An Apology for the Septuagint, in which its Claims to Biblical and Canonical Authority are briefly stated and vindicated. By E. W. Grinfield, M. A. [pp. 541-557]

1850.] Grinfield's Apology for the Septuagint.
a very helpless and inartificial style, rendered still more
obscure by a peculiar mode of punctuation, which the author
has invented for himself, with the usual result of rendering
his sentences almost unreadable by others. These facts we
are obliged to state in justification of our not attempting to
give the author's arguments and reasons in his own words,
which would either be impossible or useless, but with all fidelity, as if we were speaking for ourselves.
1. In the first place, AMr. Grinfield seems to think it a priori
probable, that before the change from a local and temporary
dispensation to an ecumenical and final one, the revelation
which had been originally given in the language of the chosen
people, and thereby sealed up from the world at large, would
be transfused, under Divine direction, into a language more
extensively known and common to all civilized and cultivated
nations. Such a transfusion would at least make the analogy
between the Word and Church of God more perfect. As the
latter was to undergo a total change of form before the
change of dispensations and in order to it, why should not the
former undergo a like change for precisely the same purpose?
Now there was such a version of the Hebrew scriptures made,
in the interval between the Old and New Testament, into what
was then becoming the xosvq 6i,.xEx,o- of the civilized world, and
unde- circumstances certainly remarkable, even when stripped
of all mythical embellishment. Can this coincidence be purely accidental or without significance? Such seems to be the
a priori argument for Mr. Grinfield's doctrine, ever present to
his mind, though nowhere very clearly stated.
2. This antecedent probability, arising from the mutual relation of the old and new economy, our author seems to think
confirmed by the fact, that when the New Testament was written, it was written in the very language of this ancient version; not merely in Greek, but in that very kind of Greek,
that strange local or provincial Greek, the earliest specimens
of which are furnished by the Septuagint version. Why was
not the New Testament, as well as the Old, written in Hiebrew? Because it was no longer meant to be a local but a
universal revelation? Why then not in Attic Greek, or in the
Macedonian dialect, to which the conquests of Alexander had
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