Simeon the God-Receiver (Luke 2:21–35) as a Translator of the Septuagint: Investigating the Sources of a Popular Hagiographic Legend in Orthodox Christianity

Abstract

The legend of the old man Simeon, who received Jesus in his arms and was one of the Septuagint translators, is almost unknown in Western Christianity but is very popular today among Orthodox Christians. The version circulating in Orthodox churches is based on the account in Demetrius of Rostov’s Lives of the Saints. The article explores the occurrences of the legend in modern, medieval Slavonic, Byzantine, and oriental writings and attempts to identify the stages of the transmission of the legend from antiquity to modern times. The historical analysis and the comparison of the motifs found in these writings make the hypothesis of a Byzantine archetype of the legend plausible. This writing has been lost, but it was previously translated into Syriac, Arabic, and Slavonic, contributing to the spread of the legend in Eastern and Slavic Christianity. The legend builds on the identification of Simeon in Luke’s Gospel with Shimʿon ha-Tsaddiq. It interprets Luke 2:26 by constructing a pre-history of the episode that places Simeon into the time of the Septuagint translation. The miracle of prolonging Righteous Simeon’s life functions as a reconfirmation of the fundamental character of Isaiah 7:14 for Christianity.

1. Introduction

I have taught Old Testament courses in an Orthodox theological faculty for almost 20 years. Every year, one of my lectures is on the Septuagint, the most well-known ancient translation of the Hebrew Bible. Inevitably, every time I talk about the seventy-two translators who, according to the Letter of Aristeas, translated the Hebrew text into Greek, one of the students makes the following remark: among the seventy of them was St. Simeon. The story goes that when translating the text of Isaiah 7:14, Simeon doubted that a virgin could give birth and wanted to change the word “virgin”. God let him live until the day Jesus was brought to the temple by his mother and the righteous Joseph, as the Gospel relates (Luke 2:21–35).

Following the definition given by Hyppolite Delehaye, this account can be framed as a hagiographic legend:

The legend, on the other hand, has, of necessity, some historical or topographical connection. It refers imaginary events to some real personage, or it localizes romantic stories in some definite spot.

(Delehaye 1907, p. 14)

The legend about Simeon the God-receiver has an almost dogmatic status for young theologians. Only after discussing with Professor Kai Brodersen, who translated the Epistle of Aristeas into German (Brodersen 2008), I became interested in the legend’s origin. I asked him what he thought of the tradition about Simeon as a translator of the Septuagint, and he replied that he did not know it. Only then did I realize that the legend is almost, if not wholly, unknown in Western Christianity. There is barely any scholarship that has addressed the legend, and it explores the antiquity occurrences of the legend. J. F. Coakley encountered the legend in the form of a brief note among the various traditions about Simeon in Syriac Christianity of the first millennium (Coakley 1981). Abraham and David Wasserstein encountered the legend as a hagiographic narrative in Arabic, Coptic, and Ethiopian Christianity between the 10th and 13th centuries (Wasserstein and Wasserstein 2006). In a more recent study, Eveline van Staalduine-Sulman reworks the findings of Coakley and Wasserstein and Wasserstein (Staalduine-Sulman 2019). None of these works deal with the legends circulating in Orthodox Christianity today and their transmission.

This article aims to investigate the origins of the legend of Simeon as a translator of the Septuagint and to identify stages of its transmission from antiquity to the present. From a methodological point of view, we will resort to the historical and literary analysis of writings from different periods. First, we will explore the versions used in other Orthodox churches today. Then, we will try to identify the writings that attest to the legend in the preceding centuries and the medieval era and subject them to a comparative analysis. We hypothesize that the source of the present-day legend is to be sought in the hagiographic literature circulated in Byzantine Orthodox churches in the second Christian millennium.

