HistoricalChristian.Faith

Justin Martyr on the Origin of the Septuagint

Dates: c. AD 155 · Wikipedia
Summary: The first Christian retelling of the origin story. In the First Apology (ch. 31) Justin gives the legend in its barest Christian form: Ptolemy, building his library, sends for the books of "the prophets," receives them in Hebrew, and has them rendered into Greek. He preserves the royal-commission frame and nothing more — no seventy-two elders, no separate cells, no inspiration miracle — and in fact garbles the high priest into "Herod… king of the Jews." Yet he turns the story to a new, Christian purpose: the point is that the Hebrew prophecies of Christ have been publicly available in Greek "until now," so the pagan reader can check them. (In his later Dialogue with Trypho Justin shows he knows the fuller tradition — "your seventy elders that were with Ptolemy" — making the thinness of the Apology's version the more telling.)

Claims & evidence

Ptolemy's library, the books of the prophets, and a Greek translation that "remained… until now"

"And when Ptolemy king of Egypt formed a library, and endeavoured to collect the writings of all men, he heard also of these prophets, and sent to Herod, who was at that time king of the Jews, requesting that the books of the prophets be sent to him. And Herod the king did indeed send them, written, as they were, in the foresaid Hebrew language. And when their contents were found to be unintelligible to the Egyptians, he again sent and requested that men be commissioned to translate them into the Greek language. And when this was done, the books remained with the Egyptians, where they are until now."

— First Apology, ch. 31, source. The familiar frame is here — a book-collecting Ptolemy, a request to Judea, the Hebrew originals, the rendering into Greek — but stripped to its bones. There is no Demetrius, no Eleazar, no count of translators, no festival, no marvel. Justin's interest is not the mechanics of the translation but its apologetic payoff: the prophetic books, which (he has just argued) foretold Christ "before He appeared," have long lain open in Greek among the Egyptians, so the emperor can verify the prophecies for himself.

Notes

• Cells: absent. Inspiration: absent. Like Aristeas and Josephus before him, Justin has no separate chambers and no miracle of word-for-word identical renderings; the translators are simply "commissioned." Writing c. AD 155, he is the last major witness before the inspiration-marvel enters the Christian tradition with Irenaeus (c. AD 175) and is made explicit (the cells, "we have seen the traces") in the Cohortatio ad Graecos. His plainness marks where the timeline's growth has not yet happened.
• Thinner, but re-aimed. In two respects Justin's version is actually looser than the sources he follows: he names no seventy-two elders, and he garbles the Jewish high priest (the Letter of Aristeas' Eleazar) into "Herod… king of the Jews," an anachronism of nearly two centuries, since the Herods belong to the first century BC, long after Ptolemy II. But he also widens the scope from the Law to "the prophets," because his concern is the messianic prophecies — the strand that will become the corruption charge. So the same story serves a new master: not "the Law in Greek for the library," but "the prophecies of Christ, in Greek, on public record."
• He knows the fuller form. The Apology's bareness is not ignorance: a decade or so later, in the Dialogue with Trypho (c. AD 165), Justin appeals repeatedly to "your seventy elders that were with Ptolemy the king of the Egyptians" and treats their translation as an authoritative standard the Jewish teachers have since betrayed. There the same legend underwrites the charge that the synagogue corrupted the text — the doctrine for which the inspired-Septuagint premise, traced on this page, is the necessary backdrop.