Chapter 13

The Replacement Translations — Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion

In the last chapter, we looked at the dramatic events of the second century AD — how Rabbi Akiba and the rabbinic establishment launched what can only be described as a coordinated campaign against the Septuagint. We saw how the destruction of the Temple in AD 70, and then the catastrophic Bar Kokhba revolt of AD 132–135, left the Pharisaic rabbis as the sole surviving Jewish authority. With that monopoly of power came the ability — and the motivation — to reshape the Jewish Scriptures in ways that would distance Judaism from the rapidly growing Christian movement. As we argued in Chapter 12, the Hebrew text itself was altered in key passages, particularly Messianic prophecies that Christians were using to demonstrate that Jesus was the promised Christ.

But altering the Hebrew text was only half the battle. There was a massive problem the rabbis still had to deal with: the Septuagint. This Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures had become the Bible of the early church. It was the Bible that Paul quoted. It was the Bible that the Gospel writers used. It was the Bible that was read in churches from Jerusalem to Rome, from Antioch to Alexandria. And worst of all — from the rabbinic point of view — it was a Greek translation that had been made before the rabbinic alterations to the Hebrew. That means the Septuagint preserved older readings that the rabbis had changed. Every time a Christian opened the Septuagint and read a Messianic prophecy in its original, unaltered form, the rabbinic project was undermined.

So what did the rabbis do? They commissioned entirely new Greek translations — translations that would be based on the altered Hebrew text, not on the old Hebrew text that stood behind the Septuagint. In the space of roughly one generation, three new Greek translations appeared: the translation of Aquila, the translation of Symmachus, and the revision of Theodotion. Each of these was designed, in its own way, to replace the Septuagint in Jewish communities throughout the Greek-speaking world.

This chapter tells the story of these replacement translations. It is a story that should trouble every Christian who cares about the integrity of the biblical text. And it is a story that raises a pointed question: Why would the Jewish community need three entirely new Greek translations of the Bible within a single generation if the Septuagint was perfectly adequate? The answer, I believe, is clear — and it provides some of the strongest evidence that the campaign against the Septuagint was deliberate, coordinated, and theologically motivated.

The Historical Context: Why New Translations Were Needed

To understand why the replacement translations appeared, we need to recall the situation on the ground in the mid-second century AD. As we discussed in Chapter 12, the Septuagint had been the Bible of Greek-speaking Jews for over three hundred years. It was produced in Alexandria beginning around 282 BC, and it quickly spread throughout the Jewish Diaspora — the millions of Jews who lived outside the land of Israel, scattered across the Roman Empire and beyond. For these Jews, Greek was their everyday language. Hebrew had become a scholarly and liturgical language, but Greek was the language they spoke at home, at work, and in the synagogue. The Septuagint was how they heard God's Word.

But by the mid-second century, something had changed. The Septuagint had become the Christians' Bible. This was not a minor irritation for the rabbinic leadership — it was a crisis. The early Christians were using the Septuagint to devastating effect in their debates with Jews. They pointed to Isaiah 7:14, where the LXX used the word parthenos (παρθένος, "virgin"), to argue that Jesus' virgin birth had been prophesied centuries before. They quoted Psalm 16 from the LXX to argue for the resurrection. They cited Deuteronomy 32:43 in its longer LXX form — "Let all God's angels worship him" — to demonstrate the deity of the Messiah (as the author of Hebrews does in Hebrews 1:6; see Chapter 8 for the full treatment of this passage). Passage after passage, the Septuagint's wording supported Christian claims more powerfully than the emerging proto-Masoretic Hebrew text.

The rabbinic establishment faced a dilemma. They had already altered the Hebrew text in key places, as we argued in Chapter 12. But Jews in the Diaspora were still reading the old Greek text — the Septuagint — which preserved the original, unaltered readings. The solution was obvious: produce new Greek translations that would reflect the revised Hebrew. If the synagogues of the Diaspora could be supplied with new Greek Bibles that matched the rabbis' Hebrew text, the Septuagint could be sidelined. The old readings that the Christians loved so much would simply vanish from the Jewish Greek Bible.

Consider an analogy. Imagine that a major religious community today produced three competing English translations of the Bible within a span of about fifty years. And imagine that each of these translations consistently changed the same passages in the same direction — always weakening the same doctrines, always altering the same prophecies, always moving the text away from one particular interpretation and toward another. We would rightly suspect that something more than independent scholarly judgment was at work. We would suspect a coordinated campaign. That is precisely the situation we face with Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion.

Aquila: The Student of Rabbi Akiba

The first and most important of the replacement translations was produced by a man named Aquila, around AD 130. Aquila's story is fascinating — and deeply revealing. According to the fourth-century church father Epiphanius, Aquila was originally a Gentile from Sinope in Pontus (modern-day Turkey). He was a relative of the Roman emperor Hadrian and had been sent to Jerusalem to oversee a construction project — possibly related to Hadrian's rebuilding of Jerusalem as the pagan city Aelia Capitolina. While in Jerusalem, Aquila came into contact with Christianity and was baptized. But the early Christians eventually expelled him from their fellowship because he refused to give up the practice of astrology. After his expulsion, Aquila converted to Judaism — and here is the critical detail — he became a student of Rabbi Akiba himself.¹

Let that sink in for a moment. Aquila was not just any Jewish translator. He was a member of Akiba's inner circle — the very circle that this book argues was responsible for the deliberate alteration of the Hebrew text. As we discussed in Chapter 12, Akiba was the most powerful and influential rabbi of his generation, the driving force behind the standardization of the rabbinic Hebrew text, and a man with strong theological motivations for undermining the Septuagint. Aquila was his student, his protégé, his instrument.

