HistoricalChristian.Faith

Cyril of Alexandria on the Origin of the Septuagint

Dates: c. AD 444 · Against Julian (Contra Iulianum)
Summary: The scope widened from the Law to the Prophets. Cyril, patriarch of Alexandria, refers to the Septuagint origin in his great apology Against Julian, written near the end of his life to answer the apostate emperor's Against the Galileans. His distinctive contribution to the legend's growth is not a new miracle but a quiet expansion of what the Seventy are said to have done: where the Letter of Aristeas had the seventy-two render only the Law (the Pentateuch), Cyril writes as though their work took in "the holy prophets" as well — folding the whole Greek Old Testament into the one inspired translation. It is the scope-creep Justin and Clement had already begun, now settled into the assumption that "the Seventy" produced the entire Greek Bible.

Claims & evidence

The Seventy as translators of the Prophets, not the Law alone

Recounting the origin of the Greek Scriptures in the first book of Against Julian, Cyril has Ptolemy write to the high priest not for the Law only but for the whole of the Hebrew Scriptures — "all the books of Moses and of the holy prophets":

Πτολεμαῖος δὲ οὑτοσὶ τῶν ὅτι μάλιστα φιλολογωτάτων γεγονὼς ἕνα τῶν ἐπιτηδείων αὐτῷ πέπομφε εἰς τὴν Ἰουδαίαν, Ἐλεαζάρῳ τῷ τηνικάδε κατὰ νόμους ἱερεῖ γράψας, ὥστε πάντα τὰ βιβλία Μωσέως τε καὶ τῶν ἁγίων προφητῶν ἀποστεῖλαί οἱ μαθητιῶντι λίαν, συνεκπέμψαι δὲ καὶ τοὺς δυναμένους εἰς Ἑλλάδα φωνὴν αὐτὰ μεταθεῖναι· ὃ δὴ καὶ γέγονεν.¹

In English: "This Ptolemy, having become one of the most learned of men, sent one of his intimates into Judaea, writing to Eleazar, the priest at that time under the Law — since the king was eager to learn — that he should send him all the books of Moses and of the holy prophets, and should send along also men able to render them into the Greek tongue; which indeed came to pass." The load-bearing words are πάντα τὰ βιβλία Μωσέως τε καὶ τῶν ἁγίων προφητῶν — "all the books of Moses and of the holy prophets": the prophetic books are folded in alongside the Pentateuch, under the one royal commission to Eleazar.

The observation matters for the timeline because the source the tradition inherits, the Letter of Aristeas, is explicit that the king asked only for "the law of the Jews," and its translators render the Law alone; the Prophets and the rest of the Greek Old Testament were rendered later and by other hands. Yet by Cyril's day "the Seventy" had become a standing name for the whole Greek Bible, so a writer could fold the prophetic books into the same seventy-two without remark. Cyril does not argue the point — he simply assumes it, which is exactly why it is evidence of how far the legend had spread: its scope had grown silently from the Law to the entire canon. Abraham and David Wasserstein note the same widening, reading Cyril here as "not quite sure that it was the Pentateuch that the seventy-two translated, including in their work also 'the holy prophets'."²

Notes

• What is new, and what is not. Cyril adds no fresh element to the mechanism of the legend — no separate cells, no new physical detail, no inspiration formula appears in the passage quoted here. His contribution is to the legend's reach: the seventy-two, in his telling, stand behind "the holy prophets" and not only the Law. This continues a widening already visible in Justin Martyr (who spoke of "the books of the prophets" sent to Ptolemy) and Clement of Alexandria ("the Scriptures both of the law and of the prophets"); in Cyril it has become the unspoken default.
• Cells and inspiration: not attested here. For the through-line this timeline traces — whether each teller carries the separate-cells miracle and the inspiration claim — the passage quoted on this page carries neither: it is a bare royal commission, the marvel of the identical drafts absent. Cyril does treat the translation more fully elsewhere in Against Julian (book six reproduces the older account of Ptolemy and the elders, with the Aristobulus dating fragment); that fuller retelling is not examined here, where the point is only the scope of "all the books of Moses and of the holy prophets."
• Date and text. Cyril completed Against Julian (twenty books, of which ten survive) in his last years; it is dated here at c. AD 444, the year of his death, placing him on the timeline after Augustine of Hippo (c. 425). The Greek of the passage at issue (PG 76, col. 521 D, in book one) is given above as Paul Wendland printed it among the testimonia to his edition of the Letter of Aristeas (Teubner, 1900); Norman Russell's selections (Cyril of Alexandria, Routledge, 2000) and the Riedweg / Brüggemann–Kinzig critical edition (GCS, 2016–17) carry the same book in full.

Sources