2. Versions of the Legend in Circulation in Today’s Orthodox Churches

The legend of translating the Torah from Hebrew to Greek was transmitted in the ancient epistolary novel The Letter of Aristeas. Although for centuries it was considered authentic writing, scholars today consider the Letter to be pseudo-epigraphic writing that appeared in Hellenistic Judaism, most probably in the 2nd century BC (Pelletier 1962, p. 58; Tilly 2007; Shutt 1992, p. 381; Brodersen 2008, pp. 10–11). The letter’s author describes the context in which, in the time of King Ptolemy II Philadelphus (282–246 BC), the Torah was translated into Greek in Alexandria by 70 (actually 72) Jewish scholars from Jerusalem. Hence the name Septuagint (literally “of the seventy”). Chapters 47–49 of the Letter list the 72 translators, divided according to the 12 tribes of Israel. Among them are three persons named “Simon” (Pelletier 1962, p. 130).

But from here, identifying one of the three with the Simeon mentioned in the Gospel of Luke is a long way off. So, from where do students learn this legend about Simeon? From the book Viețile Sfinților (“The Lives of the Saints”). This 12-volume work, corresponding to the months of the year, is one of the most popular writings among Orthodox Christians. It is not a liturgical book, but passages from it are sometimes read at Mass during the communion of the faithful. In monasteries, it is read to monks during meals. The Church recommended it to the faithful as a private reading to strengthen piety. Thus, the Lives of the Saints became one of the most widely read Romanian books.

Holy, Righteous Simeon is commemorated on February 3 in the Orthodox Church’s calendar, the day after the feast of Hypapante (February 2). The legend of the righteous Simeon is contained in volume 6 (February) of the Lives of the Saints. Here is my English translation of the legend.

According to the testimony of the Holy Gospel, Simeon, the elder, was a righteous and faithful man, waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him. God made him aware of the coming of the true Messiah, soon to be in the world. And it was made known unto him, as the ancient historians relate, when, by the commandment of Ptolemy, king of Egypt, the law of Moses and all the prophecies were translated from Hebrew into Greek. For this work were chosen wise men of Israel, seventy in number, among whom was St. Simeon, as one wise and skillful in the divine Scriptures. And when he was interpreting the words of Isaiah the prophet and came to the words, “Behold, the virgin shall conceive in her womb, and bear a son”, he doubted, saying, “It is not possible that a virgin, not knowing a man, should be able to give birth”; and taking a knife, he was willing to scrape off the words. But the angel of the Lord appeared and held his hand, saying: “Be not unbelieving of those things which are written, whose fulfillment you alone shall see. You will not taste death until you see Him who will be born of the Most Holy Virgin, Christ the Lord”. So he, believing the angelic and prophesied words, longed for the coming of Christ into the world.

[Here follows the paraphrase of the episode from Lk 2:25–35.]

And so, thanks to God, he passed peacefully into his old age. For it is written of him that he lived 360 years—God thus lengthening his life—that the time might come, which was desired from everlasting, when the eternal Son was born of the Blessed Virgin […].

(Episcopia Romanului 1999, pp. 36–37)1

The legend is not only popular among Orthodox Romanians. It can be read in Greek, Russian, Serbian, and English on the websites of many Orthodox churches.2 Metropolitan Nicolae Velimirovich included it in his Prologues from Ochrid (1928), written in Serbian and translated into many languages, thus contributing significantly to the legend’s popularization. The most recent English edition appeared in 2008 (Velimirovich 2008).

However, there is also a certain reticence about the legend’s content, especially in the Greek Church. It was not accepted by St. Nicodemus the Hagiorite (1749–1809), a person of great authority in the modern Greek Church (Macarie 2011a, p. 29). St. Nicodemus does not mention the Septuagint legend in his account of the life of St. Simeon (Nicodemus the Hagiorite 1819, pp. 101–2). Nor do we find it in the Agiologion of Sophronios Eustratiadis (Eustratiadis 1961, p. 436).

Of the hagiographical resources in Greek, only Konstantinos Doukakis (1840–1908) mentions the tradition of Simeon as a translator of the LXX. In the February volume of O Megas Sinaxaristis, Doukakis first mentions the tradition that Simeon was a priest and adds that

[…] others (ἄλλοι) say that he was one of the seventy translators of the Old Testament in the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus. While translating [the text] “Behold, the virgin shall conceive”, and because he doubted it, he received a divine oracle, that he should live until he should receive in his arms the one prophesied to be born of the Virgin.

