The Septuagint and Other Translations

Abstract

This chapter retraces the origins of the Greek Bible, and explains how the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Torah ultimately defined the (linguistic) form of the entire Greek Old and New Testament. Surveying the most important episodes in the Christian transmission history of the Bible, it argues that that tradition was to a considerable extent a form of biblical exegesis: it offered Christian scribes, revisers, and authors a platform for the inclusion of interpretative views into the Greek biblical text. The same phenomenon can be observed in the transmission of the various Latin and Syriac Bible versions. The fact that most of those can be traced back to translations made by Christians increases the interpretative dimension of their form. The chapter in that sense highlights that the literary corpus that was Christian Scripture, and generated Early Christian biblical interpretation, was itself to a certain extent a product of such interpretation.