Interview with Albert Pietersma

WILLIAM ROSS: LXX SCHOLAR INTERVIEW: DR. ALBERT PIETERSMA (Septuaginta &C. Blog). One excerpt, but read it all:

As I see it, however, in all three of these sub-disciplines, Septuagint Studies continues to suffer from what might be called a schizophrenic approach to the Septuagint. In my view, the origin of this schizophrenia is an outgrowth of the discipline’s historical origins. In brief, one might consider the following. That these historical origins lie in the study of the New Testament (NT) and more particularly in the conceptualization of the LXX as the Christian Old Testament is scarcely open to controversy. Not only did Christians transmit the LXX, but, as well, both the Cambridge and the Göttingen editions bespeak, a patently Christian context. Thus the former speaks of “The Old Testament in Greek” and the latter subtitles the Septuagint as “Vetus Testamentum Graecum.” Between these two editions, however, a great gulf is fixed. Whereas the Cambridge LXX is a diplomatic edition, that is to say, a given Christian manuscript functions as the lemma text to which all other witnesses are collated, the Göttingen LXX, on the other hand, is a critical edition, in other words, a text critically recovered and reconstructed, as closely as possible to its pristine originality both in terms of its text-form and its text-semantics. To label this critically reconstructed, Jewish, text “The Old Testament” or “Vetus Testamentum” creates a methodological contradiction between title and contents. One might well ask how this text of pre-Christian Jewry can, in one and the same breath, also be spoken of as the Old Testament of Christianity or, for that matter, the Bible of Alexandrian Judaism. The answer is that it cannot possibly be so designated. In short, while Christianity could and did lay claim to the LXX as its Old Testament at some point in its reception history, it cannot possibly lay claim to the event of its production.

Some past interviews of LXX scholars by William Ross are noted here and links.