Irenaeus of Lyons · a new plain-English translation from the original language
How the Scriptures came to be translated into the Greek language, and when.
Before the Romans yet possessed their empire, while the Macedonians still held Asia, Ptolemy, son of Lagus, desiring to adorn the library which he had built at Alexandria with worthy writings of all peoples, asked the people of Jerusalem—for they were then still obedient to the Macedonians—to send him the men among them who were most skilled in the Scriptures and in both languages, so that they might do what he wished. And they sent seventy elders to Ptolemy. But he, wishing to test them, and fearing lest, being in agreement with one another, they might hide the truth that was in the Scriptures through their translation, separated them from one another, and commanded them all to translate the same Scripture; and he did this with all the books. And when they gathered again before Ptolemy and set their translations side by side, God received glory, and the Scriptures were recognized as genuinely inspired, since every one of them had spoken the identical things, using matching wording and matching designations, straight through from start to close—so that the nations who were present might also learn that the Scriptures had been rendered under God's inspiration. Nor is it any wonder that God accomplished this among them, given that during that captivity of the people brought about under Nebuchadnezzar, when the Scriptures had suffered corruption, and the Jews, once seventy years had passed, returned again to their own country, and afterward, under the reign of Artaxerxes, ruler of the Persian realm, ...
Since, therefore, the Scriptures were interpreted with such great faithfulness and by the grace of God — the Scriptures by which God prepared and formed our faith in his Son, and preserved for us in Egypt in their simplicity, in the land where the house of Jacob also grew up when fleeing the famine that came upon Canaan, and in which our Lord also was kept safe when he fled the persecution that came from Herod — and since this interpretation of the Scriptures was made before our Lord descended, and was translated before Christians were even shown to the world (for it was around Augustus's forty-first regnal year that our Lord came into being, whereas Ptolemy, in whose day the Scriptures underwent translation, lived a good while before that), those men are shown to be truly shameless and bold who now wish to produce different interpretations, since they are refuted by us out of the very Scriptures and are shut up to the faith in the coming of the Son of God.