Aquila's translation philosophy tells us everything we need to know about his purpose. His approach was hyper-literal — slavishly following the Hebrew word order and syntax to a degree that often produced barely readable Greek. The early Christians noticed this immediately. Jerome, writing centuries later, commented that Aquila's translation was so woodenly literal that it was practically incomprehensible to native Greek speakers.² Lanier and Ross describe how Aquila went so far as to use the Greek preposition syn ("with") to represent the Hebrew direct object particle 'et (את) — a marker that does not actually need to be translated at all. The result was Greek that sounded bizarre and unnatural, even by the standards of translation Greek.³

Why would anyone produce a translation this awkward? The answer lies in Aquila's methodology. His goal was not readability. His goal was to make the Greek text absolutely subservient to the Hebrew — to ensure that every single Hebrew word, particle, and grammatical feature was reflected in the Greek. On the surface, this sounds like a commitment to accuracy. But think about what "accuracy to the Hebrew" meant in Aquila's context. The "Hebrew" to which he was being slavishly precise was the very text that had been revised by his teacher Akiba. His "precision" was precision to an altered text. The hyper-literal approach served a double purpose: it gave the translation an air of scholarly rigor and "exactness" (Aquila actually used the Greek word akribeia, ἀκρίβεια, meaning "precision" or "exactness," as his guiding principle), while simultaneously ensuring that every rabbinic alteration to the Hebrew was faithfully carried over into the new Greek text.⁴

Aquila's Most Significant Change: Isaiah 7:14

The single most famous — and most theologically significant — change that Aquila made was in Isaiah 7:14. As we discussed in depth in Chapter 7, the original Septuagint translators had rendered the Hebrew word almah (עַלְמָה) with the Greek word parthenos (παρθένος), meaning "virgin." This translation was made around the second century BC — centuries before the birth of Christ — and reflects the pre-Christian Jewish understanding that Isaiah 7:14 prophesied a miraculous virgin birth. Matthew's Gospel explicitly quotes this verse in its LXX form to describe Mary's conception of Jesus: "Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel" (Matthew 1:23, ESV).

Aquila replaced parthenos with neanis (νεᾶνις), which simply means "young woman" — with no connotation of virginity whatsoever. This was not a minor stylistic preference. It was a theologically motivated alteration designed to undermine the Christian doctrine of the virgin birth. If the Greek Old Testament read "young woman" instead of "virgin," the Christian argument from Isaiah 7:14 collapsed — or at least, that was the hope.

The early church fathers recognized exactly what was happening. Irenaeus, writing around AD 180, explicitly called out Aquila and Theodotion by name for this change. In Against Heresies 3.21.1, Irenaeus defended the Septuagint's use of parthenos and accused the newer translators of deliberately altering the text to oppose the Christian faith. He argued that the seventy translators who produced the original LXX had gotten it right — they had translated under the guidance of the Holy Spirit — and that Aquila and Theodotion had produced corrupted translations to serve the purposes of those who denied that Jesus was the Christ.⁵

Justin Martyr, writing even earlier (around AD 155–160), made similar accusations. In his Dialogue with Trypho, Justin engaged in extended debate with a Jewish interlocutor about the meaning of Isaiah 7:14. Justin defended the reading parthenos and attacked the proposed rendering "young woman" as a deliberate perversion of the text. In chapters 67–68 and 71 of the Dialogue, Justin accused the Jewish teachers of his day of removing and altering passages from the Scriptures to undermine Christian claims. He noted that the new translations being circulated in the synagogues reflected these changes.⁶

It is worth emphasizing the timing here. Justin Martyr wrote his Dialogue around AD 155–160 — perhaps only twenty years after Aquila completed his translation. Justin was not commenting on ancient history. He was commenting on what he himself had observed happening in real time. He had visited synagogues and seen the new texts. He had debated with Jews who were using the new translations. His testimony is that of a firsthand witness.

S. Douglas Woodward draws attention to Justin's remarkable observations. Justin noted that the Jews had already changed the text in the synagogues he visited, "in order to twist the scripture to confound Christians who sought to prove Jesus was the Christ by citing numerous Messianic OT passages." Justin's Dialogue was written within two decades of the publication of Aquila's new translation. As Woodward observes, "Fake news travels fast — even in the ancient world which didn't have an Internet."⁷

Aquila's Broader Impact

Isaiah 7:14 was not the only passage Aquila changed, of course. His hyper-literal methodology ensured that every difference between the LXX and the proto-Masoretic Text was resolved in favor of the Hebrew — meaning, in favor of the text that had already been altered by the rabbis. Wherever the Septuagint contained a longer reading (a "plus" not found in the Hebrew), Aquila omitted it. Wherever the Septuagint's wording was more explicitly Messianic or universal than the Hebrew, Aquila's wording followed the Hebrew's narrower reading.

Yet despite its awkwardness, Aquila's translation was well received in Jewish communities. Lanier and Ross note that "Aquila's recension is marked by many other distinctive features, some of which intensified the approach that had begun with the Kaige movement," referring to an earlier revisional tradition that had already begun adjusting the Greek text toward the Hebrew. They also observe that even within Aquila's maximally rigid approach, he still managed to include "certain more educated and literary vocabulary and expressions in Greek." Overall, "Aquila's work was well received among the Jewish community and remained popular for many centuries (particularly as Hebrew fell out of use)."⁸

This is a crucial point. Aquila's translation became the standard Greek Bible for the Jewish community for centuries. The Septuagint was gradually abandoned by Jews — not because it was a poor translation, but because it had become the Christian Bible. Emperor Justinian, in his decree of AD 533, mandated the Septuagint as the authorized version for Christian use, but he also gave a nod to Aquila's translation, granting permission for its use as well.⁹ The replacement had been largely successful.

