Septuagint

Article on Septuagint here: http://www.bibliahebraica.com/the_texts/septuagint.htm  a few quotes:

The oldest witnesses to the LXX include 2nd century BC fragments of Leviticus and Deuteronomy (Rahlfs nos. 801, 819, and 957), and 1st century BC fragments of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and the Minor Prophets (Rahlfs nos. 802, 803, 805, 848, 942, and 943). Relatively complete manuscripts of the LXX include the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus of the 4th century AD/CE and the Codex Alexandrinus of the 5th century. These are indeed the oldest surviving nearly-complete manuscripts of the Old Testament in any language; the oldest extant complete Hebrew texts date much later, from around 1000.

The sources of the many differences between the Septuagint and the Masoretic text have long been debated by scholars. One extreme view was that the Septuagint provides a reasonably accurate record of an early Semitic textual variant, now lost, that differed from the Masoretic text. The other extreme, favored by Jewish religious scholars, was that the differences were primarily due to intentional or accidental corruption of the Septuagint since its original translation from the Masoretic text. Modern scholars follow a path between these two views. The discovery of many fragments in the Dead Sea scrolls that agree with the Septuagint rather than the Masoretic proved that many of the variants in Greek were also present in early Semitic editions.

.....................................................

The Early Christian Church, however, continued to use the Greek, since it had always been the language of the Church and because the prophetic passages clearly pointed to Jesus as the Christ in the Septuagint version, whereas the same passages were ambiguous or absent in the Hebrew. When Jerome started preparation of a new Vulgate translation of the Bible into Latin, he started with the Septuagint, checking it against the newer Hebrew Masoretic Text, he discovered many significant differences. Encouraged by his Jewish friends who provided him the Masoretic with their insistence of its perfect accuracy, Jerome at last broke with all church tradition to translate the Old Testament not from the age-old Greek but from his new find, the Masoretic. The Psalms in the Masoretic differ particularly from the Septuagint, although the Latin Mass still used the Psalms from the older Greek versions. Indeed, all the other early Christian translations of the Old Testament were done from the Greek version and Church fathers such as Origen remarked on how Jewish religionists differed in both the interpretation of the Old Testament and how over time the Jewish text grew different from the Christian in wording.

The writers of the New Testament, also written in Greek, quoted from the old Greek versions exclusively. This is significant since the new Masoretic text prominently diverged in those passages which prophesied Christ. Thus even when Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian and other translations from the Greek appeared, Greek versions continued to be used by the Greek-speaking portion of the Christian Church. The Eastern Orthodox Church still prefers to use LXX as the basis for translating the Old Testament into other languages, and the Greek Orthodox Church (which has no need for translation) continues to use it in its liturgy even today. Many modern Catholic translations of the Bible, while using the Masoretic text as their basis, employ the Septuagint to decide between different possible translations of the newer Hebrew text whenever the latter is unclear, undeniably corrupt, or ambiguous.

Recent Aramaic findings among the Dead Sea Scrolls read most closely with the LXX, and not with the Masoretic text. For example Deuteronomy 32:8-9, both the LXX and the Aramaic agree that the patron of the people of Jacob is lower in status than the Most High. This suggests that the older LXX may be more accurate than the newer Masoretic text which was given to Jerome.

see also: http://www.fisheaters.com/septuagint.html