“Christianization” of the Septuagint, A Jewish Legacy from Alexandria?

Abstract

The Septuagint (hereafter LXX) is generally recognized as a translation that provides textual and theological sources for understanding the New Testament (NT) and the theology of the early church. Yet, as Hengel (2002:19) emphasizes, for many readers or interpreters of Scripture, the study of the LXX remains a terra incognita that is in fact crucial for probing the theological and literary context of the New Testament and the early church (Jobes and Silva 2000:23; McLay 2003:137–170). Quotations and implicit allusions from the Old Testament in the NT often display a text that aligns more closely with the LXX than with the Hebrew text. This reality inevitably raises fundamental questions, not only in terms of translation but also interpretation and theology: To what extent did the NT writers and the early church make use of the LXX to support their theological agenda? Given that the LXX was a Jewish translation produced in the diaspora of Alexandria, one must ask: What influence did the use of this source text exert on the theological development of the early church? Has the LXX, in fact, undergone a process of “Christianization”—whether in the sense of being “appropriated” to serve the proclamation of the church or in the sense of being “altered” to support the church’s theological agenda? And how did Judaism and Christianity position themselves in the polemics concerning the alleged falsification of Scripture?