...I'm sorry, what? Do you think that every single Biblical scholar just decided to make up the idea of a Greek version of the Old Testament with a greater number of books than the much later Masoretic recension? The existence, composition and dating of the Septuagint is a settled matter among scholars, regardless of denomination or even religion.
Septuagint - Wikipedia
The date of the 3rd century BCE is supported for the Torah translation by a number of factors including the Greek being representative of early
Koine Greek, citations beginning as early as the 2nd century BCE, and early
manuscripts datable to the 2nd century.
[16]
After the Torah, other books were translated over the next two to three centuries. It is not altogether clear which was translated when or where; some may even have been translated twice into different versions and then revised.
[17] The quality and style of the different translators also varied considerably from book to book from a
literal translation to
paraphrasing to an interpretative style.
The translation process of the Septuagint itself and from the Septuagint into other versions can be broken down into several distinct stages, during which the social milieu of the translators shifted from
Hellenistic Judaism to
Early Christianity. The translation of the Septuagint itself began in the 3rd century BCE and was completed by 132 BCE
[18][19] initially in
Alexandria but in time elsewhere as well.
[8] The Septuagint is the basis for the
Old Latin,
Slavonic,
Syriac, Old
Armenian, Old
Georgian, and
Coptic versions of the Christian
Old Testament.
[20]
Additionally, the oldest Christian Bibles that we have contain the books of the New Testament in the Septuagint ordering. For example, check out the Codex Sinaiticus, written in the mid-300's AD:
Codex Sinaiticus - See The Manuscript | Genesis |
