The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity

by Robert L. Wilken

According to a pious legend, the project to translate the Jewish sacred books was undertaken by the Egyptian king Ptolemy Philadelphus (285–246 B.C.), who wanted to have a Greek version of the Jewish Scriptures for his great library in Alexandria. He assigned the task to seventy scholars (hence the name Septuagint) and, working independently of one another, they produced word-for-word identical Greek translations. In truth the translation was the work of a smaller company of scholars working in different places over a long period of time. It was completed before the rise of Christianity, and it is this version, not the original Hebrew (and Aramaic) version, that was cited in the New Testament and in other early Christian writings. The Septuagint was the first Christian “Bible.”