebrew standard rather than to the old translation of the seventy.
The sources record praise for Aquila, not an official commissioning. Saying the rabbis “sponsored” his translation would go past the evidence.
At Isaiah 7:14, the old translation reads parthenos, “virgin,” the wording Matthew's Gospel quotes. Aquila and the two other second-century Jewish revisers, Symmachus and Theodotion, all render the word instead as neanis, “young woman.” The old reading stayed in the church's text. The new Jewish versions dropped it.
Whether translation method or the Christian use of the verse drove the choice is debated among scholars. What is documented is the change itself, and its date.
Aquila the proselyte translated the Torah before Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Joshua, and they praised him.
What the later record does to the claim: it preserves honor, demotion, and finally mourning, in that order. The dates matter.
The Babylonian Talmud retells the making of this translation for King Ptolemy as a miracle, but not the miracle Philo told. In the Talmud's version, seventy-two isolated elders each independently made the same fifteen or so changes to the text “for King Ptolemy,” and the identical changes are the proof of divine protection. The story honors the event while marking the Greek text itself as adjusted for a gentile king. Honor and demotion in one passage, by design.
A dispute among Byzantine Jews over whether synagogue reading may be in Greek reaches the emperor Justinian. His ruling permits Greek and names two versions: the translation “of the seventy interpreters,” preferred, and Aquila's, also allowed. The preference for the seventy is the emperor's, and the Septuagint was his own church's Bible. The same law bans the Mishnah from synagogues.
What the law documents about Jews: some congregations wanted Greek, some wanted Hebrew only, and Aquila's version had to be named to accommodate Jewish practice. Which version any congregation actually read is not recorded.
The post-Talmudic tractate Soferim compares the day the Torah was translated into Greek to the day Israel made the golden calf. This is the record's one outright condemnation, and it was compiled roughly nine hundred years after the translation. The same tradition that had once called the translation a miracle now compared it to idolatry.
That day was as hard for Israel as the day the calf was made, for the Torah could not be adequately translated.
A community does not usually celebrate a translation with a festival, call it inspired, guard it with a curse, and then build a replacement for it. The record fixes the order of events. No surviving source states the reason. Scholars point to three factors from the same period, and the record supports dating them, not weighing them.
The young church quoted this translation to argue that Jesus was the Messiah, and by 150 AD Jews and Christians were disputing its text verse by verse. Justin's Dialogue records the argument in progress.
The revolt of 115 to 117 AD devastated the Jews of Alexandria, the community that had produced the translation, produced Philo, and kept the Pharos festival.
After the Temple fell in 70 AD, rabbinic Judaism consolidated the Hebrew scriptures toward a single standard form. The new Greek versions of the second century track that Hebrew text closely. The old translation did not.
One caution the dates force: the earliest revision, kaige, is known from a single scroll whose handwriting date spans 50 BC to 50 AD. That window cannot settle whether revision began before Christianity or alongside it. What is firmly dated is the replacement itself: Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion all belong to the century after the church adopted the translation. The sequence is documented. The motive is not.
Follow the same book through both traditions after the first century.
Both traditions began the first century reading the same book. The record gives the dates of the parting. It does not give the reasons.
Made and revered by the Jews. Argued from by Jesus. Built on by the apostles. Kept by the church.
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