What influence did the LXX have on the development of the canon of Scripture? Several years ago, I started a series of posts on the LXX and Canon, in which I reviewed some scholarly works that addressed the question. (See here, here, here, and the five-parter on Hengel: part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.) My laziness prevented me from reviewing more works. Perhaps this post represents a post-mortem on that series, if not on the topic. That blog series was my attempt to work through some of the issues and develop my own thoughts, and I guess that paid off.
My own approach to the issue of how the LXX influenced the development of the biblical canon is that it didn't. In my 2021 book on the LXX—which mostly deals with the reception of the LXX as text in the early church (see the front matter at my academia page)—the longest chapter concerns the canon, implicitly (or, maybe, explicitly) responding to the oft-repeated claim that early Christians viewed the deuterocanonical books as Scripture because they found these books in the LXX. This is nonsense.
I recognize that by not quoting any particular scholar here, I open myself to the charge of caricature or straw-manning the argument. I will let readers decide whether I have correctly articulated a common position among scholars regarding the inclusion of the apocrypha/deuterocanonicals in the LXX. Or, better yet, get my book, where I think I do demonstrate that the view I am critiquing here is a common assumption among biblical scholars. (Or see my JBL article mentioned at the end of this post.)
The downfall of the assumption that the LXX included the deuterocanonicals is in the identity of the LXX. What is the LXX? I think when biblical scholars say things like, "The LXX included the books of Maccabees" or even "The LXX included the book of Isaiah," they are thinking that the LXX = the Greek Old Testament, and so whatever *we* consider a part of the Greek Old Testament is necessarily a part of the LXX. And to confirm whether a work is in the LXX, we can just pick up our copy of Rahlfs-Hanhart, which after all is called Septuaginta.
But if we are talking about ancient Christianity, we should consider what ancient Christians thought about the identity of the LXX. As far as I can tell from reading their statements, they did not think that the LXX included all Jewish religious literature in Greek, or all Jewish Greek Scripture, or whatever. Rather, the concept of the LXX referred to a story of translation, having to do with Ptolemy II (usually) and his assembly of some Jewish scholars for the purpose of translating Jewish Scripture. Just which books did they translate? Or, rather, which books did ancient Jews and Christians say that Ptolemy's assembled scholars had translated?
Ah, there's the question. Different ancient authors provide different answers to it, and those answers (I think) falsify the assumption that ancient Christians received the deuterocanonicals as Scripture because they found them in the LXX. And if that assumption proves invalid, I'm not sure how the LXX exerted any particular influence on the development of the biblical canon. Thus, the first sentence of the canon chapter in my aforementioned book: "The Septuagint had no bearing on the development of the canon of Scripture."
If you want a taste of my argument, you can now get it at the wonderful Text & Canon Institute website, where the fine folks over there recently published my essay Paul and the Septuagint Canon. They have assigned it to the level of three dots—rather than one or two dots—which means that it might be slow-going for some readers unaccustomed to biblical scholarship. But I hope you read it and I hope you find it helpful.
One more reference to my own work: a few months ago, the Journal of Biblical Literature published my article on the same topic: "Suddenly and Then Gradually: The Growth of the Septuagint and Its Canon" (here). If you can't get access to it, email me and I'll send you a copy. Here's the abstract.
The Septuagint defies easy definition. Biblical scholars routinely use the term to designate the Greek Old Testament, though they recognize that such language is similar to talking about “the English Bible” or “the German Bible”: there is no such thing, or rather there are many such things. In this article, I urge closer attention to the way ancient people described the translation, particularly its scope. While modern scholars often seem (tacitly or not) to assume that the Septuagint began as the Greek Torah and then expanded its borders to welcome new Jewish scriptural books as they continued to be translated into Greek, ancient authors did not depict the Septuagint in this way. All ancient Jewish sources that mention the translation restricted the Septuagint to the Pentateuch, whereas most patristic sources attributed a Greek version of the entire Hebrew Bible to the Seventy translators. The most significant moment in the “growth of the Septuagint” was when it suddenly swelled from five books to perhaps a couple dozen or more. These ancient ideas on the extent of the Septuagint have implications for our notions of the Septuagint canon and for the use of this Greek version in the New Testament.
