Which version of the Septuagint did our Lord use while on earth?

 

This text is from a letter written by David Gooding in 1994.

When people nowadays refer to the Septuagint version, they are generally thinking in terms of one or two large volumes containing a Greek translation of all the canonical books of the Old Testament and many apocryphal books besides.

But in our Lord's time on earth, there was no such thing. There was only a number of Greek translations which existed, for the most part, on separate scrolls. Some of these translations were renderings of Old Testament canonical books. Some were translations of apocryphal books originally written in Hebrew; and some were copies of books that were written originally in Greek.

Moreover, in the case of some canonical books, there was more than one Greek translation; for some parts of some canonical books there were three translations; but no one had yet collected all these miscellaneous materials into one or two large volumes. They still remained on separate scrolls.

It was only in the second century onwards that people began to collect these scrolls and to transcribe them into codices—that is, into book form; and it was at that time that, unfortunately, Greek-speaking Christians, who knew no better, included various apocryphal books along with the canonical books.

Yours very sincerely,

 
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