Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 The Letter of Aristeas
- 2 The Hellenistic Jewish Tradition
- 3 The Rabbis and the Greek Bible
- 4 The Ptolemaic Changes
- 5 The Church Fathers and the Translation of the Septuagint
- 6 Among the Christians in the Orient
- 7 The Muslims and the Septuagint
- 8 Yosippon and the Story of the Seventy
- 9 Karaites, Samaritans and Rabbanite Jews in the Middle Ages
- 10 The Septuagint in the Renaissance and the Modern World
- Conclusion
- Appendix: In Partibus Infidelium: Zosimus of Panopolis
- Bibliography and Sources
- Index
Conclusion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 The Letter of Aristeas
- 2 The Hellenistic Jewish Tradition
- 3 The Rabbis and the Greek Bible
- 4 The Ptolemaic Changes
- 5 The Church Fathers and the Translation of the Septuagint
- 6 Among the Christians in the Orient
- 7 The Muslims and the Septuagint
- 8 Yosippon and the Story of the Seventy
- 9 Karaites, Samaritans and Rabbanite Jews in the Middle Ages
- 10 The Septuagint in the Renaissance and the Modern World
- Conclusion
- Appendix: In Partibus Infidelium: Zosimus of Panopolis
- Bibliography and Sources
- Index
Summary
For ancient (and some modern) Christians, the authority of the LXX surpassed that of the masoretic Hebrew text. This authority is guaranteed by the miracle story. That story in all its manifold variety sits at the heart of the chapters that lie behind us. But it is, after all, just a story. The Letter has no value as testimony to genuine historical events. The intimacy of its detail, if nothing else, must tend to reduce whatever limited suspension of disbelief our desire for reliable sources might induce. For all that the story has fired the imagination and aroused curiosity among Jews and Christians, Muslims and even pagans. We find it in the Iberian Peninsula and in Caucasian Iberia, on the shores of the Atlantic and in the wastes of Central Asia; we have seen it not just in its original Greek but also in Latin and in Persian, in Armenian and in Ethiopic, in Hebrew and Arabic, and in Georgian, to say nothing of English and Portuguese and other languages of modern western Europe. It fuelled religious controversy and fed religious faith from the second century b.c.e. until the Renaissance and after, and even now its last echoes have not died away.
Taken together, the stories studied here add up to more than the sum of their parts. They testify to the vitality and acceptability of the story and its individual bits in many different contexts.
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- The Legend of the SeptuagintFrom Classical Antiquity to Today, pp. 270 - 274Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006