(Doukakis 1958, pp. 37–38)

Doukakis also mentions other traditions about Simeon handed down by “others”, such as that Simeon was the son of Hillel or that he was president of the Sanhedrin (Doukakis 1958, p. 38). However, none of these traditions appear as an extended narrative, as with the legends in the Romanian, Russian, and Serbian hagiographical traditions.

Anyway, the official Greek version of The Great Synaxaristes summarizes the account in Luke 2:25–35 and excerpts from the writings of St. Athanasius and St. Amphilochius on Simeon. There is no reference to Simeon as a translator of the Old Testament.3

3. The Main Source of the Modern Legend: Saint Demetrius of Rostov’s Lives of the Saints

The legend of Simeon the God-receiver as a translator of the Bible must have entered the Romanian Orthodox space through the translation of Slavonic church literature, but not earlier than the 18th century. Metropolitan Dosoftei’s Lives of the Saints, the oldest hagiographical work in Romanian culture (1682–1686), does not contain the legend (Frențiu 2002, p. 256; Mihăilescu 2014).

Indeed, the legend about Simeon is contained in the hagiographic work of St. Demetrius of Rostov Kнигa житий cвятыx (“The Book of Lives of the Saints”). Published in Kyiv in four volumes (1689, 1690, 1700, and 1705), it was written in Church Slavonic, and an adapted Russian translation was done only in 1903–1911 (reprinted in 2004). Below is the English translation of a passage on Simeon (after the 2004 reprint).4

According to the testimony of the Divine Gospel, the elder Simeon was righteous and pious, awaiting the consolation of Israel and the Holy Spirit abode upon him. God announced to him the approaching coming of the true Messiah into the world. Ancient historians narrate the following about Simeon receiving this oracle. By order of the Egyptian king Ptolemy, a translation of the law of Moses and the books of the prophets from the Hebrew into Greek was undertaken. Seventy of the most learned men were chosen from all the Jewish people for this work.

Among them was Simeon, a wise man well-versed in the Divine Scriptures. Translating the book of the prophet Isaiah, Simeon came to the words, “Behold, a virgin shall conceive in her womb and bear a son”. Reading them, he doubted, thinking that it was impossible for a woman who did not have a husband to give birth. Simeon had already taken a knife and wanted to erase these words from the scroll and change the word “virgin” to the word “woman”. But at that moment, the angel of the Lord appeared to him and, holding him by the hand, said: “Have faith in the written words, and you will see their fulfillment, for you will not see death before you see Christ the Lord, who is to be born of the pure Virgin”.

Having believed in the angelic and prophetic words, Simeon eagerly awaited Christ’s coming into the world. He led a righteous and blameless life, avoiding all evil and abiding unceasingly in the temple of God. There, Simeon prayed to God that He would have mercy on His world and deliver the people from the all-evil devil.

When our Lord Jesus Christ, after forty days had passed since His birth, was brought by the hands of His Most Pure Mother, according to the custom of the law, to the temple, at that time, the righteous Simeon came there, led by the Spirit of God. When he saw the Infant and the Most Pure Virgin who gave birth to Him, he knew that this was the promised Messiah, and this was the Virgin in whom the prophecy of Isaiah was to be fulfilled and was fulfilled. Seeing Her illuminated by heavenly light and shining with Divine rays, Simeon approached Her with fear and joy, took the Divine Infant into his arms, and said: [here follows the Nunc dimittis, Luke 2:29–32]. After this, he prophesied about the sufferings of Christ and of His crucifixion, and also of the Virgin, that her soul would be pierced by the weapon of sorrow and grief when she saw her son hanging on the cross.

