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lion of the books of Moses and that of the other books ; or , if any such difference had existed , the comparison would have been in favour of the latter , on account of its having been undertaken at a time when the translators must have become familiar with their employment , and must therefore
have been better qualified to produce a correct and faithful version . . We are fully justified , then , on the ground both of external and internal evidence , in concluding that the Septuagint Version was made at different times and by different individuals , and that the five books of Moses were first translated , probably in the reign of Ptolemy Philadelp hus , about the year B . C . 280 .
This version of the law soon came into extensive use , and continued to be read alone in all the Greek synagogues for more than a century , till Antiochus Epiphanes issued a decree in which he prohibited the reading of the law on pain of death . The arbitrary mandate of Antiochus was executed with great rigour ; and the Jews of Jerusalem , finding themselves debarred by it from the use of the law , are supposed to have taken this opportunity of introducing the reading of the prophets , " so that , when the reading of the law was again restored by the Maccabees , the section which was read every sabbath out of the law served for their first lesson , and the section out of the
prophets for their second lesson . " * This practice , it is said , was soon adopted by the Jews in Egypt and other countries ; and hence , probably , arose the first actual necessity for a Greek version of the books of the prophets . Of this circumstance , it is true , no direct mention has hitherto been discovered in any ancient writer ; but as every known fact which can be brought to bear upon the subject , concurs to render the supposition
provable , we are quite at liberty , in the absence of positive testimony , to avail ourselves of such facts in the way of argument . We know , for instance , that the law only was publicly read in the synagogues of Palestine before the decree of Antiochus Epiphanes was issued ; and it has been shewn above , that , in the time of Jesus Christ and his apostles , the prophetical books also were read on the sabbath days in the synagogues of Judea , Galilee and Asia Minor , It is obvious , therefore , that these books must have been well
known , before the Christian era , to the Jews residing in every part of the world ; because the practice of foreign Jews , in every thing pertaining to religious matters , was uniformly regulated by that of their brethren at Jerusalem . The translation of the prophetical books , then , must have been made in the interval between the year B . C . 168 , in which the decree of Antiochus was issued , and the public appearance of Jesus Christ in the synagogues of Galilee ; and consequently the books themselves must have formed a part of the Jewish canon long before the publication of the Gospels and other parts of the New Testament .
Another circumstance which tends to corroborate the opinion that the books of the prophets were translated into Greek about the time of Antiochus Epiphanes , is the division of the books of the Old Testament into three parts , of which the law formed the first , the prophets the second , and the remaining books the third ; and for the origin of which it is impossible ,
on any other supposition , to assign so plausible a reason . Of this division we have already seen traces in the Talmud , in the catalogue of Jerome , in the writings of Josephus and Philo , and in the Gospel of Luke . Similar lraces of its existence before the time of our Lord occur in the second prologue to the book of Ecclesiastic us , in which the Jewish Scriptures are The Old und New Testaxnent connected , &c , Vol . I . p . 334 .
Untitled Article
504 . Canonical Authority of the Boohs of the Prophets .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), July 2, 1827, page 504, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1798/page/32/
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