This is an important topic. Which means, of course, it will be largely ignored! Mostly it will be ingored because it is deep. Deep how? It requires a lot of background familiarity with sources.
A layperson who approaches this subject can easily be put off. For one thing, who do you read first and how will that color your view going in?
As with all controversies the presuppositions you carry around will direct you toward your conclusions like a strong magnet. It is, alas, only human to try and support your own views by bolstering them as much as possible and dismissing contrary evidence. Why? Changing an opinion isn't only a matter of changing one or two facts. No. Changing an opinion requires a complete rooting out of all connecting inferences like tangled roots beneath the soil on weeds you pluck from your garden. Our ideas are connected and the insidious nature of our mental filing system means the redundancy of an error is everywhere lurking and doing its damage.
But, I digress!
I've been reading and studying about this subject since I was about 40 years old and now I'm 58. At first it was just curiousity. Later it was more than that--more like furious determination. It became clear to me rather quickly that there was a dead skunk in the woodpile that everyone pretended wasn't there. I'm talking, of course, about the bull'seye issue of "inspiration" in religious writing and what was canonical and what wasn't.
Without a verifying text to support a religious doctrine you have only human opinion. And that, my friends, is a thorny fact. Once you have a verifying text your problems have only just begun. How do you ascertain the veracity of a written text? How do you authenticate the god-breathed part of it and distinguish from the man's-hands part of it? How do you parse a text for the distinction between hidden meaning (symbolical) and contextual historical meaning? How can you ever know what you are reading wasn't just the result of a redaction and rewriting of some person or group (like the Watchtower with its "a god" rendering of John 1:1) intent on influencing a beloved doctrine?
Well, you can't!
You end up proving your presupposition. If you demand for yourself that the Bible MUST HAVE BEEN "inspired" then you will also insist it was PRESERVED. And that will settle the issue for you and you'll dismiss all evidence to the contrary.
Your investigation will only have been an annoyance and not an honest intellectual inquiry of warts and all.
People hate and despise uncertainty. This is especially true about religious views. Truly, religious people are intent on surrendering their mind, their willpower and their life to a higher authority because it is easier to do so than think for themselves. All they really want is some palatable assurance that their surrender terms include rewards and blessings down the road. A fool's paradise is still a paradise, after all!
Back to our subject.....
The SEPTUIGENT (also spelled SEPTUIGINT) is a mere case in point of the entire process I've been discussing.
Whenever a revision, translation or redaction of a beloved document is undertaken it is sorely tempting to make it into what it (by your own opinon) SHOULD BE rather than what it is. That is why a fisherman will lengthen the size of the fish he caught each time he tells of the catch!.
The 70 translators weren't 70 translators. Seventy appeals to the numerologists and does not conform to the actual facts. That's just a head's up going in to this subject. As the rabbi's will tell you, "All translations are lies". And they don't mean necessarily deliberate ones. They mean a translation calls for CHANGES and changes require judgment, familiarity and pivotal viewpoints to resolve issues of importance. So, it comes down to why the changes are made and not merely what changes are made. This is policy.
The King James translators were not translators per se, as an example. They were learned and scholarly men who were charged with propping up the notion of a King and lending as much credence to his authority as humanly possible. Further, they were intent on sifting through PREVIOUS translations into the common tongue and choosing the apt phrase and the beautiful cadence rather than sourcing a Hebrew word and literally showcasing it. This is a fact. Should we expect that the Septuigent translators were free from all worldly and human issues, policies and rationale just to assure ourselves that truth is crammed into every sentence? That would be delicious and yet lacking in realism.
My own conclusion is that a kind of sad and unfunny farce has been perpetrated on generations of humans that concerns our gullible acceptance of the very notion of an "inspired" writing passed on to us for our edification and enlightenment. After all, you'd expect a superior mind and transcendant intelligence (who made our own brains work, after all) could concoct a document of surpassing transparency of intention and less bumbling, rambling and murky patchwork repairs. No, our Bible is an embarrassment of cut and paste hackwork and smells of the fingers of furtive fanatics and political prudes who wish to grasp us by the nape of our gullibility and and toss us handily into their service for their singular purposes. We become hangdog sinners by their handiwork. We skulk about in our depressing lives with an eye on the heavens and one foot in our graves. We are beaten down into semi-obedient vassals obeying greedy liege lords of our local congregation. Our "service to god" is mere puppetry as we shovel bagloads of cash into the coffers of self-important puppetmasters who crack the righteous whip of orthodoxy over our perspiring brows. Our beloved Bible gives us a sense of being worthless and doomed and our lives are filled with endless rituals of reassuring the invisible ill-tempered Soverign in the sky that we mean well. The life of a religious fop being what it is; dull, furtive and frightened of shadows on the one hand and alternately pompous, arrogant and assured on the other. Such induced schizophrenia is everywhere evident in every church and congregation as the eager puppies of righteousness scamper to and fro licking up their own poop and vomiting it back out onto their brethern in gleeful anticipation of a pat on the head.
Such is the fate of the faithful! And we can thank the Bible (no matter which translation) for that.
T