Despite the general acceptance of the Septuagint, prepared in Egypt about the third century b. c, there were other scholars who, in the succeeding centuries, undertook the provision of alternative Greek rendering of the Hebrew Scriptures. Three of these translations are worthy of note, and are associated with the names of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion.
The earliest, and in some respects the most significant of these three versions was that of Aquila, who is supposed to have written about 150 a. d. The orthodox Jews of his day were decidedly prejudiced against the Septuagint, feeling, apparently, that its translators did not abide sufficiently closely by the details and idiom of the Hebrew. In seeking to obviate any criticism of this sort, Aquila, himself a student of the famous Rabbi Akiba, provided a rendering which is on the whole amazingly literal, so much so that it is often conspicuously lacking in literary style—yet this very literalism is of abiding value, since it clearly suggests the original Hebrew words which Aquila had before him. An interesting tradition informs us that in his youth Aquila had been partly converted to Christianity, but on suffering a stern reprimand from the Christian authorities because of his persistence in unorthodox beliefs, he became an ardent supporter of Judaism, producing his Greek Version of the Old Testament with a view to upholding Jewish orthodoxy and offsetting the influence of the Septuagint, which has sometimes been called the "Bible of the Early Christians," because of their constant references to that translation. Some find evidence of this supposed polemical bias in the fact that though the Greek Christos (Christ) is admittedly synonymous with the Hebrew Mashiach (Messiah), Aquila goes out of his way to translate Mashiach by some other Greek word. Whatever his purpose may have been, we know that his rendering won great popularity among the Jews.
What little information has come down to us with regard to the background of Symmachus is somewhat contradictory, for while Eusebius affirms that he was an Ebionite ("a kind of semi-Christian"), Epiphanius would have us believe that he was a Samaritan who became an orthodox Jew—surely an unlikely transformation! In any event, he prepared a Greek Version of the Old Testament towards the close of the second century A. D. The most outstanding characteristic of Symmachus' work is that he succeeds in giving a masterly rendering of the Hebrew original in good idiomatic Greek—indeed, he seems to have been equally conversant with both languages.
