Stranger said:
What made the fragment a supposed piece of the 'Septuagint'?
How do you know these oldest codices contain the Septuagint? And these manuscripts are only 4th and 5th century. Is there something or someone who says this is the Septuagint? The Septuagint, as the story goes, must exist before Christ. Else He can't quote from it. Yet the story of the Septuagint is proven to be a fraud. Don't you agree?
A side note....It is easier then some think to cut off a limb that your standing on. Literally. I have done it with a chain saw before, so, I won't be surprised if I do it on theological grounds also.
I am not uncurious. I am very curious about how we got our Bible.
Stranger
It seems to me that you are not even curious enough to read the links that I provided. And that you say things like “So, why is it a collection of Scrolls. It should be one item.” shows that you never really occupied yourself with ancient Biblical manuscripts.
As far as I’m concerned the story of the 72 scribes may be as much of a legend as that the Gospel of John for example was written by the Apostle John (nowhere in the actual text does it explicitly say that it was, and we do indeed have reasons to assume that there’s not a single author but an entire Johannine School that we have to thank for the Gospel of John in its final form).
Of course the Septuagint existed before the New Testament was written. As I said: its oldest surviving textual witness goes back to the 2th century BC:
How do we know that the Papyrus Rylands 458 (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papyrus_Rylands_458) is part of the Septuagint (a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible that got completed over hundreds of years)? For the similar reasons that we know that Papyrus 52 is a part of the Gospel of John. These old fragments are bit like a jigsaw-puzzle, so guess what this is from:
“mest into th bour's vin
ou mayest eat grapes thy hine”
Yes, you got that right: it’s a fragment of Deuteronomy 23:24 from the KJV.
While the Gospels authors who tell us about Jesus quoting the Old Testament quoted from the Greek Septuagint, Jesus Himself may have used Aramaic/Hebrew versions of the texts He quoted. Alas, as far as I am aware of, there are no surviving witnesses of such versions, other than the bits we find in the Ketef Hinnom Silver Scrolls (700-650 BC), maybe the Gemara (c. 200 BC) and some of the recently discovered Dead Sea Scrolls (150 BC-75 AD). The Masoretic Text, that most Protestant Old Testament translations are based on, is from about 700-1000 AD with the oldest extant manuscript we still have being from about 900 AD. But no worries: while the Masoretic Texts differ slightly from equivalent texts in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Dead Sea Scrolls have shown that all in all the versions of the Tanach, while fluid in detail, have remained surprisingly consistent over the centuries.
Seriously, I don’t know why you feel the need to deny the existence of the Septuagint Greek Translation(s) of the Hebrew Bible. What’s your point? And why do I even bother trying to explain this stuff to you, when I’m almost certain that you’ll just continue to blindly believe that the KJV (or whichever version of the Bible you may use) just somehow fell from heaven like Mannah?