There are those who claim that the Greek Septuagint (LXX)--but which critical (eclectic) edition is supposed to most reliably embody it?--is generally more reliable than the Masoretic Text (MT). They hold that the LXX gradually came into existence beginning first with translation of the Pentateuch, which supposedly is translation from the hands of 70 (or 72) Jews commissioned by the Jewish high priest, and worked in translating the Hebrew Pentateuch while together in Alexandria, Egypt in the third century B.C.E. More translational product followed in the second century BCE and beyond. Orthodox tradition holds that the original 72 Jewish scholars, although working separately, miraculously produced identical translations of the Hebrew and Aramaic autographs. They hold that where it can be shown that the original Greek translations differed in substance from the Hebrew Vorlagen, then God inspired the translators for the original LXX to make corrections.
This is problematic for those like Eastern Orthodox churchmen who hold that the “Septuagint” (LXX), compiled in the pre-Christian era from Greek translations of Hebrew texts, was an inspired translation of Hebrew texts. The LXX as accepted by the Greek Orthodox Church is not, however, a translation from a single, fixed, priest-approved corpus of Hebrew sacred texts (the Tanakh) archived in some synagogue and/or in the Temple. The LXX was translation of a pluriform body of pre-Masoretic Hebrew texts (Vorlagen), reflecting textual diversity in late Second Temple Judaism, with different books often translated separately, leading to textual variations later seen in the Great Isaiah Scroll and proto-Masoretic texts. The LXX shows no internal evidence that it is a Greek translational corpus all of it produced within a certain (relatively short) time frame under the auspices of an editor/editorial committee charged with keeping all the translators working in harmony with the same appreciation for the tenets of a Judaism free of sectarian influences, and who then and there gave the “miraculously perfect” product of that translation enterprise its name, “Septuagint." And yet there soon enough became identifiable a translational corpus of the Tanakh accessible to Jews and proselytes in Judea and in the diaspora all of them able or potentially able, of course, for communication with each other via the lingua franca Koine Greek. But no part of the enterprise of translating the Tanakh was either perfect or even known to have been overseen by religious authority in accordance with a nonsectarian body of editors working in close proximity. For a fact the LXX embraced scientific, historical, and spiritual error, as may be seen in its adoption from pagan Greek writers of, among other things, the concept that re’em was a singly-horned creature, and thus translatable as monokeros.
There is no empirical evidence which might dispose us to believe that there was in existence a perfect copying of the Scriptures. Indeed, all the Scriptural texts extant in manuscripts known to us are none of them an autograph, an original and perfect text from the hand of a God-inspired writer. Therefore, neither (a) the originally penned Greek-translations of the Hebrew Scriptures based on any Hebrew texts that had come into the hands of the translators--even if any or all of those Hebrew or Aramaic texts were, in the most unlikely of events, themselves the very autographs written by God-inspired Jews--nor (b) any of those original translations into Greek (which may well have been for a period of time a collection of scrolls placed together in an Alexandrian library and/or in the Temple in Jerusalem, and serving as templates for subsequent copies of those Greek translations, and which Augustine of Hippo called “libris septuaginta” = “the books of the seventy”) give us any reasonable expectation that they maintained the perfection of the autographs. So, we may hold that Josephus, Philo, Jerome, and Augustine were unreasonably optimistic and certainly in error when asserting that the original Greek translational works of the Tanakh were divinely inspired. Neither the original Jew-copied productions of the “Septuagint” (so made from the third-century BCE onward into the second century CE), nor the Latin Vulgate, nor the KJV English translation can any of them reasonably be viewed as embodiments of a perfect translational reflection of any of the texts that had come from the hands of God-inspired writers whether those writers be (a) the more than 39 writers of the perfect Hebrew autographs of the Tanakh or (b) the 8 writers of the 27 perfect autographs that closed out the Biblical canon in the first century as typically confessed—atypical confessions exist, too—by all traditions that lay claim to being true Christianity.
Scholars tell us that there were revisions of the “LXX” that contained extra-canonical but nonetheless highly esteemed Jewish writings. An example of such a revision is kaige-Theodotion (a revision style for improving the received Greek translation texts of the Hebrew Vorlagen) that, if not begun by Theodotion, was continued or standardized by Theodotion and included at least Baruch and the expanded version of Daniel, while Origen’s and Lucian’s revisions included most of the Apocrypha. For most revisions, however, we do not know vis-à-vis manuscript evidence how many of even the biblical (canonical) books were included in those revisions. Some of the revisions, such as the kaige-Theodotion and Aquila’s, were widely circulated among Jews.
