HistoricalChristian.Faith

The Simeon-the-Just legend: did one of the Seventy balk at Isaiah 7:14's "virgin"?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: weak — as an argument that the Septuagint preserved the authentic messianic "virgin" of Isaiah 7:14 against a Jewish softening, the legend of Simeon the Just does not hold: it is a late (it first surfaces around the year 900), demonstrably legendary conflation that adds nothing to the philological dispute and, tellingly, locates the temptation to soften "virgin" inside the translators' own work — conceding the very translation-versus-text point the corruption charge must deny. What is genuine is the legend as a witness to tradition: it shows how completely the Isaiah 7:14 anxiety had saturated the Eastern Christian imagination, and dramatizes the premise that binds the origin legend to the corruption charge · told first, already in Isaiah-7:14 form, by the Syriac Moses bar Kepha (d. 903), then by Eutychius of Alexandria (c. 938) and the Coptic-Arabic chroniclers, with a thin Byzantine Greek branch — Kedrenos (c. 1050), who falsely credits Chrysostom's Hexaemeron (an ascription the Acta Sanctorum exposed as spurious), and the more guarded Euthymius Zigabenus (c. 1120); the latest Syriac teller, Bar Hebraeus (d. 1286), fuses it with the separate guess that Simeon had fathered Ben Sira

Related arguments: the hagiographic mirror of the Aquila-revision argument (a named reviser deliberately writes "young woman" against the Church; here one of the Seventy is tempted to the same softening and divinely checked) — see also the master corruption charge and the Septuagint-legend argument (both on the rabbinic-corruption side)

This argument takes a late-antique offshoot of the Septuagint origin legend — the story that one of the seventy-two translators, Simeon the Just (identified with the Simeon of Luke 2), hesitated over the "virgin" of Isaiah 7:14 and was kept alive three centuries to see the Christ — and asks what, if anything, it establishes for the claim it is enlisted to serve.

The legend

"Among the Seventy was a man named Simeon the Just, who took Christ our Lord [into his arms] in the temple. This Simeon, in explaining the Torah and translating the Prophets from Hebrew into Greek, found in every letter that he was transcribing, a prophecy about Christ our Lord, and in his heart he tried not to admit it by saying, 'This is not possible!' God therefore delayed his death, and he lived three hundred and fifty years until he saw Christ our Lord. When he saw Him he said: 'Now send your servant out in peace, O Lord, according to your word, for our eyes have seen your salvation…'"

— Eutychius of Alexandria, Annals, ch. 7 (c. 938), trans. Roger Pearse.¹ The interpretation the legend serves — the reason it is gathered into the corruption dossier — is that the Septuagint's parthenos ("virgin") at Isaiah 7:14 is the authentic, divinely-intended messianic reading, and that softening it to "young woman" or "girl" is the archetypal corruption: a temptation so grave that even one of the inspired Seventy who felt it was supernaturally checked. It is the hagiographic mirror of the Aquila charge. Where Aquila, the rabbis' second-century reviser, is said to have deliberately written neanis ("young woman") against the christological proof-text, here a member of the original band is imagined tempted to the very same softening — and prevented by God, who lengthens his days until the prophecy he doubted is fulfilled in his arms.

Who tells it

The legend is a property of the medieval Christian East, not of the early Church. Among its witnesses are two tenth-century Arabic chroniclers of Egypt and Syria: the Melkite patriarch Eutychius of Alexandria (Sa‘id ibn Bitriq, c. 938), who gives the 350-year form quoted above, and his contemporary Agapius of Hierapolis (c. 942), in whose Universal History the same providential motive — the LXX made "that… all peoples were able to profit" — frames the origin story.² From there it descends through the thirteenth-century Coptic-Arabic chain: Ibn al-Rāhib (c. 1257) gives it in seed, folding Sam’an al-kahin — "who carried our lord in his arms" — into the band of translators in a single clause; his reader al-Makīn Ibn al-‘Amīd (c. 1273) tells it whole, with the prayer for length of days, the 350 years, the Child taken "on his arms," and the Nunc Dimittis.³ Its sharpest form is in a Coptic redaction of the Arab Jacobite Synaxarium, read on the feast of the Presentation (8 Amshir / 2 February), where the proof-text is named outright: Simeon "struggled with the words of Isaiah [7:14], 'Behold, a virgin shall conceive…'; he was afraid to write 'a virgin shall conceive'… so he wrote, in place of 'virgin', 'girl'," whereupon an angel rebuked him and he was bound to life until he saw the Christ.⁴ The modern collection and analysis of the whole cluster is in Abraham & David J. Wasserstein's The Legend of the Septuagint.⁵

