The Septuagint was old, revered, and in places - if you knew the Hebrew - frankly baffling. Produced in Egypt from the third century BCE onward, it had served Jewish communities for generations and was now the Scripture of Greek-speaking Christians too. But the further the Greek drifted from the living Hebrew, the more it bothered people who cared about precision. By the second century CE, at least three scholars had decided to produce a fresh translation. Two of them - Symmachus and Theodotion - have left us enough fragments to understand what they were each trying to do, and the contrast is striking.
Theodotion's instinct was conservative. He worked not from a blank scroll but from the existing Septuagint, revising it passage by passage to bring it closer to the Hebrew text as he knew it. Where the old Greek had wandered, he corrected it; where it had gaps, he filled them. His version of the book of Daniel proved so reliable that the early Church quietly swapped it in - and it is Theodotion's Daniel, not the original Septuagint Daniel, that almost every Christian community read for the next thousand years, often without knowing it.
The record
The Septuagint Daniel was largely displaced by Theodotion's revision in Christian use, probably by the third century CE. Jerome, writing around 391 CE in his preface to the book of Daniel, noted that "the churches of the Lord Saviour do not read the prophet Daniel according to the Seventy interpreters, using Theodotion's edition." This displacement is documented by Origen of Alexandria (c. 185-254 CE), who collated both versions in his Hexapla - a six-column comparison of Hebrew and Greek Bible texts - and marks the divergences using diacritical signs borrowed from Alexandrian textual scholarship. Origen's Hexapla is described in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, Book VI, chapter 16.
Symmachus took the opposite approach. He was not a reviser; he was a writer. His goal was fluency - a Greek translation that read as Greek rather than as Hebrew wearing Greek clothes. Where a Hebraism would jar a cultivated reader, he smoothed it. Where an idiom was opaque, he found a Greek equivalent. The result was a version that a scholar like Jerome - who read several languages and held strong opinions about all of them - consistently admired for its elegance. Jerome cited Symmachus frequently when producing his own Latin Vulgate, treating him as a guide to meaning even when he ultimately went his own way. What we know about Symmachus's identity is fragmentary: he is identified by Eusebius as an Ebionite Christian of Jewish background, though other sources connect him with the Samaritans. The debate has never quite closed.
The record
Fragments of both Symmachus and Theodotion survive principally through Origen's Hexapla and related manuscript traditions, including the Tetrapla. The most substantial surviving portion of the Hexapla is often identified with the Ambrosian Palimpsest (Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Cod. O 39 sup.), a sixth-century manuscript that preserves the Psalms column with hexaplar signs and notation. The Cambridge scholar Frederick Field published a systematic reconstruction of the Hexapla fragments in his Origenis Hexaplorum quae supersunt (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1875), which remains the standard collection. Field identified thousands of marginal citations in later Greek manuscripts attributing variants to "Σ" (Symmachus) and "Θ" (Theodotion).
What is striking, looking at these two men across eighteen centuries, is how clearly they understood what they were doing and why. Theodotion asked: what does the Hebrew actually say? Symmachus asked: how would a Greek speaker understand it? Those are not the same question, and the tension between them has never been resolved - every serious Bible translator since has had to choose a side, or find a way to stand on both at once. The Septuagint they were both trying to improve is still read today. So, in fragments, are they.
Origen's decision to set all six versions - the Hebrew, a Greek transliteration, the Septuagint, Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion - side by side in his Hexapla was itself a statement. He was not picking a winner. He was displaying the whole argument, column by column, and trusting readers to see what it meant that the same sacred text could be rendered in so many ways, each capturing something the others missed. That kind of humility before a difficult text is rarer than it sounds.
The record
The first modern critical edition specifically devoted to Theodotion's translation was produced by Joseph Ziegler in the Göttingen Septuagint series (Septuaginta: Vetus Testamentum Graecum), the Daniel volume appearing in 1954. Ziegler's analysis confirmed that Theodotion's revision drew on a Hebrew Vorlage - a source text - closely related to the proto-Masoretic tradition, which explains why his Daniel reads so much more consistently with later rabbinic Hebrew manuscripts than the original Septuagint Daniel does.
Two translators, one century, the same problem - and between them a map of every tension that still runs through the act of moving sacred words from one language to another. Precision or readability. Faithfulness to the source or loyalty to the reader. Symmachus and Theodotion didn't settle it. Nobody since has either.
