The Murderous History of Bible Translations

by Harry Freedman

  Demetrius summoned the Jews who lived in Alexandria and, despite its great length, read the translation to them. It must have taken hours. The crowd, whom we had been given to understand had no knowledge of Hebrew, gave an ovation to the translators and to Demetrius, voicing their uncritical approval of the new work. Their enthusiasm was so great that all agreed this magnificent translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek should become an official, unalterable version. Great curses would descend upon anyone who dared tamper with it.

  Aristeas’s letter is considered by most scholars to be a fanciful account of how the Bible was translated into Greek.8 It’s not just that it contains fantastical elements like the recurring number seventy-two. It is also historically inaccurate; Aristeas has Demetrius working for Ptolemy II whereas he actually worked for his father, Ptolemy I. Indeed, Demetrius was no friend of Ptolemy II. He had badly miscalculated when caught up in a political intrigue that had sought to prevent Ptolemy’s accession to the throne. Demetrius backed the wrong side, the intrigue failed and one of Ptolemy II’s first acts when crowned king was to arrange for his assassination, poisoned by the bite of an asp.9 It is inconceivable that Demetrius would have been Ptolemy II’s librarian.

  The account written by Aristeas is the first, but not the only source to suggest that a translation of the Hebrew Bible was undertaken in Alexandria in the second or third century BCE. It is possible that the underlying facts are true, that the translation was commissioned, or at least endorsed, by one of the Greek-Egyptian monarchs. The general view today is that the translation was conceived and carried out by a Greek-speaking Jew, for members of the large and flourishing Alexandrian, Jewish community whose grasp of their ancestral Hebrew tongue was diminishing. One reason for this theory is the dialect of Greek used in the translation. Known as koine, it is similar to that found in other Egyptian documents from the same period. The translation even contains a few Egyptian words. All this suggests that the translation was made by Greek-speaking Egyptians. Not by Hebrew-speaking foreigners from Jerusalem.10

  The legend was popular in its day. It crops up a second time in the writings of Philo,11 a Jewish philosopher who lived in Alexandria from about 25 BCE to 50 CE. Aristeas had neglected to mention which books of the Hebrew Bible had been translated in Alexandria. But Philo tells us. He declares that the translation commissioned by Ptolemy was just the first part of the Hebrew Bible; the Five Books of Moses, known in Greek as the Pentateuch and in the language of the Jews as the Torah. Modern scholars agree. Although the translation was eventually expanded to include the whole Hebrew Bible, the style in which the Pentateuch has been translated is noticeably different from, and considerably earlier than, that of the later books.12

  Philo doesn’t agree with every detail of Aristeas’s account. He still believes that the translation was commissioned by Ptolemy II and he relates the arrival of envoys from Jerusalem, the lavish banquet and the symposium instigated by the king.13 He doesn’t mention Demetrius, and there is no reference to the ancient tribes of Israel, nor the recurring number seventy-two. However he does add new information. Whereas Aristeas has his seventy-two translators collaborating to produce the best possible version, Philo’s delegates (he doesn’t tell us how many there were) each produce their own version. And every version they produce is identical, each translation corresponds with the other, word for word, ‘as if guided by an unseen prompter’.14 In Philo’s version a miracle seems to have taken place.

  The miracle that Philo hints at becomes more pronounced as the legend develops over the coming centuries. In later versions, the translators do not simply produce identical Greek versions of the Pentateuch; they do so despite being locked into separate cells, unable to communicate with each other. Towards the end of the second century, the Church Father, Irenaeus of Lyons, wrote that Ptolemy ‘wishing to test (the translators) individually, and fearing lest they might perchance, by taking counsel together, conceal the truth in the Scriptures . . . separated them from each other’.15 In making this statement, Irenaeus is not just naively alerting us to a slightly different version of the legend that he has heard. For reasons which will become clear, he wants to emphasize the miraculous, ineffable nature of this translation, and to stress that even if the translators had wanted to ‘conceal the truth’ they were not able to do so. In Irenaeus’s eyes, the miracle stopped the Jewish translators from falsifying the Bible, from eliminating prophesies which he believed foretold the coming of Jesus. The legend was evolving into polemic. And the translated Bible was on the brink of its first foray into religious politics.