A separate Byzantine Greek branch carries the legend too — and carries with it a false patristic pedigree. The eleventh-century chronicler George Kedrenos (c. 1050), narrating the Presentation in his Synopsis Historiarum, tells how "the receiver of God, Symeon the Jew, was one of those seventy interpreters who had translated the Hebrew Old Testament into Greek for Ptolemy Philadelphus… as the divine Chrysostom says in his Hexaemeron" — Simeon doubting Isaiah's word "that a virgin should be pregnant," and kept alive "until the prophet's oracle was fulfilled." The attribution to John Chrysostom's Hexaemeron (de sex diebus opere, "On the Work of the Six Days") is spurious: when Jean Bolland quoted Kedrenos verbatim in the Acta Sanctorum (1665), he flagged the citation as drawn from one of the many works falsely fathered on Chrysostom — "it is not read in his genuine works that Simeon was among the seventy-two interpreters." Chrysostom's genuine Homily 4 on Genesis does recount the Septuagint's origin and does treat "the work of the six days," but it has no Simeon at all (it is the plain providential-commission account on the origin timeline). Bolland adds the decisive chronological objection as well: the 350-year lifespan "does not seem to have arisen from any other source than from the error by which Saint Simeon is confused with another Simon, surnamed the Just and high priest of the Jews" — the same threefold conflation set out below. The legend stayed rare on the Greek side: the only other Byzantine writer known to carry it, the early-twelfth-century commentator Euthymius Zigabenus (c. 1120), reports it in his Commentary on Luke with conspicuous reserve — "I too have found in certain writings concerning this righteous man that he was among the seventy translators," he begins, before retelling the doubt over Isaiah's "virgin" — and, tellingly, claims no Chrysostom and no named authority at all, only "certain writings."⁶

Earlier than any of these, however, stands the Syriac branch — and with it the legend's earliest dated witness. A homily "On the Circumcision of Christ" in the Book of Homilies attributed to Moses bar Kepha (d. 903), introducing a passage "from the commentary on Luke" (i.e. from his now-lost Luke commentary), lists seven rival identifications of the Gospel Simeon. The fifth is the translator legend already in developed form: "Others say that he was one of the 72 translators; and when he was rendering the book of Isaiah from Hebrew into Greek at the command of Ptolemy in Egypt, he doubted and said, 'A virgin cannot conceive and give birth,' and he was bound 272 years until Christ." The same seven-fold list recurs a quarter-millennium later in the Commentary on Luke 2:25 of Dionysius bar Salibi (d. 1171), where the lifespan is 278 years — so the list, and the translator-option within it, was a fixed piece of Syriac Luke-exegesis. Two features matter for the assessment below. The story is offered as one identification among seven, not as established fact — the Syriac tradition had no settled answer to who Simeon was; and, decisively, the explicitly Isaiah-7:14 shape of the legend — the translator stumbling over the "virgin" — is already present at c. 903, in Syriac, a generation before Eutychius and long before the Coptic Synaxarium once thought to have first fastened the doubt onto that verse.⁷

The Syriac branch runs on to its latest major voice. The polymath maphrian Gregory Bar Hebraeus (d. 1286) folds the legend into his Gospel commentary, the Storehouse of Mysteries (Awṣar Rāzē), at Luke 2:25 — and there does the one thing the earlier Syriac list-makers had been careful not to do: he fuses two of their seven options into a single identity. Where bar Kepha and bar Salibi had kept "the father of Jesus bar Asira [Ben Sira]" and "one of the 72 translators who doubted Isaiah" as separate guesses, Bar Hebraeus welds them — this Simeon, he writes, "was the father of Jesus the son of Asira, and was one of those seventy and two interpreters who translated the Scriptures from Hebrew into Greek in the days of Ptolemy. And because he was doubtful concerning that verse, ‘Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son,’ which is spoken in the prophet Isaiah, he was bound two hundred and eighty years… until he should see Him who was born of a virgin." Two small things shift as the story reaches the thirteenth-century West-Syriac mainstream: the miraculous lifespan drifts once more — 272 years in bar Kepha, 278 in bar Salibi, 280 here — and the Ben-Sira paternity that George of the Arabs had labored to refute five centuries earlier (point 4 below) is now simply asserted as fact and bundled with the very translator-legend it had once been merely an alternative to.⁸