Having reached a ripe old age, Simeon departed to the Lord. It is written about him that he lived three hundred and sixty years, for it pleased God to prolong the life of the holy elder so that he could live unto the year long-awaited throughout all ages, when the Timeless Son was born from the Virgin, to Whom be glory forever, amen!

(St. Demetrius of Rostov 2004, pp. 30–32)

The dependence of the versions circulating in Orthodox churches today on the text of St. Demetrius is undeniable. Naturally, one would ask what the source from which St. Demetrius drew when he wrote about the Righteous Simeon was.

4. Demetrius of Rostov’s Primary Source: The Chetyi Minei of Macarius

It would not have been difficult for Demetrius to compose the vita of Simeon, the God-receiver himself. Dimitrij Tuptalo (1651–1709) received a thorough education in his schools, where he learned Greek, Latin, and Polish (Berndt 1975, pp. 22, 24). He was a gifted and highly regarded preacher, author of religious poetry and drama, and various religious and historical writings (Berndt 1975, pp. 24–38). His passion for books and literature is also illustrated by his will, in which he wrote that the only thing he had collected in a lifetime was his library (Berndt 1975, p. 38), which numbered 288 books (Rothe 1984, p. 28). However, bearing in mind that fidelity to tradition is a fundamental principle in the Orthodox Church, it is very likely that Demetrius used sources.

A. O. Krylov lists the following hagiographical sources that St. Demetrius used: the Prologue (1685), Metropolitan Macarius of Moscow’s Velikiye Chetyi Minei, the Paterikon of Kiev-Pechersk (1661), Laurentius Surius’ hagiographical collection De Probatis Sanctorum Historiis, which contained the lives of Simeon Metaphrast in Latin translation, and the volumes Acta Sanctorum of the Bollanditists for January-May (Krylov 2017, p. 53). An exploration of two of the sources mentioned above (Acta Sanctorum and the writing of Laurentius Surius) shows that they do not contain the legend of Simeon, so Demetrius did not take it from here. The Paterikon of the Pecerskaya Lavra contains only the lives of the saints who lived in this monastery.

The primary source must have been the Velikiye Chetyi Minei (“Great Menaion Reader”) of Metropolitan Macarius of Moscow. In the 16th century, Metropolitan Macarius attempted to collect all the books on the territory of Russia, which involved a massive translation of Greek writings. Of about 1000 lives of saints, only 40 were written by Russians (Fedotov 1946, p. 41). It is the most grandiose project in the history of Russian book writing and the most complete collection of reading texts known in Russia until the mid-16th century (Lyakhovitsky and Shibaev 2017, p. 262).

Because of his literary talent, Demetrius was commissioned to revise the Lives of the Saints in 1681, when he was a monk at the Pecerskaya monastery in Kyiv. A new edition was necessary since Metropolitan Macarius’ Chetyi Minei was hard to find, and there was no writing in the Greek Church as comprehensive as that of Macarius. To revise it, the Patriarchate of Moscow gave him the volumes of the Chetyi Minei (Berndt 1975, pp. 25–28). Scholars consider Demetrius’s manner of revision to be conducted by a critical spirit. From the sources available to him, Demetrius took only what seemed plausible or historically confirmed about the life of a saint (Berndt 1975, p. 26).

The text does indeed appear in Chetyi Minei. Below is the English translation from the manuscript Sophia 1320, f 31a.5

Saint Simeon was of the tribe of Levi, the son of Onias, the great priest. When they translated the Law of Moses for King Ptolemy of Egypt, Simeon translated the [book of] prophet Isaiah. And he wrote the most important words: “Behold, the virgin shall conceive, and bear a Son, Christ the Lord”. And he took a knife and wanted to wipe it out. And the angel took him by the hand, saying unto him: “Do not reject the things which are written, for so it shall be. And indeed, until you take him in your arms, you will not taste death”. And he was righteous and blameless. And he stood by the Temple, praying God to have mercy on his world. And he waited to see what the angel had spoken to him.

