Almost four years after the initial draft of The Christian Scriptures, I have completed my translation of the last major text associated with the Greek Old Testament, the original Septuagint version of Daniel.
Rahlfs' edition of the Septuagint contains two different versions of three works: Judges (Vaticanus text vs. that of Alexandrinus), Tobit (Vaticanus/Alexandrinus text vs. that of Sinaiticus), and Daniel. In my opinion, the first two books are not sufficiently crucial to Christian theology, nor are they dramatically distinctive in content, so as to warrant anything more than noting important variant readings in the footnotes. Daniel by contrast plays a major role in Jesus' eschatological preaching (e.g. Mark 13) and in John's Revelation, and its original Greek text regularly diverges from the later edition of Theodotion, which ancient Christian Bibles favored. As a non-canonical text, the complete Daniel "according to the Seventy" has been placed in the Appendix file, together with Solomon's Psalms.
Rahlfs' edition of the Septuagint contains two different versions of three works: Judges (Vaticanus text vs. that of Alexandrinus), Tobit (Vaticanus/Alexandrinus text vs. that of Sinaiticus), and Daniel. In my opinion, the first two books are not sufficiently crucial to Christian theology, nor are they dramatically distinctive in content, so as to warrant anything more than noting important variant readings in the footnotes. Daniel by contrast plays a major role in Jesus' eschatological preaching (e.g. Mark 13) and in John's Revelation, and its original Greek text regularly diverges from the later edition of Theodotion, which ancient Christian Bibles favored. As a non-canonical text, the complete Daniel "according to the Seventy" has been placed in the Appendix file, together with Solomon's Psalms.
The last verses which I translated (in Daniel 11) featured references to "the testament of the Holy One," as opposed to "the holy testament" in Theodotion. Recovering the correct understanding of this testament is arguably the modern church's most pressing task, and it is my prayer and hope that The Christian Scriptures may contribute to this goal.