The evidence for

The legend is genuine, widespread, and rightly identifies the verse at the heart of the dispute. It is no invention of a single eccentric. It is attested across the confessions of the Christian East — Syriac (Moses bar Kepha, Dionysius bar Salibi, Bar Hebraeus), Byzantine Greek (Kedrenos, Euthymius Zigabenus), Melkite (Eutychius), Syriac-tinged Arabic (Agapius), and Coptic (Ibn al-Rāhib, al-Makīn, the Synaxarium) — and reached into the liturgy, attached to the feast of the Presentation and to the Gospel figure of Simeon who sang the Nunc Dimittis over the infant Christ (Luke 2:25–35). It survives there to this day: the living Orthodox commemoration of Simeon the God-Receiver (3 February) carries the translator-legend whole — Simeon set among the Seventy to render Isaiah's "virgin," tempted to correct it to "woman," stayed by an angel, and kept alive (now a round 360 years) until he held the Christ in the Temple.⁹ As a piece of tradition it does real work: it crystallizes, in narrative, the conviction that the Septuagint's "virgin" is the true messianic reading; it fastens that conviction onto exactly the proof-text the controversy turned on (Isaiah 7:14, the most-disputed verse from Justin and Irenaeus onward); and it makes vivid and explicit the premise on which the whole rabbinic-corruption charge depends — that an inspired, providentially-guarded Greek text turns the synagogue's divergent reading into corruption. The legend is a true mirror of how the Church felt the Isaiah 7:14 question.

Adversarial assessment

What holds. The Eastern Christian tradition really did dramatize the Isaiah 7:14 anxiety in this hagiographic form, and did so widely and early enough (by the tenth century) to count as a settled motif, not a one-off. As evidence for the history of the doctrine — for how deep and how shared the conviction was that the LXX-virgin is the authentic messianic reading — the legend is a real and valuable witness.

What fails, and why the legend cannot bear the weight put on it.

1. As history the identification fails. "Simeon the Just" (Shim‘on ha-Tzaddik) is the high priest who heads the rabbinic chain of transmission (Pirqei Avot 1:2), placed by the tradition either c. 300 BC (Simeon I) or c. 200 BC (Simeon II) — generations before the Gospel Simeon of Luke 2, and a century or more before any plausible date for the translation. The legend welds three distinct figures into one — the high priest Simeon the Just, an anonymous member of the Seventy, and the aged Simeon of the Nunc Dimittis — and bridges the gap between them with a lifespan of three centuries or more that no earlier source attests and that the rabbinic chronology of Simeon the Just cannot accommodate. (The longevity is not impossible in principle — the legend openly makes it a miracle of divinely extended life — but it is unattested and improbable on the evidence, and a miracle of long life cannot of itself turn three separately named Simeons into one.) The latest Syriac form swells the composite to a fourth: Bar Hebraeus (d. 1286) makes the same Simeon "the father of Jesus the son of Asira," i.e. the parent of Ben Sira the sage — the very Sirach-conflation George of the Arabs had already refuted on chronology in the eighth century (point 4), now reasserted and welded to the translator-legend. It is a hagiographic construction, first surfacing around the turn of the tenth century (Moses bar Kepha, d. 903), some nine hundred years after the events it narrates.¹⁰ The diagnosis is not a modern one: already in 1665 Bolland, editing the legend in the Acta Sanctorum, traced the inflated age to "the error by which Saint Simeon is confused with another Simon, surnamed the Just and high priest of the Jews," and dismissed the swollen lifespan as "a mere Talmudic invention" (see "Who tells it" above).