(Macarius of Moscow 1541)

Demetrius of Rostov adapted this text. He omitted the information that Simeon was a priest and added an explanation for why Simeon wanted to delete the text: he did not believe that a virgin could give birth, so he tried to replace “virgin” with “woman”. Demetrius rewrote the legend of Simeon using sources, enriching the story in a manner that befitted his writing talent.

But with the elucidation of the Slavonic source of the legend of Simeon, new questions arise: where did the legend in Chetyi Minei of Macarius come from? Is it a genuine creation of Slavic hagiography? Much of medieval Slavonic writing was translated from Byzantine Greek literature. Might the legend of Simeon originate from the Byzantine hagiographical tradition?

5. Investigating the Byzantine Sources of the Legend

Before exploring the possible Byzantine sources of the legend, a brief overview of Orthodox hagiographical literature is necessary. Collections about the lives of saints are called “synaxarion” or “menologion” in Orthodox churches. It should be noted that the two names have been used with different meanings over the ages in Eastern Christianity, which can lead to confusion (Delehaye 1895, p. 396; Noret 1968, p. 21). For the following analysis, I consider it sufficient to distinguish between three classes of hagiographical texts:

• lists of saints’ names arranged in calendar order. These are also the shortest hagiographical texts. Such lists, followed by an indication of the biblical readings of the day and referred to by scholars as ‘minor synaxaria’, frequently appear as appendices in liturgical books containing the Gospel and Apostolic readings used in worship. They are probably the earliest forms of hagiographical literature (Delehaye 1895, p. 402; Noret 1968, pp. 21–22).
• historical accounts of the lives of the saints of the Menaion, the book containing the hymns used in services on each day of a month. Thus, 12 volumes of Menaia correspond to each month of the year. The account of the lives of the saints of the day (“synaxary”) is contained between Canticle six and seven of the daily Canon. These short accounts were also collected as a single book in Constantinople, beginning from the 10th century (Thomas and Mallet 2011, p. 575). The latter category includes the Menologion of Basil II (ca. 1000 CE) or the Sinaxary of Constantinople (10th century).
• extensive accounts of the lives of the saints of the year, arranged according to the days of a liturgical year and collected in several volumes (usually 12), traditionally called “Menologion”. The accounts vary in length and include historical data and legendary elements. The earliest menologion is the collection of lives compiled by Simeon Metaphrastes (10th century), which later served as a model for hagiographical collections and was translated into Church Slavonic. To this class belong also the writings of the Slavic hagiographical tradition to which we have already referred: the Great Menaion Reader of Macarius of Moscow and the Lives of the Saints of Demetrius of Rostov. The popularity of this type of literature among the faithful led F. Halkin to consider them the “best-sellers” of their time (Halkin 1973, p. 345; apud Rosalind Y. McKenzie 1998, p. 16).

Suppose we search these three classes of Byzantine hagiographical writings for the legend of Simeon as translator of the Septuagint, as we know it from Demetrius of Rostov. In that case, the result will be below expectations. The Menologion of Basil II summarizes the account in Luke 2. The only detail in common with the legend is that Simeon received the oracle of the Holy Spirit from an angel and prayed in the temple that God would have mercy on the world. But this is too little to be an allusion to the legend of Simeon as translator of the Bible.

Commemoration of the holy and righteous Simeon, who received the Lord in his arms, and of the prophetess Anna. Elder Simeon was upright and pious and abstaining from all evil. He went to the temple and prayed to God to have mercy on His world and deliver people from the devil. He had heard from the angel (παρὰ τοῦ ἀγγέλου) that he would not die until he had seen the Lord Christ, the One who was to come to save the entire world.

(PG 117:292–93)

The Synaxary of Constantinople (10th century) notes on 3 February that “the memorial of the saint and the righteous Simeon, who received the Lord in his arms, and of Anna are commemorated. Their synaxis is held in the chapel of St James, the brother of the Lord, which is in the venerable church of the Most Holy in Chalkopreteia” (ed. Delehaye 1902, pp. 439–40).