  Jewish sources of the same period agree that the translators, although separated, produced identical works. Their reasons for stressing this are different. The Jews were not afraid that the translators might conceal doctrinal truths. Their concern was about possible ambiguities, ways of translating the text that might give rise to theological problems. What was miraculous for the Jews was that in the version the translators produced, passages which were potentially ambiguous or misleading had been elucidated. The Talmud cites several amendments to verses which might otherwise have been misunderstood. One occurs in the Creation narrative when, in the Hebrew text, God states ‘Let us make man in our image.’16 This could suggest that God collaborated with others in the world’s creation. The Jewish sources tell us that the translators all came up with the far more straightforward, ‘I shall make man in an image.’ Similarly, in the account of the Tower of Babel, God’s ‘We will go down and confuse their speech’17 becomes ‘I will go down . . .’18

  By the second century CE, the legend that Aristeas composed had become a miraculous fable. It told of a team of scholars, each shut away incommunicado in his own cell, each working on his own, and each translating the Five Books of Moses in identical fashion. The legend had become a miracle and the Greek translation of the Bible was turning into a battleground.

  Although both the Jewish and Christian sources affirmed the miraculous nature of the translation, they did so for very different reasons. Irenaeus had said that it was so the Jewish translators couldn’t collude and falsify the Bible. The Jewish sources claimed it was to eliminate the possibility of people reading ideas into the Hebrew text that weren’t there. It was these two different ways of interpreting the legend and its miracle which generated the first Bible translation controversy. It would be the first of many, and they would grow more violent with time.

  The Septuagint Controversies

  Four hundred years or more after the original translation, the Greek Bible was complete. The Alexandrian translation of the Pentateuch had been supplemented by Greek renditions of the other Old Testament books. The translation had also acquired a name. The versions of the legend now in circulation had deducted a couple of translators from Aristeas’s mythical seventy-two, and the work had become known as the Septuagint, meaning seventy in Latin.

  The Septuagint’s impact on history has been colossal. It is far more than just an ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament. Alexander the Great’s conquests had led to the dialect of Greek known as koine becoming the language of trade, law and culture throughout the ancient Middle East and Asia Minor. The completion of the Septuagint meant that, for the first time, everybody in the Greek-speaking world had access to the foundational texts both of the Jews and of the new, rapidly expanding Christian faith, which were also circulating in Greek. The Septuagint brought Hebrew ideas and beliefs to the attention of the world.19 It explained the background to Christianity. It even introduced the one word which has probably changed the course of human history more than any other. It gave the world the word Christ, which is Greek for Messiah. And by extension, the terms Christian and Christianity.20 Without the Septuagint, London and Rome would still be heathen and the scriptures would be no better known than the Egyptian Book of the Dead.21

  Aristeas’s account of how the Septuagint came into being is nothing more than a fable. But it is still of value. Even if there were not six men from each of twel
ve tribes, even if the delegation didn’t consist of seventy-two envoys, even if there was no delegation from Jerusalem at all, the legend nevertheless provides several important pieces of information. It establishes the probability that the earliest translation of the Bible was made in Alexandria. It implies that this particular translation of the Bible was of such cultural significance that, even a century later, Aristeas felt it worthy of glorification.22 Perhaps most importantly, for the future history of the translated Bible, it tells us that, even in the earliest days, there were important differences between the Hebrew and Greek versions.23 It was these differences which the account of the miracle attempted to explain away.