Symmachus: The Elegant Alternative

The second replacement translation was produced by Symmachus, probably in the late second or early third century AD (roughly AD 170–200). If Aquila's translation was rigid and awkward, Symmachus's was the opposite — elegant, literary, and readable. But despite the difference in style, the theological result was the same.

The identity of Symmachus is somewhat uncertain. Lanier and Ross note that "although ancient writers attribute this second recension to someone named Symmachus, in reality we know almost nothing about who actually produced it. Most scholars believe the translator was a Jew living in Caesarea of Palestine."¹⁰ Other ancient sources identify Symmachus as an Ebionite — a member of a Jewish-Christian sect that denied the virgin birth and the full deity of Christ. If this identification is correct, it helps explain his theological motivations: Symmachus had doctrinal reasons of his own for wanting to eliminate the parthenos reading from Isaiah 7:14.

Woodward describes Symmachus's approach by noting that while he "stuck to the story as laid out by Aquila (namely, making sure that Akiba's changes remained intact), Symmachus did a much better job translating Hebrew into words Homer would have liked." Woodward cites the assessment of Alison Salvesen, who praised Symmachus's translation as one that "combined the best Biblical Greek style, remarkable clarity, a high degree of accuracy regarding the Hebrew, and the rabbinic exegesis of his days." Woodward is quick to add, however, that Salvesen's enthusiasm "does not include an evaluation of whether the recension represents the authentic Hebrew Vorlage" — that is, whether the Hebrew text Symmachus was translating was itself authentic or had been tampered with.¹¹

This is a vital point that modern scholars often miss. Symmachus's translation was accurate — accurate to the proto-Masoretic Hebrew text. But the question is whether that Hebrew text was itself accurate to the original. If the Hebrew had been altered, as we argue it was, then Symmachus's beautiful, elegant translation was a beautiful, elegant rendering of a corrupted text. The polish of the Greek only made the corruption harder to detect.

Lanier and Ross offer a helpful comparison between Aquila and Symmachus. They note that "the Aquila recension adopted and developed the tendencies of the revisional translation tradition and the Kaige movement," while "the Symmachus recension adopted and developed the tendencies of the Pentateuchal translation tradition." In other words, Aquila pushed the Kaige approach — hyper-literal conformity to the Hebrew — to its extreme. Symmachus, by contrast, followed the older, more idiomatic translation approach used by the original Pentateuch translators, but applied it to the new Hebrew text rather than the old one. The result was a translation that was "characterized by clarity of expression in Greek and accuracy in conveying the Hebrew."¹²

Like Aquila, Symmachus replaced parthenos with neanis in Isaiah 7:14. This consistency across two independent translations is significant. If the change had been merely a matter of scholarly opinion — if some translators simply thought neanis was a better rendering of almah than parthenos — we might expect the two translators to disagree on at least some of the theologically contested passages. But they agree consistently, passage after passage, in the same direction. This is exactly what we would expect if both translators were working from the same altered Hebrew text and under the same theological pressure.

Jerome, the great fourth-century biblical scholar who produced the Latin Vulgate, praised Symmachus for the literary quality of his translation. Jerome noted that Symmachus's work was so clear and well-written that he was able to use it — more than Aquila's literal version — when working on his own Latin translation.¹³ This is ironic. Jerome, whose own decision to translate the Old Testament from the Hebrew rather than the Greek would have enormous consequences for the Western church (as we will discuss in Chapter 27), found Symmachus's translation helpful precisely because it was readable. But the readability masked the fact that Symmachus was translating from a Hebrew text that had been revised to weaken Christological readings.

Lanier and Ross note that "it seems that the Symmachus recension was aimed at a middle-class, native-Greek-speaking audience, one that was looking for Scripture in a different style and perhaps for different purposes than Aquila's version."¹⁴ This makes sense. Aquila's translation appealed to scholars and those who wanted the most precise possible rendering of the Hebrew. Symmachus's translation appealed to ordinary Jews in the pews — people who wanted a Greek Bible they could actually understand. Between them, the two translations covered the full range of the Jewish Greek-speaking market.

There is another important feature of Symmachus's translation that we should not overlook: its theological tendencies. Lanier and Ross observe that "there are also theological elements in the recension that seem to be consistent with certain concerns in Jewish interpretation in Palestine, such as the tendency to translate the phrase 'other gods' more specifically as 'false gods.'"³² This is a subtle but significant change. By inserting the word "false" before "gods," Symmachus was not merely translating — he was interpreting. He was embedding a specific theological judgment into the text itself. This is exactly the kind of tendentious translation that we see throughout the replacement translations: changes that look like innocent improvements in clarity but actually carry theological freight.

The Ebionite identification of Symmachus deserves a bit more attention, because it illuminates the strange bedfellows that the anti-Christian campaign produced. The Ebionites were Jewish Christians who accepted Jesus as the Messiah but denied his virgin birth and his full deity. They insisted on continued observance of the Mosaic law and rejected the authority of the apostle Paul. In other words, the Ebionites occupied a theological no-man's-land between mainstream Judaism and mainstream Christianity. They agreed with the rabbis that Jesus was not born of a virgin (hence their desire to eliminate parthenos from Isaiah 7:14), but they disagreed with the rabbis about whether Jesus was the Messiah at all.

If Symmachus was indeed an Ebionite, his translation represents a fascinating convergence of interests. The rabbinic establishment and the Ebionites had very different reasons for rejecting the parthenos reading in Isaiah 7:14 — the rabbis because they wanted to undermine the Christian claim that Jesus was born of a virgin, the Ebionites because they believed Jesus was the Messiah but denied the virgin birth. Yet both arrived at the same textual conclusion: replace "virgin" with "young woman." This convergence of theological motivations from very different directions helps explain how the replacement translations could be produced by translators with somewhat different religious commitments and yet still arrive at the same textual results in the key passages.

