Category:Letter of Aristeas (text)

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The Letter of Aristeas is a Jewish text usually included in collections of Old Testament Pseudepigrapha or Jewish Hellenistic Literature.

Overview

Manuscript tradition

The Letter of Aristeas in Scholarship (History of research)

The Letter of Aristeas was first printed in translation--by Mattia Palmerio in 1471 (Latin), by Dietrich Reisach in 1502 (German), and by Lodovico Domenichi in 1550 (Italian). The editio princeps of the Greek text was published in 1561 by Simon Schard, with Latin translation by Matthias Garbitius. New translations followed, including its first translations in Hebrew (1574) by Azariah de' Rossi, and in English (1633) by John Done.

The Letter was initially seen as a faithful account of the translation of the Septuagint by an eyewitness. Its historical reliability was first questioned by Humphrey Hody (1685), who also published in 1692 a new edition of the Greek text with Latin translation.

What could be considered the first critical edition of the document was published in 1870 by M. Schmidt, until the definitive edition by Henry St. John Thackeray in 1902.