HistoricalChristian.Faith

The Septuagint on the Old Testament Canon

Dates: c. 132 BC (the Greek Old Testament as a maturing collection — the date the grandson and translator of Ben Sira gives in his prologue for his arrival in Egypt, the earliest external marker for a Greek "Law, Prophets, and the rest of the books") · Wikipedia
Verdict on the deuterocanon: YES (inclusion). The Greek Old Testament the early church inherited contained Tobit — and with it Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, and 1–2 Maccabees. It was the most-used Old Testament in the first Christian centuries, and the New Testament's own scriptural citations overwhelmingly follow it. So the disputed books were inside the church's working Bible from the start; the later YES / NO verdicts on this timeline are arguments over a collection the church already had in hand.

Claims & evidence

It contained Tobit and the other disputed books

The books later contested — Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), Baruch, and 1–2 Maccabees — stood within the Greek Old Testament, not appended to it. The three great Christian pandect Bibles of the fourth and fifth centuries — Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus, and Codex Alexandrinus, the oldest near-complete copies of the Septuagint — all carry Tobit among the Old Testament books, interleaved with the protocanonical ones rather than set off as a separate class.¹ (Vaticanus and Alexandrinus preserve one textual form of Tobit; Sinaiticus a distinct, longer recension — a sign the book had a long Greek transmission behind it.) Whatever a given Father or council would later say about Tobit's rank, the physical Greek Bibles the church copied and read placed it among the Scriptures.

It was the Bible of the early church

"By the first century, the LXX was the Bible of Greek-speaking Jews and so was the most frequently used version of the Old Testament in the early Church."

— Catholic Answers, "In Which Passages Does Jesus Quote the Septuagint…?"² The same point is made from the Jewish side: the Septuagint, made for the Greek-speaking synagogue, passed into Christian hands and "became part of the Bible of the Christian Church."³ Because the church's working Old Testament was this Greek Bible, the books it carried — Tobit among them — were the Scriptures the first Christians actually read in worship, centuries before any council ruled on a fixed list.

The New Testament quotes it, not the Hebrew

"Protestant authors Archer and Chirichigno list 340 places where the New Testament cites the Septuagint but only 33 places where it cites from the Masoretic Text rather than the Septuagint."

— Catholic Answers, summarizing G. L. Archer & G. C. Chirichigno, Old Testament Quotations in the New Testament: A Complete Survey (Chicago: Moody, 1983), pp. 25–32.⁴ The figure counts the places where the New Testament's wording agrees with the Greek against the (later-named) Masoretic Hebrew: of the roughly 340 Old Testament quotations surveyed, about 307 follow the Septuagint and only 33 the proto-Masoretic text. That textual dependence is why the Greek Bible — deuterocanon and all — became the church's de facto Old Testament: the apostles themselves quote it.

Notes

• "Inclusion" is not yet a canon list. The Septuagint was a growing body of Greek scrolls, not a single sealed table of contents; calling Tobit "in the LXX" means the church received and read it as part of its Greek Scriptures, not that a council had ruled on it. The formal YES / NO verdicts on Tobit's canonicity begin further down this timeline — with Melito, Origen, the African councils, and the rest. The Septuagint marks the starting condition: the disputed books are inside the church's Bible from the outset, so the later dispute is over whether to keep what was already there, not whether to add something new.
• How the Greek Bible got its authority. The standing of this translation is the subject of the companion Origin and Inspiration of the Septuagint timeline — the Aristeas legend, the seventy-two translators, and the Christian claim that the work was itself inspired (Augustine, City of God XVIII.42–43, treats the LXX as Spirit-given). That premise is not re-argued here; it is the reason the books the LXX carried could be received as Scripture rather than as mere translation.
• The Septuagint-versus-Hebrew quarrel. Because the synagogue's later Hebrew (the Masoretic Text) omits these books and diverges from the Greek elsewhere, the inclusion question is bound up with the charge of a Rabbinic Corruption of Scripture — gathered, and weighed, on that page.

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