The Loss of Symmachus's Translation

It is worth pausing to note that Symmachus's translation has been almost entirely lost. We possess only fragments — quotations preserved in the margins of later manuscripts, in the writings of the church fathers (particularly Jerome, who valued Symmachus's literary quality), and in the remains of the Hexapla tradition. From a purely literary perspective, this is a significant loss. Scholars who have studied the surviving fragments agree that Symmachus was probably the finest Greek stylist among all the ancient translators of the Hebrew Bible — superior even to the original Septuagint translators in some respects.

But from the perspective of recovering the original text of Scripture, the loss of Symmachus's translation is less important. As Woodward rightly observes, Symmachus — however elegant his Greek — was translating from the proto-Masoretic Text. His translation, no matter how beautiful, would not help us recover the original Hebrew Vorlage from which the Septuagint was translated. It would only tell us what the altered Hebrew said, in very good Greek. A beautiful translation of a corrupted text is still a translation of a corrupted text.

Theodotion: The Subtle Revision

The third replacement translation was produced by Theodotion, probably in the late second century AD. Theodotion's work is in some ways the most interesting of the three — and the most consequential for the history of the Christian Bible.

The identity of Theodotion, like that of Symmachus, is uncertain. According to Irenaeus, Theodotion was a convert to Judaism originally from Ephesus.¹⁵ This is significant: Theodotion, like Aquila, was a convert — a proselyte who came to Judaism rather than being born into it. The pattern of proselytes producing replacement translations is striking. Both Aquila and Theodotion were outsiders who converted to Judaism and then undertook the enormous task of retranslating the Scriptures. One cannot help but wonder whether this was coincidental, or whether the rabbinic establishment specifically recruited converts for this sensitive work — people who would have no sentimental attachment to the old Greek text and who would be eager to prove their loyalty to their new community.

Theodotion's approach was different from both Aquila's and Symmachus's. Where Aquila produced a hyper-literal new translation and Symmachus produced a literary new translation, Theodotion produced what is better described as a revision of the existing Septuagint. He did not start from scratch. Instead, he took the Greek text of the Septuagint and adjusted it — bringing it into closer conformity with the proto-Masoretic Hebrew text at key points while preserving much of the Septuagint's existing language elsewhere.

Lanier and Ross describe his approach as producing "a translation that is closer to the Hebrew than existing texts." They note that "the results were less rigorous than Aquila's work but not quite as stylish and idiomatic as Symmachus." They also observe an important complication: "Theodotion's translation approach has similarities with the Kaige movement — or perhaps should be considered a later part of it."¹⁶ The Kaige movement, which we need to understand briefly, was an earlier revisional tradition that had already begun adjusting the Greek text toward conformity with the Hebrew. Some scholars believe Theodotion continued this tradition; others think he simply worked from a Greek text that already contained Kaige-style revisions.

Timothy Michael Law explains that the earlier Jewish revisers — including the translator of the Minor Prophets Scroll found near the Dead Sea — had already been working "to modify the oldest Greek translations so that they would conform to the tradition behind the Hebrew Bible." The translations of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion are best understood not as isolated projects, but as "only three among many more during this period." Law suggests that "we are probably closer to the truth if we imagine numerous revisions happening all over Palestine and maybe all around the Mediterranean world, wherever Jews were reading the Greek Scriptures."¹⁷

This is an important observation. The replacement translations were not random scholarly projects. They were part of a broader cultural movement within second-century Judaism to bring the Greek Scriptures into line with the emerging standard Hebrew text. And as we have argued, that standard Hebrew text had itself been revised in theologically significant ways.

The Kaige Tradition: A Deeper Background

To fully understand the replacement translations, we need to say a bit more about the Kaige tradition that preceded them. The name "Kaige" (pronounced KAI-geh) comes from a distinctive Greek translation technique: the revisers consistently translated the Hebrew word gam (גם, meaning "also" or "even") with the Greek words kai ge (καί γε), a combination that would have sounded unusual to native Greek speakers. This quirky translation choice became the trademark by which scholars could identify manuscripts that had been revised in this tradition.³³

The Kaige revisers were active primarily in the first century BC and the first century AD — that is, before the replacement translations proper. Their goal was to bring existing Greek translations closer to the standard Hebrew text. The Kaige revision has been detected in Greek manuscripts of Samuel-Kings, Joshua, Judges, and sporadically elsewhere. The Minor Prophets Scroll from Nahal Hever, discovered near the Dead Sea and dating to the first century BC, is one of the earliest and most important witnesses to this revisional tradition.

What is significant about the Kaige tradition for our purposes is that it shows the revisional impulse — the desire to "correct" the Greek toward the Hebrew — had deep roots in pre-Christian Jewish practice. But there is a crucial difference between the early Kaige revisions and the later replacement translations. The early Kaige revisers were working in a period when the Hebrew text was still somewhat fluid — when multiple textual traditions coexisted side by side in the Jewish community. By the second century AD, however, the rabbinic establishment had standardized a single Hebrew text — the proto-MT — and had suppressed the alternatives. The replacement translations of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion were "correcting" the Greek not toward a fluid and variegated Hebrew textual tradition, but toward a single, standardized, and (we argue) deliberately altered Hebrew text.

This is the critical distinction. The Kaige revisers may have been motivated by genuine scholarly concerns about accuracy. The replacement translators — operating in the post-Akiba, post-Bar Kokhba environment of the mid-to-late second century — were working within a religious and political context that had become explicitly anti-Christian. The earlier revisional tradition was co-opted and weaponized for theological purposes.

