Septuagint and Canon: Hengel, part 1

I've now re-read (again) Martin Hengel's book The Septuagint as Christian Scripture: Its Prehistory and the Problem of Its Canon from 2002. The translation of Hengel's book is already 15 years old, so there are plenty of reactions to this book available: here's a review by Kristin De Troyer, here's one by James Sanders, and here's a reference to one by Alison Salvesen.

The whole book is available here.

So, at the risk of seeming out-dated in devoting so much time to a 15-year old (or older) book, I'm going to blog my way through each chapter. Maybe it will help some readers. It will help me, anyway, as I take stock of this brief but dense book. This post continues my occasional series on the Septuagint and canon mentioned here.

Chapter 1: A Difficult Subject (pp. 19–23)

Hengel defines his subject as "the Alexandrian canon of the Septuagint" (p. 19), but he admits both his own lack of expertise in the area and the ambiguity of the subject itself, since "We cannot prove the existence of a genuine Jewish, pre-Christian collection of canonical value, unambiguously and clearly delimited, distinguishable through its greater scope from the canon of the Hebrew Bible in the realm of the historical books and wisdom writings and written in Greek" (p. 19; see the similar comment on p. 22). That is, we cannot prove the existence of the Alexandrian Jewish biblical canon as it has usually been conceived.

What evidence we do have for Alexandrian Judaism (most prominently, Philo) would rather indicate a more limited canon than Palestinian Judaism, consisting especially of the Greek Pentateuch, instead of an expanded canon with the entire Hebrew Bible plus the deuterocanonical books. After Philo, we have very little information on Alexandrian Judaism, which was largely wiped out after the rebellion of 115–17.

The citations of Scripture within the New Testament do not indicate adherence to a wider Alexandrian canon.

The research question:

On the basis of this complicated situation, the question presents itself: how did it come about that the collection of Jewish writings in the Greek language, significantly larger than the scope of the Hebrew Bible, become, under the designation 'the Seventy', the authoritative 'Holy Scriptures' of the Old Testament in the Christian church? (p. 22)

I would only ask at this point whether the premise is true: is the OT canon, as defined here by Hengel, really the OT canon attested by early Christian sources? What he means by that, apparently, is that these are the books found in the LXX codices of the fourth and fifth centuries.