2. It is self-undermining on the very point it is enlisted to prove. The corruption charge needs Isaiah 7:14 to be a case of the Hebrew text mutilated by the rabbis. But the legend locates the whole drama inside the act of translation: Simeon is tempted, as he renders the Hebrew into Greek, to write the softer Greek word — and in the Synaxarium he actually "wrote, in place of 'virgin', 'girl'" before the angel corrects him. That is a concession, not a proof. It places the choice between "virgin" and "young woman/girl" exactly where the Aquila-revision argument and the master charge place it on the evidence — at the point of rendering the unchanged Hebrew 'almah (a young woman of marriageable age; virginity connoted, not denoted), which the Septuagint glossed interpretively parthenos and the later Jewish revisers rendered literally neanis. The legend, told by the Church's own hand, makes Isaiah 7:14 a translation question — which is precisely why it cannot serve as evidence of a textual corruption.¹¹

3. It adds no independent weight to the philological dispute. Whether parthenos or neanis is the better rendering of 'almah is a real and contested question — but it is a question of Hebrew lexicography and translation method, weighed under the Aquila argument. A tenth-century miracle story contributes nothing to settling it; it simply presupposes the answer it dramatizes. To cite the legend as support for the reading is to argue in a circle.

4. The witnesses are late and dependent, and the motif visibly grows in the telling. No source for the Simeon legend predates the turn of the tenth century; nothing in the early patristic Septuagint literature (Aristeas, Philo, Josephus, Justin, Irenaeus, Epiphanius, Augustine) knows it, and on the Syriac side a dated negative survives a century before bar Kepha himself. The earliest Syriac writer known to canvass who the Simeon of Luke 2 was — George, bishop of the Arabs (d. 724), answering the recluse Yeshu's question whether this Simeon "is Simeon Sirach or not" — runs through the rival identifications and weighs them: that he was Simeon Sirach (Simon son of Sirach); that "he lived 500 years, from the time of the deportation to Babylon until the time when he took Christ in the temple on his arms"; that "he was a priest together with Zechariah" who, with Joseph, knew the secret of the virgin conception and birth. George rejects the Sirach-conflation on chronology (Simeon Sirach "lived more than 244 years before the coming of Christ… in the days of King Ptolemy Euergetes of Egypt") and traces it to a false etymology — the supposition "that the name Sirach is derived from 'asir [i.e. bound/captive]" — concluding that the Gospel Simeon "need have been neither a priest nor unusually old." Nowhere does he know the translator-form. As late as the early eighth century, then, the Septuagint-translator identification had not yet attached itself to Simeon even in the Syriac tradition that would later carry it.¹² The Syriac Moses bar Kepha (d. 903) is the earliest dated witness, with Eutychius and Agapius (c. 938–942) close behind; the thirteenth-century Coptic-Arabic chain (Ibn al-Rāhib → al-Makīn) is derivative, al-Makīn drawing openly on Ibn al-Rāhib; the Synaxarium redaction is later still. And the detail does still accrete as it travels — though less tidily than the Arabic line alone suggests. The two language-streams carry different elements: bar Kepha already names Isaiah and the doubt over the "virgin" at c. 903, yet Eutychius (c. 938) has the multi-century lifespan but no Isaiah 7:14, and al-Makīn keeps it with the messianic prophecies only "in general." So the explicitly-Isaiah-7:14 form is not a late Coptic refinement but an early Syriac one; what the Coptic Synaxarium uniquely adds is the dramatization — the written "girl" substituted for "virgin," and the rebuking angel. This remains a developing legend, not an early independent testimony — but it develops along more than one line.¹³

Assessment

Weak. As an argument that the Septuagint preserved an authentic "virgin" at Isaiah 7:14 against a Jewish softening — or even as evidence bearing on that dispute — the Simeon-the-Just legend does not hold on its best available case. It is a late (it first surfaces around the year 900), demonstrably legendary conflation of three (in Bar Hebraeus, four) distinct Simeons — bridged by an unattested lifespan of three centuries or more and resting on the demonstrable etymological and chronological error George of the Arabs had already exposed; it adds nothing to the philological question of 'almah; and, most tellingly, it locates the temptation to soften "virgin" inside the translators' own work — conceding that Isaiah 7:14 is a question of how to render the unchanged Hebrew, not of any tampering with the Hebrew text, the same conclusion the Aquila-revision argument reaches independently. What should be trusted is the legend as a witness to tradition: it shows how completely the Isaiah 7:14 anxiety had saturated the Eastern Christian imagination, and it dramatizes, more vividly than any argument, the premise that binds the origin legend to the corruption charge — that an inspired Greek text makes the synagogue's divergent reading look like betrayal. What must be flagged is the leap from that devotional memory to evidence: the legend is the hagiographic mirror of the Aquila charge, and like that charge it is weak exactly where it claims to document a corruption. It is cultural history, not proof.

Sources