In the first century BCE, Greek-speaking Jews treasured their Scriptures in translation. Philo celebrated the translation’s origin each year with a festival on the island of Pharos, and the diaspora read, prayed, and studied from it. Within two centuries the same text had become a battlefield. Christians cited it against rabbinic readings, the rabbis abandoned it, and new Greek versions appeared to take its place. This final episode follows that rupture through the revisions, the scholars, and the great parchment codices it produced, from Justin Martyr’s argument with Trypho to the manuscripts that carried the Old Greek into the present.
Literary Backgrounds: Greek and Ancient Near Eastern Connections
Origen of Caesarea compiled the Hexapla between 230 and 240 CE, a work that filled roughly 6,000 parchment pages. It arranged the Old Testament in six parallel columns: the Hebrew text in square script, a Greek transliteration of the Hebrew, Aquila, Symmachus, the Old Greek, and Theodotion. The Hebrew of the ancient Near East stood first on every page, and every Greek witness answered to it. In the fifth column Origen applied critical symbols that Alexandrian scholars had developed for editing Homer. An asterisk marked words present in the Hebrew but missing from the Old Greek, and Origen usually supplied them from Theodotion. An obelus marked Greek words that had no Hebrew counterpart. A method sharpened on the epics of Greece now served the oracles of God.
The Jewish revisers each wrote in a distinct literary voice. The kaige movement, active from the late first century BCE into the first century CE, reworked the Old Greek toward the proto-Masoretic Hebrew and rendered the particle וְגַם with καί γε. Aquila of Sinope, a proselyte and disciple of Rabbi Akiva, produced a version around 125 CE so tied to Hebrew grammar that it bent Greek syntax, translating the object marker אֵת with σύν. Symmachus took the opposite road in the late second century and wrote clear, elegant Koine that carried the sense of the Hebrew into natural prose. Theodotion revised the existing Old Greek against the Hebrew, and his Daniel won such favor for its clarity that it replaced the Old Greek Daniel in most Christian Bibles.
Theological and Ethical Analysis
Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho, written around 160 CE, records the quarrel in the words of the combatants. Justin charges Jewish scholars with removing passages from their Scriptures that pointed to Christ. Trypho answers that Christian writers lean on inaccurate Greek translations that altered the original Hebrew. Both men understood that a translation carries theology, and both treated the wording of Scripture as a matter of conscience. The Greek text that Jews once used in liturgy and law now served Christian argument, and that shift moved Jewish scholars to produce versions tied closely to the standardized Hebrew.
Origen answered the confusion with transparency. He placed every competing witness side by side and marked each addition and deletion so that any reader could inspect the evidence. That labor reflects a sound ethic for handling God’s word: show the reader what the text says and where the witnesses differ. Time added an irony. Scribes who copied the fifth column often dropped Origen’s symbols and kept the added text, and the resulting Hexaplaric text became a mixed, expanded Greek that hid the shorter Old Greek readings Origen had meant to preserve. Careless copying can undo careful scholarship, and the church still carries that warning.
Old Testament Analysis and Critique
Isaiah 7:14 stood at the center of the dispute. The Hebrew reads עַלְמָה, a young woman, and the Old Greek translators rendered it παρθένος, a virgin. Aquila and Symmachus replaced that word with νεᾶνις, a young woman, which fits the narrower literal range of the Hebrew and removes the Greek text’s support for the Christian claim. The prophet introduces the verse with a promise that the Lord Himself will give a sign, and a sign from the Lord invites wonder. The Alexandrian translators chose παρθένος generations before any Christian controversy existed, and the Jewish revisers chose νεᾶνις after the controversy had begun.
The Old Testament itself forbids both the careless addition and the convenient subtraction. Moses commands Israel to add nothing to the word and to take nothing from it (Deuteronomy 4:2), and Isaiah declares that the word of our God stands forever (Isaiah 40:8). Those texts judge every community that reshapes Scripture to win an argument. The revisions of the Three aimed at fidelity to the Hebrew, yet they pushed aside a translation that earlier generations of Jews had honored in synagogue and festival. A reader who loves the Old Testament owes loyalty to the whole inherited witness and no single school’s preference.
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