How did the New Testament writers and the earliest Christians come to adopt the Jewish scriptures as their first Old Testament? And why are our modern Bibles related more to the Rabbinic Hebrew Bible than to the Greek Bible of the early Church? The Septuagint, the name given to the translation of the Hebrew scriptures between the third century BC and the second century AD, played a central role in the Bible's history. Many of the Hebrew scriptures were still evolving when they were translated into Greek, and these Greek translations, along with several new Greek writings, became Holy Scripture in the early Church. Yet, gradually the Septuagint lost its place at the heart of Western Christianity. At the end of the fourth century, one of antiquity's brightest minds rejected the Septuagint in favor of the Bible of the rabbis. After Jerome, the Septuagint never regained the position it once had. Timothy Michael Law recounts the story of the Septuagint's origins, its relationship to the Hebrew Bible, and the adoption and abandonment of the first Christian Old Testament.

About the Author
Timothy Michael Law is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of The Marginalia Review of Books. He was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the University of Oxford from 2009-2012 and is Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in the Georg-August-Universitat Goettingen, Germany until 2014. He has published more than two-dozen articles and is author or editor of several books, including the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of the Septuagint (with Alison Salvesen), and the ongoing OUP series, The Apocrypha in the History of Interpretation (with David Lincicum). He also writes at timothymichaellaw.com.

Reviews
Law should be commended for complicating conservative and fundamentalist theologies of scripture vis-a-vis his discussion of the Septuagint ... Law has opened an important conversation about the relevance of the Septuagint today (especially for American Christianity) and wisely points to the past and the east for interlocutors. * James Covington, Journal of Religion *
It is a gripping tale, beautifully told, and should be of profound interest to any reader of the Jewish or Christian BibleTimothy Michael Law has written the first introduction to the LXX that can be read by people outside the guild. It is a remarkable book, full of fascinating detail that I cannot evoke in a short review, a book that tells a rich story that no reader of the Bible can afford to ignore. * Kevin Hart, Los Angeles Review of Books *
a splendid work... I haven't found any book so interesting and enjoyable in years * Sir Fergus Millar, Camden Professor of Ancient History (Emeritus), Oxford, and Fellow of the British Academy *



Book Information
ISBN 9780199781720
Author Timothy Michael Law
Format Paperback
Page Count 240
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 340g
Dimensions(mm) 152mm * 234mm * 18mm