HistoricalChristian.Faith

John Chrysostom on the Origin of the Septuagint

Dates: c. AD 407 (preaching at Antioch and Constantinople, c. 386–407) · Homilies on Genesis · Wikipedia
Summary: The legend in a preacher's plain providential form. John Chrysostom, the great Antiochene preacher and later archbishop of Constantinople, recounts the origin of the Greek Scriptures in his fourth Homily on Genesis: Ptolemy, "curious to gather a rich library," sent to Jerusalem for the Jewish books and had them rendered into Greek, so that "by a particular disposition of Providence… all peoples were able to profit." He keeps the royal-commission frame and the providential reading Eusebius had given it, but carries neither the separate-cells miracle nor the marvel of identical independent renderings — the bare apologetic-providential strand, told from the pulpit. The same historical premise — that the Seventy preceded Christ — does heavy work elsewhere in his preaching, where it grounds his charge against the later Jewish translators.

Claims & evidence

The translation as a providential act of a pagan king

Preaching through Genesis, Chrysostom pauses to assure his hearers of the Greek text's reliability and tells how it came to be:

"Listen attentively to what I am about to say to you, and do not be easily shaken by those who give you all their dreams. All the sacred books of the Old Testament were originally composed in Hebrew, no one contradicts it. Now, a few years before the birth of Jesus Christ, King Ptolemy, curious to gather a rich library, wanted to join our Holy Books to all those of various kinds that he had already gathered. This is why he brought some Jews from Jerusalem to translate into Greek, which they did happily. And this is how it came about, by a particular disposition of Providence, that not only those who heard Hebrew, but generally all peoples, were able to profit from our holy books. Is it not equally surprising that this design was conceived by an idolatrous prince, who, far from following the religion of the Jews, observed an altogether opposite worship? But this is how the Lord disposes all things, so that the enemies of truth are the first to break it."¹

The frame is the plain royal commission of Aristeas, but the load-bearing note is providential, not philological: Chrysostom is struck that the design "was conceived by an idolatrous prince" who "observed an altogether opposite worship," and reads the irony as the Lord's own doing — "the enemies of truth are the first to break it." This continues the providential frame Eusebius had set on the legend (God "put it into the mind of King Ptolemy" to have the Scriptures translated and published before Christ came) and Zacharias would echo (the king "moved by God"). For the through-line this timeline traces, what matters is what is absent: there are no separate cells, no sealed silence, no marvel of word-for-word agreement — the inspiration is of the occasion (God moved the pagan king), not of the translating.

The same Ptolemy story turned against the synagogue

Chrysostom retells the same origin elsewhere to a sharper end. In the first homily Against the Jews he recalls that Ptolemy Philadelphus, having gathered books "from all over the world," "sent for men from Judea and had them translate those books, which he then had deposited in the temple of Serapis, for he was a pagan."² And in his homily on Matthew 1:22–23 the same pre-Christian provenance becomes a dating rule: the Seventy, having worked "an hundred years or more before the coming of Christ, stand clear from all such suspicion," whereas the later Greek translators (Aquila and the rest), rendering Isaiah 7:14's "young woman" after Christ "continuing to be Jews," "may justly be suspected." The origin legend is the premise; the corruption charge is what he builds on it. That polemical use is treated on his rabbinic-corruption page; here the point is only the bare origin account, which is the providential-commission form with the miracle stripped away.

Notes

• Cells and inspiration: not attested. Where Irenaeus, the Cohortatio, Cyril of Jerusalem, Epiphanius, and Augustine all carry the separate-cells proof, Chrysostom carries none of it. His retelling is the plainer apologetic form of Tertullian and Josephus — a royal commission and a providential reading, no marvel at the desk. He is a near-contemporary of Rufinus (c. 401) and Augustine (c. 425), who in the same years were making the cells the load-bearing center of the legend; Chrysostom, preaching, does without them.
• "A few years before" understates the gap. The Septuagint Pentateuch was made in the third century BC, well over two hundred years before Christ; Chrysostom's "a few years before the birth of Jesus Christ" (and his "an hundred years or more" in the Matthew homily) is a loose minimum for the rhetorical point — the Seventy long predate Christ — not a precise date.
• The spurious "Hexaemeron" attribution — and the Simeon legend Chrysostom does not tell. A later Byzantine tradition credited Chrysostom with the Simeon-the-Just legend — the story that one of the Seventy, identified with the Simeon of Luke 2, balked at Isaiah 7:14's "virgin" and was kept alive for centuries to see the Christ. George Kedrenos (c. 1050) reports it "as the divine Chrysostom says in his Hexaemeron" (de sex diebus opere, "On the Work of the Six Days"). But the attribution is false: Jean Bolland, editing the Acta Sanctorum (1665), noted that the "Hexaemeron" Kedrenos cites is among the many works spuriously fathered on Chrysostom — "it is not read in his genuine works that Simeon was among the seventy-two interpreters."³ Chrysostom's genuine Homily 4 on Genesis (quoted above) does treat "the work of the six days" and does recount the Septuagint's origin — but it has no Simeon. The false ascription, and Bolland's rebuttal of it, are weighed on the Simeon-the-Just argument; on the timeline Chrysostom stands only for the genuine, plainer account.
• Texts used. The origin notice is Homily 4 on Genesis §4 (English from J.-B. Bareille's French of the Greek); the Ptolemy–Serapis retelling is Against the Jews (Homily 1, VI.1, trans. Paul W. Harkins, FOTC 68); the dating argument is Homily 5 on Matthew §4 (trans. NPNF 1.10), quoted in full on his rabbinic-corruption page. All are from his Antioch and Constantinople preaching, c. 386–407; the timeline anchors him at c. 407, between Rufinus (c. 401) and Augustine (c. 425).

Sources