PREFACE TO THE READER.

Those who are more accurately versed in the sacrosanct Scriptures all acknowledge that the Greek edition of the Seventy translators is by far the most ancient and approved of all those that the Greeks have used. It is certain that those translators, who were Jews by birth but learned in Greek, more than three hundred years before the coming of Christ, while Ptolemy Philadelphus reigned in Egypt, being full of the Holy Spirit, translated the sacred Bibles. This interpretation, from the first times of the nascent Church, was both publicly proposed in the churches for reading and privately received and explained by ecclesiastical writers who lived before Blessed Jerome, the author of the Latin Vulgate edition.

For Aquila of Sinope, who was the second after the Seventy to convert the same books from Hebrew into Greek, flourished much later under the prince Hadrian. His interpretation—because it involved in crafty obscurity those things which had been predicted about Christ in the Scriptures, in order to gain favor with the Jews, by translating them otherwise than the Seventy—has long been disapproved by those who think rightly, even though it was held in the Hexapla a six-columned Bible containing Hebrew and various Greek versions. Those who followed him, Symmachus and Theodotion—the former a Samaritan under Lucius Verus, the latter an Ephesian under the Emperor Commodus—were both considered unreliable translators, even though they too circulated in the Hexapla. Symmachus, offended by the Samaritans, corrupted more than one place of Holy Scripture with a disturbed meaning to please the Jews; Theodotion, as a follower of the heretic Marcion, perverted rather than translated the sacred books in many places. Besides these, there were among the Greeks