The same text is to be found in the Menaion currently used in the Orthodox churches, but with two additions: a short epigram in verse praising the saint and a summary of the Gospel account. The verses seem to contain an allusion to Simeon as translator of the Bible:

• To the dead, the elder proclaimed that God, being the Word,
• as a man will come even to them.
• On the third day, Simeon was loosed
• from the bonds of the body.
(Koutloumousianos 1905, p. 22)

These verses were probably added later to the historical note, but still in Byzantine times. The actual structure of the Menaia used in the Byzantine rite became fixed in the 11th-12th centuries (Taft 1991, p. 1338). However, for someone who does not know the legend, it is hard to understand that the “dead” are those who lived during Old Testament times and that Simeon “proclaimed” them in the sense that he translated for them the prophecies about Christ’s coming. The canon of the Menaion dedicated to St. Simeon was composed by Joseph the Hymnographer (c. 812/818–86), one of the most prolific Byzantine hymnographers (Papaioannou 2021, p. 445). Joseph takes up the apocryphal tradition that Simeon was a priest but does not give the slightest hint that the saint translated the Bible.

The Imperial Menologion is the earliest Greek source that explicitly mentions that the Righteous Simeon contributed to translating the Septuagint. The text was composed during the reign of Emperor Michael the Paphlagonian (1034–1045), as is evident from the acrostic of the final prayer of this homily (Halkin and Festugière 1984, p. 7). But there is no hint that Simeon doubted the prophecy of Isaiah 7:14. On the contrary, the author of the sermon praises Simeon, claiming that the Bible translation is evidence of his enlightened mind. Based on the teaching of Matt 5:5, the author believes that because of Simeon’s purity of heart, God allowed him to live hundreds of years and to see Christ (Halkin and Festugière 1984, p. 12).

It is worth noting that F. Halkin, the editor of this homily, considers the motif of Simeon as a translator of the LXX as unusual. The legend seems to be a rare occurrence in the Byzantine sources known today. Of Byzantine historians, only two seem to be acquainted with the legend. Zygabenus (+after 1118) states that “I too have found in certain writings concerning this righteous man that he was among the seventy translators” (Coakley 1981, p. 208). George Kedrenos (11th or 12th century) explicitly refers to the legend of Simeon as a translator of the Septuagint. This is the text from Bekker’s edition (Bekker 1838, p. 328) in English translation:

And after 40 days, [Jesus] was brought to Jerusalem to be presented to the Lord according to the law. And he was received by the righteous Simeon. This Simeon the God-receiver (Θεοδόχος) was a Jew. He was one of the seventy translators of the Old Testament Scriptures from Hebrew into Greek, in the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus, king of Egypt, before the coming of Christ, as the divine Chrysostom says in his Hexaemeron. As he was reading Isaiah’s prophecy, “Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel”, he doubted these things, saying that according to human nature, a virgin cannot give birth. Then, he received a divine revelation that he would live until the fulfillment of the divine prophecy. This is why the divine Gospel teaches that “the Holy Spirit was upon him. And he received an oracle from the Holy Spirit that he should not see death before seeing Christ the Lord”. While in the temple, he saw the 40-day-old child and received him in his arms, joyfully saying, “Now deliver your servant, O Lord, in peace”.

Nicephorus Callistus (†1335) has the story about Simeon having doubts about the possibility that a virgin shall conceive, as stated in Isa 7:14. The angel eventually teaches him that he will not die until he sees this prophecy fulfilled. Nicephorus does not make Simeon one of the LXX translators (Ecclesiasticae Historiae 1.12).6

Both Zygabenus and Kedrenos claim to have taken up this tradition. Zygabenos doesn’t name the source, while Kedrenos says he found the legend in John Chrysostom’s Hexaemeron, a writing unknown today.