  By the second century the details of the miracle were no longer able to account for all the differences between the Hebrew and Greek texts. The Septuagint’s popularity meant that there were now many copies in existence. They had all been written by hand; this was long before the invention of printing. But scribes can, and do, make mistakes. When a manuscript is copied, so are its errors. And the copying scribe may well introduce further errors of his own. So the inaccuracies multiply. Once the manuscript leaves the scriptorium it falls upon the mercy of assiduous scholars, who may decide to erase and replace something they suspect is incorrect or with which they disagree. Other readers may scribble notes in the margin, which the next copyist can easily mistake for the main body of text. It is not hard to see how hand-written documents, once they have been copied a few times, can end up very different from the original.

  Like all frequently copied manuscripts, the Septuagint went through this process of continual corruption. The result was that the Hebrew and Greek bibles diverged ever more widely from each other. The Jews, who had access to the Hebrew text as well as the Greek version, would have spotted the differences sooner; the Christians, who in the main didn’t speak Hebrew, had no base text to assess their manuscripts against. It was the differences between the two versions that caused the first round of Septuagint controversies.

  For the Jews the Septuagint would always be a translation, an adjunct to the Hebrew original. To the emerging Church, however, the Septuagint represented the essential text of the Old Testament. It was written in a familiar tongue, the very language in which the New Testament had been transcribed. It was natural for the Church to vest the same degree of sanctity in the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament, as they did in the New.

  Significantly, the church’s adoption of the Septuagint underlined the essential difference, in those early days, between Christianity and the Jewish faith out of which it had been born. Judaism had become an inward-looking religion, demoralized by centuries of Roman occupation, declining economic fortunes and ongoing emigration. Paul’s Christianity, in contrast, had a universal ambition; it aspired to bring salvation to the world. It made absolute sense for Christianity to reject the old representation of Scripture, written in the obscure, provincial tongue that only the Jews spoke, and to proclaim the universality of the miraculous new revelation that was the Septuagint, the eternal Bible reincarnated into a language that everyone understood. Throughout history the translated Bible has found itself tangled up in the politics of religion.

  One theological dispute in particular cemented the Jews’ rejection of the Septuagint and confirmed its authoritative status within the Church. It concerned Isaiah’s prophecy about the birth of a child to be named Immanuel.24 Isaiah had described the child’s mother using a Hebrew word, almah, which is usually translated as ‘young woman’. The Septuagint translated it as parthenos, or ‘virgin’.25 Of course, the Septuagint, written two or three hundred years before Jesus’s birth was completely oblivious to the implications of its choice of word. Nevertheless, the apostle Matthew took it as proof that Isaiah had foreseen that a virgin would give birth and that the child she bore would turn out to be the Messiah.26 Matthew, when he quotes this prophecy from Isaiah, delivers the Septuagint translation, not the original Hebrew. The Jewish religious leaders, who paid little attention to the Septuagint, knew nothing of this. until they were confronted by Christians seeking to prove that the Hebrew Bible foretold the birth of Jesus. The Septuagint’s translation of Isaiah’s prophecy led to possibly the most contentious of all interpretative disputes between Christianity and Judaism, one which still reverberates today.

  Challenging the Septuagint

  From the second century onwards both Jews and Christians became increasingly aware of the discrepancies between the Septuagint and the Hebrew text. Even though each faith regarded its own version as sacred, nobody denied that the Old Testament had originally been written in Hebrew. The Jewish Bible was rooted in antiquity; in debates over authenticity the Septuagint was naturally at a disadvantage. When the Jews challenged its accuracy, the Church robustly rose to its defence. When defence proved ineffective, they went on the attack.