Theodotion's Daniel: A Case Study in Replacement

The most consequential result of Theodotion's work involved the book of Daniel. This is a remarkable story that deserves careful attention, because it shows just how effective the replacement strategy was — effective enough to infiltrate even the Christian Bible.

The original Septuagint version of Daniel was different from the version that appears in most Greek manuscripts of the Old Testament. At some point in the early centuries of the church, Theodotion's version of Daniel replaced the original Septuagint version of Daniel in virtually all Greek manuscripts. When you pick up a modern edition of the Septuagint today and turn to the book of Daniel, you are almost certainly reading Theodotion's version, not the original Greek translation.¹⁸

How did this happen? We are not entirely sure. But the fact that it happened tells us something disturbing: the early church itself sometimes accepted the replacement translations, perhaps without fully understanding the theological motivations behind them. The Christians who copied Greek manuscripts of the Old Testament found Theodotion's Daniel to be more readable, perhaps more "accurate" (in the sense of closer to the Hebrew text they knew), and gradually replaced the old LXX Daniel with Theodotion's version. The original Septuagint Daniel survived in only a handful of manuscripts.

Woodward describes this situation with characteristic directness. He notes that Theodotion "often resorted to transliteration in order to facilitate similar pronunciation between the languages," that "his recension of the Book of Daniel became the Church's preferred Greek translation of that prophet's work," and that "his Book of Job is one-sixth longer than that of the LXX, suggesting poetic license or more likely, another text at his disposal."¹⁹

There is also a fascinating scholarly puzzle surrounding Theodotion. Some scholars have noticed that "Theodotion" readings appear in texts that predate the historical Theodotion — including in some New Testament passages. This has led to the theory of a "proto-Theodotion": an earlier revision of the Greek text that the later Theodotion either incorporated or built upon. As Woodward notes, citing Jobes and Silva, the Theodotion fragments "have confirmed the view that, for at least parts of the Hebrew Bible, a translation containing elements once attributed to Theodotion, was already in use before NT times."²⁰ If this is correct, it means that the Kaige-Theodotion revisional tradition stretches back even further than the second century AD — suggesting that the process of adjusting the Greek text toward the Hebrew was already underway before the birth of Christ.

The Smoking Gun: Three Translations, One Direction

Now let's step back and look at the big picture. Within a single generation — roughly AD 130 to 200 — the Jewish community produced three entirely new Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible. Each translator had a different approach:

Aquila was hyper-literal, producing Greek that was slavishly tied to the Hebrew. Symmachus was literary and elegant, producing Greek that was beautiful and readable. Theodotion was moderate and revisional, keeping much of the Septuagint's language while adjusting it toward the Hebrew. Three very different translation philosophies. Three very different levels of readability. Three very different audiences.

And yet — and this is the crucial point — all three consistently made the same theologically significant changes. All three replaced parthenos with neanis in Isaiah 7:14. All three followed the proto-Masoretic Text rather than the Septuagint wherever the two differed in Messianic passages. All three omitted the "plus" material found in the LXX but not in the Hebrew. All three narrowed the universal, Gentile-inclusive language of the LXX to the more nationalistic language of the proto-MT.

This consistency is the smoking gun. If these were truly independent scholarly projects, we would expect at least some disagreement on the contested passages. We would expect one translator to side with the LXX in some places and another to side with the Hebrew. But the agreement is virtually uniform. The direction of change is always the same: away from the Septuagint, toward the proto-MT, in every passage that has Christological or theological significance.

The most natural explanation is the simplest one: all three translators were working from the same revised Hebrew text, and all three were operating within the same theological framework — the framework established by Akiba and the rabbinic establishment. Aquila was Akiba's student. Symmachus and Theodotion were operating within the same Jewish community that Akiba had shaped. The replacement translations are not the product of independent scholarly judgment. They are the product of a coordinated campaign.

Fairness to the Other Side: The Scholarly Counterarguments

Now, I want to be honest and fair here. Not all scholars agree with this assessment. There are legitimate alternative explanations, and we should consider them carefully before drawing conclusions.

Some scholars argue that the replacement translations were motivated not by anti-Christian animus but by a genuine desire for greater accuracy. They point out that the Septuagint, whatever its merits, was a translation — and like all translations, it had imperfections. As the Jewish community's knowledge of Hebrew developed (particularly under the influence of the rabbinic schools), some Jews may have felt that the Septuagint's renderings were not precise enough. The new translations, on this view, represent a natural scholarly development: a community becoming more sophisticated in its understanding of the original language and wanting translations that reflected that sophistication.

There is something to this argument. It is true that the Septuagint was not a perfect translation. The quality of the translation varies significantly from book to book — the Pentateuch translation is generally excellent, while some of the later books (like Job, which is significantly shorter in the LXX than in the Hebrew) have more problems. It is entirely plausible that some Jews wanted better Greek translations for legitimate scholarly reasons.

Other scholars point to the broader phenomenon of the Kaige revision, which — as we noted — had begun even before the birth of Christ. The revisional impulse to bring the Greek text closer to the Hebrew was not new in the second century AD. It had been going on for over a century. Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion can be seen as the culmination of this long-running revisional tradition, not as a sudden anti-Christian reaction.

These are fair points, and I take them seriously. But I think they miss the forest for the trees. Yes, the revisional impulse was already present before Christianity. Yes, some of the motivation may have been genuinely scholarly. But the timing, the scope, and the consistency of the second-century replacement translations go far beyond what a purely scholarly impulse would explain.

Consider the timing: all three translations appeared in the period immediately following the Bar Kokhba revolt (AD 132–135), when the split between Judaism and Christianity had become final and irreversible. Consider the scope: three entire Greek translations of the entire Hebrew Bible — an enormous investment of time, money, and scholarly labor — produced within a single generation. Consider the consistency: all three make the same changes in the same passages in the same direction. And consider the personal connections: Aquila was literally a student of Rabbi Akiba, the man we have identified as the chief architect of the rabbinic text.

The scholarly impulse toward accuracy may have been part of the story. But it was not the whole story. The anti-Christian motivation was real, and the patristic witnesses — Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and others who were living through these events — confirm it.

Origen's Hexapla: The Unintended Consequence

The story of the replacement translations does not end with their production. It takes a tragic turn in the third century, when one of the greatest Christian scholars who ever lived inadvertently helped the rabbinic campaign succeed beyond its architects' wildest dreams.

That scholar was Origen of Alexandria (c. AD 185–254). Origen was a towering intellect — one of the most brilliant and prolific writers in the history of the church. He was deeply committed to the Christian faith and to the authority of Scripture. And he was acutely aware of the textual problems we have been discussing. He knew that the Septuagint differed from the Hebrew text in many places. He knew about the replacement translations of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion. And he wanted to do something about it.

Origen's response was to create the most ambitious biblical-scholarly project the ancient world had ever seen: the Hexapla. The word Hexapla (Ἑξαπλᾶ) comes from the Greek word for "sixfold," because the work arranged six different texts in parallel columns on each page:²¹

Column 1: The Hebrew text in Hebrew script
Column 2: The Hebrew text transliterated into Greek letters
Column 3: Aquila's Greek translation
Column 4: Symmachus's Greek translation
Column 5: The Septuagint (with Origen's editorial marks)
Column 6: Theodotion's Greek translation

It was a monumental achievement. The completed work probably filled about forty large volumes and may have consumed six thousand pages.²² Origen spent years working on it, drawing on his training in the famous Alexandrian scholarly tradition. His goal, as he explained in a letter to Julius Africanus, was to equip Christians for debates with Jews: "I make it my endeavor not to be ignorant of their various readings, lest in my controversies with the Jews I should quote to them what is not in their copies."²³

On the surface, this sounds reasonable. Origen wanted Christians to be well-prepared when discussing Scripture with Jewish interlocutors. If the Jewish Greek texts said something different from the Christian Greek text, he wanted Christians to know about it. So far, so good.

But here is where things went terribly wrong. Origen made a fateful decision — a decision that would haunt the Septuagint for centuries. He decided that the Hebrew text of his day — the proto-Masoretic Text — should serve as the standard against which the Septuagint should be measured. Where the Septuagint contained material not found in the Hebrew, Origen marked it with an obelus (÷), indicating that it was suspect — material that should perhaps be deleted. Where the Hebrew contained material not found in the Septuagint, Origen added it from one of the other Greek columns (usually Theodotion) and marked the addition with an asteriskos (※).²⁴

Do you see the problem? Origen assumed that wherever the Septuagint differed from the Hebrew, the Septuagint was the text that needed to be corrected. He treated the Hebrew — the proto-Masoretic Text — as the authoritative standard. But as we have argued throughout this book, the proto-MT was itself a revised text. It had been altered by Akiba and his circle. The "plus" material in the Septuagint — the passages that Origen marked with the obelus as suspect — may in many cases have been original material that had been deleted from the Hebrew. And the "gaps" in the Septuagint that Origen filled from Theodotion may not have been gaps at all — the Septuagint may have faithfully reflected its older Hebrew source text, while the "extra" material in the proto-MT represented additions or alterations.

We now know, from the Dead Sea Scrolls, that Origen's assumption was often wrong. As we discussed in Chapter 4, the Qumran manuscripts frequently support the Septuagint's readings against the proto-MT. Passages that Origen flagged as Septuagint "additions" sometimes turn out to be attested in pre-Masoretic Hebrew manuscripts. The Septuagint was not adding to the text; the proto-MT was subtracting from it. But Origen, living in the third century, did not have access to the Dead Sea Scrolls. He made his decision based on the best evidence available to him — and that decision was disastrously wrong.

Woodward offers a perceptive analysis of Origen's motivations. He notes that Origen's stated reason for the Hexapla was apologetic — to help Christians in debates with Jews. As Origen explained, he wanted to avoid quoting passages from the Septuagint that "are not in their copies" — meaning, passages that the Jewish Greek Bibles no longer contained. But Woodward observes that this rationale was itself a concession to the rabbinic campaign. Instead of defending the Septuagint's readings as original (which, we now know, they often were), Origen took the pragmatic approach of accommodating the Jewish text. He treated the absence of passages from the Jewish text as evidence that the Septuagint had added them, when in reality it was the Jewish text that had removed them.

Law offers an additional perspective on Origen's motivations. Beyond apologetics, Origen may have been driven by his distinctive approach to biblical interpretation. Origen was famous for his allegorical method — his belief that the deeper, spiritual meaning of Scripture could be unlocked by careful attention to textual details. Law observes that Origen "kept to the Septuagint in all respects" and believed that "the Holy Spirit wished the forms of the mysteries to be hidden in the divine scriptures." Despite his desire to "heal" the Greek translation by comparing it to the Hebrew, Origen actually believed that the differences in the Septuagint — even possible "errors" — were there providentially and provided an opportunity for deeper exposition.³⁴ This is a paradox: Origen simultaneously tried to correct the Septuagint toward the Hebrew and believed that the Septuagint's distinctive readings were divinely intended. This internal contradiction may explain why his project was so uneven in its effects and why its consequences were so difficult to control.

As Woodward observes, Origen "decided that the 'standard' Hebrew version (Akiba's proto-MT version) should be the basis for 'correcting' the Greek versions. Why he made this decision is multi-faceted involving bias and bad doctrine." Woodward does not hold back in his assessment: "Typically, scholars attempt to detect the differences in versions. Origen cloaked the differences, obfuscating the original."²⁵

The Hexapla's Devastating Aftermath

The immediate consequence of Origen's project was bad enough. But the long-term consequences were catastrophic.