  Leading the charge was the Church father Justin. Writing a century or so after Jesus, Justin was the first to claim the superiority of the Septuagint over the Hebrew version.27 In his Dialogue with Trypho, a polemical work in which he disputes Christianity with an imaginary Jewish opponent,28 Justin argues that the discrepancies between the two versions were the result of the Jews doctoring the Hebrew text. He would place no reliance, he insisted, on Trypho’s teachers, who had ‘taken away many Scriptures from the translations effected by those seventy elders who were with Ptolemy’.29 Justin’s attack was a seminal moment, the first occasion in which the still-developing church expressly distanced itself from the Hebrew Old Testament. Justin’s argument set a precedent for theologians of the early church to maintain that, in all cases of conflict with the Hebrew, it was the Septuagint that ought to be followed.30

  Justin was aiming far higher than simply making a point about the mechanics of textual transmission. His argument was that the Jews had ‘taken away’ scriptures because they had deliberately set out to refute Christianity. Denying the accuracy of the Septuagint was, in Justin’s eyes, a Jewish tactic to undermine Christian belief. As far as he was concerned, the Septuagint was the authentic translation of the original Bible, while the Hebrew version that the Jews of his day were using had been tampered with, so as to erase evidence that supported the Christian view. The ‘miracle’ which resulted in all seventy translators producing identical versions restored the Bible to its primitive state, eliminating all the errors and falsifications that, so he claimed, the Jews had inserted into the Hebrew text. Justin was so persuaded of this view that he even asserted that when he was in Alexandria he saw the very cells in which the translators carried out their work.31

  The Jews rejected Justin’s allegations, but they too believed the legend of the miracle. Nevertheless, as their theological disputes with Christianity became more strident, their attitude towards the alleged events in Alexandria changed. Jewish sources began to describe the moment that the Septuagint was completed as an occurrence as tragic ‘as the day the golden calf was made’,32 a misfortune which caused darkness to fall upon the earth for three days.33 This rejection of a translation that had in all likelihood been carried out for Jews, by Jews, was, at least in some part, the consequence of what the twentieth-century Anglican theologian C. F. D. Moule called ‘one of the most remarkable takeover bids in history’.34 When Christianity adopted the Jewish Septuagint as the authoritative text of the Old Testament, the Jews turned their backs on it.

  Abandoning the Septuagint was not an option for the many Jews who were unable to read the Hebrew Bible. Greece may have ceased to be a world power but the Greek language was still widely spoken across the Eastern Roman Empire. A Greek Bible was still needed and, if the Septuagint was not up to the task, an alternative would have to be composed, one which reflected more accurately the meaning of the Hebrew text. During the second century, at least three, maybe more, of these works were made.35

  The best known of these new translations, although the least well preserved, was made by Aquila. We know very little about him; he lived during the first or second century and some o
f the early Jewish sources describe him as a convert to Judaism. His name in Hebrew is Aquilas, which frequently led him to become confused with the similar-sounding Onkelos, another Jewish convert who also translated the Bible, but into Aramaic. The early Jewish sources tended to muddle the two of them up, sometimes treating them as the same person, sometimes not.36 The Christian sources are no more helpful; they either assume that Aquila was a relative of the emperor Hadrian or they equate him with the Aquila in the Acts of the Apostles who was married to Priscilla. There doesn’t seem to be any basis for either of these views.

  Aquila set out to translate the Hebrew text into Greek as literally as he could. When he finished his translation he made a revised version, to improve its accuracy.37 He’d intended it as a simple Greek alternative to the Septuagint, an everyday Bible for Greek-speaking Jews, but in the febrile religious environment which marked the divergence of Christianity from Judaism, an alternative to the Septuagint could be nothing other than controversial. Aquila’s translation offered too easy a way to spot errors in the Septuagint, to give its Jewish critics an opportunity to condemn the accuracy and validity of the Alexandrian text. It became even more controversial in the fourth century when the Christian theologian and Bible commentator Jerome harnessed it to argue for the supremacy of the Hebrew text.38

  The second of the three translations was attributed to a man with the relatively common name of Symmachus. Again, his biography is obscure. One theory is that he was based in Caesarea, a cosmopolitan, Roman garrison town on the Mediterranean coast of Israel. The city was populated by Christians, Samaritans and a hellenized Jewish community. Alison Salvesen, in a rigorous and thorough study of the work of this man of whom we know virtually nothing, suggests that his translation may have been made for the benefit of the Greek-speaking Jewish community of that city.39