The Hexapla itself was so massive that it was never copied in its entirety. Only one copy is known to have existed, housed in the library at Caesarea. That copy was eventually destroyed — probably during the Muslim conquest of Palestine in the seventh century. But the fifth column — Origen's marked-up Septuagint — was copied extensively. Two later scholars, Pamphilus and Eusebius (the famous church historian), continued to develop Origen's text between AD 307 and 309. They added marginal notes and readings from the Hexapla, and they promoted the dissemination of Origen's revised Septuagint throughout the churches.²⁶

Here is the critical detail: as Origen's revised Septuagint was copied and recopied, the critical marks — the obelus and asteriskos — were gradually lost. Copyists who did not understand the marks, or who found them confusing, simply omitted them. The result was a text that looked like a normal Septuagint but was in fact a hybrid — a mixture of the original Septuagint with material imported from the replacement translations of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion, and with some of the Septuagint's original material deleted or flagged for removal.

Law describes the result: the fifth column "was soon copied with the signs removed and was dispersed widely. It moved out from a scholarly and professional realm, where caveats could have helped to prevent its misuse, and into the church. Unintentionally, Origen's work contaminated the stream of biblical transmission: From the fourth century, almost all Septuagint manuscripts had been influenced by the so-called Origenic, or Hexaplaric, version."²⁷

Woodward confirms the same point. He notes that Origen's diluted LXX became official: "After his work, the name Septuagint could refer to the Greek text used as his base and the text he 'revised' which would be published via scriptoriums." In other words, Origen's altered version replaced the original Septuagint in the churches. The original Old Greek was not lost entirely — it survives in certain manuscript traditions, particularly the great fourth-century codices Vaticanus and Sinaiticus — but it was contaminated. Scholars today speak of a Septuagint reading being "Hexaplaric" as a pejorative — meaning the reading has been contaminated by Origen's revisions and cannot be trusted to reflect the original translation.²⁸

The irony is profound. Origen was a defender of the Christian faith. He intended his Hexapla to serve the church. But by treating the altered Hebrew text as the standard against which the Septuagint should be measured, he inadvertently advanced the rabbinic campaign against the LXX. The very readings that the rabbis had altered in the Hebrew — readings that the Septuagint had faithfully preserved from its older Hebrew source text — were now being "corrected" out of the Christian Bible by one of the church's own scholars. As Woodward puts it, "Perhaps if Origen had noted all the differences pertinent to Christianity, he might have come to recognize the evil seed sown by Akiba and wouldn't have been so enthusiastic to eliminate those variations he obviously noted in the LXX's text."²⁹

The Antiochene Recension: A Partial Survivor

Not all of the Septuagint tradition was contaminated by the Hexapla. There is another important recension — the Antiochene or Lucianic text — that preserved some older readings untouched by Origen's revisions. Named after the Christian martyr Lucian of Antioch (though the extent of his personal involvement is debated), the Antiochene recension is characterized by stylistic revisions and clarifications that occasionally preserve readings from older Hebrew textual traditions not reflected in the proto-MT.³⁰

The existence of the Antiochene text is important because it provides a control. Where the Antiochene text preserves a reading that differs from both the Hexaplaric Septuagint and the MT, it may reflect the original Old Greek — the pre-Origen, pre-Hexaplaric Septuagint that was translated from Hebrew Vorlagen older than the proto-MT. This is one of the tools that modern Septuagint scholars use to reconstruct the original text of the Greek Old Testament, peeling away the layers of Hexaplaric contamination to recover the authentic translation of "The Seventy."

The Syro-Hexaplar: A Ray of Hope

I mentioned a moment ago that the Hexapla's critical marks — Origen's obelus and asteriskos — were lost as the fifth column was copied and recopied. This would seem to make recovery of the original Septuagint text hopeless. But there is one remarkable surviving witness: the Syro-Hexaplar.

The Syro-Hexaplar is a Syriac translation of the Septuagint based on Origen's fifth column, produced by Bishop Paul of Tella around AD 617. Critically, the Syro-Hexaplar preserves Origen's critical marks — the very marks that were stripped from the Greek copies. This means that scholars can use the Syro-Hexaplar to identify which passages in the Septuagint were marked by Origen as differing from the Hebrew, which passages were added from the replacement translations, and which passages represent the original, unaltered Septuagint text.³¹

The Syro-Hexaplar is thus one of the most important tools in the Septuagint scholar's toolkit. It provides a window back through Origen's revisions to the text that existed before him — the text that, in many cases, preserves older and more authentic readings than the proto-Masoretic Text that Origen mistakenly treated as the standard.

The Bigger Picture: What the Replacement Translations Tell Us

Let's step back and consider what we have learned in this chapter. The story of the replacement translations is the story of a multi-pronged campaign against the Septuagint — a campaign that operated on several levels simultaneously.

At the first level, the rabbis altered the Hebrew text itself, as we argued in Chapter 12. They changed key passages — Messianic prophecies, universal promises to the Gentiles, chronological data — to distance the text from Christian interpretations.

At the second level, they produced new Greek translations — Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion — that were based on the altered Hebrew. These replacement translations were designed to push the Septuagint out of the synagogues and replace it with Greek Bibles that reflected the rabbis' revised text.

At the third level — and this was unintended — Origen's Hexapla further advanced the campaign by treating the altered Hebrew as the standard and "correcting" the Septuagint to match it. Origen was not a conspirator. He was a well-meaning Christian scholar who was deceived by his own assumptions. But the effect of his work was to import the rabbinic revisions into the Christian Bible through the back door.

The result of this three-level campaign was devastating. By the fourth and fifth centuries, the original, uncontaminated text of the Septuagint had become difficult to recover. The Greek manuscripts used by the churches were largely Hexaplaric — meaning they had been "corrected" toward the proto-MT. The Jewish community had abandoned the Septuagint entirely in favor of Aquila's translation. And the Hebrew text that everyone was treating as the standard — the proto-Masoretic Text — was itself a product of the second-century rabbinic revisions.

It was a remarkably successful campaign. And its effects persist to this day. Modern Protestant Old Testament translations — the KJV, the ESV, the NIV, the NASB — are all based primarily on the Masoretic Text. They reflect the readings that the second-century rabbis established, not the older readings that the Septuagint preserves. Every time a modern Bible translates Isaiah 7:14 with the ambiguous "young woman" instead of the clear "virgin" (as some translations do), it is following the path that Aquila blazed in the second century. Every time a modern Bible follows the shorter, less Messianic reading of the proto-MT where the LXX has a longer, more explicitly Christological text, it is — whether it knows it or not — following the second-century rabbinic revisions rather than the original text.

This is why the story of the replacement translations matters. It is not merely an interesting footnote in the history of biblical scholarship. It is the story of how the Christian church lost access to significant portions of its own Scriptures — and how we can begin to recover them.

Recovering the Original: The Modern Task

The good news is that the original Septuagint is not lost. Modern Septuagint scholarship has made enormous progress in peeling away the layers of Hexaplaric contamination and recovering the authentic Old Greek text. The tools available to scholars today — including the Dead Sea Scrolls (which provide independent Hebrew evidence for many LXX readings), the Syro-Hexaplar (which preserves Origen's critical marks), the Antiochene recension (which preserves some pre-Hexaplaric readings), and the great fourth-century codices (Vaticanus and Sinaiticus) — make it possible to reconstruct the original Septuagint text with a high degree of confidence in many passages.

The Göttingen Septuagint project, which has been producing critical editions of the Greek Old Testament since the early twentieth century, represents the gold standard of this work. Each volume of the Göttingen Septuagint attempts to reconstruct the oldest recoverable form of the Greek text for each book, stripping away Hexaplaric and other later revisions. When complete, the Göttingen Septuagint will provide the church with the best possible reconstruction of the Bible that the apostles actually read.

But for the ordinary Christian reader, the practical lesson of this chapter is simpler and more urgent. It is this: we cannot take the Masoretic Text at face value. The Hebrew text that stands behind our English Old Testaments is not "the original." It is the product of a long and complex history of transmission — a history that includes, at a critical juncture, deliberate alteration by a rabbinic establishment that was hostile to the Christian faith. The replacement translations of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion are powerful evidence of this hostility. They show us that the second-century rabbis were not merely preserving an ancient text; they were actively working to replace the old text with a new one that served their theological purposes.

The Septuagint — for all its imperfections as a translation — preserves readings from Hebrew Vorlagen that were older and, in many cases, more authentic than the proto-Masoretic Text. It was the Bible of the apostles, the Bible of the early church, and the Bible that was deliberately targeted for replacement by the same people who altered the Hebrew. That alone should give us reason to take it far more seriously than Protestants have traditionally done.

In the next chapter, we will look at the specific Messianic prophecies that were altered in the Masoretic Text — the very passages that motivated the replacement translations in the first place. There, we will see the evidence laid out passage by passage, in concrete detail, so that the reader can judge the case for themselves.

A Final Reflection: What Would the Apostles Say?

I want to close this chapter with a thought experiment. Imagine that the apostle Paul — who quoted the Septuagint extensively throughout his letters — could have lived to see the replacement translations being produced. Imagine Paul walking into a synagogue in Corinth or Ephesus around AD 140 and picking up a copy of Aquila's new Greek translation. He opens it to Isaiah 7:14 and reads neanis ("young woman") where his Septuagint read parthenos ("virgin"). He turns to Deuteronomy 32:43 and discovers that the angelic worship of the Messiah — "Let all God's angels worship him" — the very text he had cited in Romans and which the author of Hebrews cited in Hebrews 1:6 — has been shortened and stripped of its Christological content. He looks at Psalm 14 and finds that the expanded section he quoted in Romans 3:13–18 is simply missing.

What would Paul say? I think he would say exactly what Justin Martyr said just a few decades later: "Your teachers have removed these passages from the Scriptures." Paul would have recognized immediately what was happening — because the passages he had quoted as Scripture, the passages on which he had built his theology of the Messiah, the passages he had preached in synagogues across the Roman Empire, were being systematically removed or altered in the new translations.

This thought experiment brings home the practical significance of what we have discussed in this chapter. The replacement translations were not an abstract scholarly exercise. They were an attack on the Scriptures that the apostles read, quoted, and preached. They were an attempt to erase from the Greek Bible the very readings that the Holy Spirit had used to shape the theology of the New Testament. And through the unintended consequences of Origen's Hexapla, they partially succeeded — contaminating even the Christian manuscript tradition with readings drawn from the altered proto-Masoretic Text.

But — and this is the good news — the campaign did not fully succeed. The original Septuagint survives. The Dead Sea Scrolls confirm its readings. The Syro-Hexaplar preserves Origen's marks, allowing scholars to identify and reverse the Hexaplaric contamination. And the great manuscript traditions of the church — particularly the fourth-century codices Vaticanus and Sinaiticus — preserve a form of the Greek text that, while not entirely free of later influence, is recognizably the Bible that the apostles knew.

The Bible that built the church has not been lost. It has been obscured, marginalized, and contaminated — but it can be recovered. And recovering it is one of the most important tasks facing the church in our generation.