6. Oriental Sources of the Legend

But even before Kedrenos, the legend of Simeon translating the Septuagint was already known to some Oriental Christian writers. Their brief presentation is welcome since we shall note approximations of the version in Chetyi Minei and Demetrius of Rostov. I will begin with the shorter legend descriptions and then expound on the extended ones.7

6.1. Syriac Sources

The Syrian writer Dionysius Bar-Salibi (+1171) lists seven different traditions concerning the identity of Elder Simeon. One of them is directly related to the legend that interests us. I reproduce the text after Coakley’s translation:

Others [say]: he was one of the 72 translators. And when he was rendering the book of Isaiah from the Hebrew language into the Greek at the command of Ptolemy in Egypt, he doubted (and said): “A virgin cannot conceive and give birth”. And he was bound 278 years until Christ.

(Coakley 1981, pp. 189–90)

Before Dionysius, the same list appears in the text known as the Book of Homilies attributed to Moše bar Kepha (+903).8 The list is appended to a homily on the Circumcision of Christ and introduced by the words “from the commentary on Luke” (Coakley 1981, p. 190). It is possible that that commentary had a narrative about Simeon and the Septuagint.

6.2. Arabic Sources

The earliest extended account of the legend of the Septuagint translation in which Simeon the Godreceiver is said to have participated appears in the chronography of Eutychius, the Melkite patriarch of Alexandria (+949). Eutychius wrote his history in Arabic. He renders the history in the Epistle of Aristeas with the addition of the miracle of identical translations, first attested in St. Irenaeus (Adversus Haereses 3.21.2). According to the story of Irenaeus, although the translators were housed in separate rooms, their translations were identical.

In the twentieth year of his reign, he [Ptolemy] sent to Jerusalem and summoned from there seventy men of the Jews to Alexandria, and he ordered them to translate for him the Torah and the books of the Prophets from Hebrew into Greek, and he placed each one of them in a house alone, on his own, so that he could see how the translation of each of them would be. And when they had translated the books, he looked at their translations and the translation was identical (lit. single), with no difference(s) in it. […].

And among the seventy was a man whose name was Sam‘an al-Siddiq (i.e., Simeon the Just) who took our Lord the Masih from the Temple. And when Sam‘an translated the Torah and the books of the Prophets from Hebrew to Greek, whenever he translated a word in which there was a prophecy about the Lord the Masih, he would deny that in his heart and say “This is what cannot be”. But God made him live long so that he lived three hundred and fifty years until he saw our Lord the Masih. And when he saw him, he said, “Now, O Lord, release Your servant in accordance with Your word, in peace, for my eyes have seen Your redemption, which You prepared before all the peoples”..

(Wasserstein and Wasserstein 2006, p. 141)

Eutychius’ version appears in extended narrative form in only two other Arabic sources: al-Makin and the Jacobite Coptic synaxarium.9 In addition to these is the account in the Ethiopic synaxarium, which is basically a translation of that in the Jacobite synaxarium, with minor differences (Budge 1928b, pp. 602–4; Wasserstein and Wasserstein 2006, p. 169). For space reasons, we will reproduce below only the passage from the Jacobite synaxarium that refers to Simeon.

On this day occurred the entry of the Lord the Masih into the Temple forty days after his glorious birth. […] And Simeon the priest bore him in his arms—and this Simeon was a righteous man; and when Ptolemy the conqueror ruled in the year 5204 since our father Adam, he ruled also over the Jewish people, and he sent to the city of Jerusalem at the instruction of God and summoned seventy men from among the learned men of the Jews, and their judges and rabbis, and ordered them to interpret for him all the books of the Law and to translate them from the Hebrew language into the Greek language.

[here follows the addition of the miracle]

And when they all translated the whole of the law, Simeon the Just struggled with the words of Isaiah [7:14]: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and shall bear a son”; he was afraid to write “a virgin shall conceive”, lest the king make fun of him, and not accept what he had written, and think that he was misleading him in what he wrote; so he wrote, in place of “virgin”, “girl”. Then he had internal doubts, and he said (to himself) that a virgin should give birth, which is something that cannot be. And while he was thinking this, God sent drowsiness down upon him, and he slept. And (in his sleep) an angel of God appeared to him and said to him, This is the one about whom you doubted that you would see death before you saw the masih who is born of a virgin. And he lived after that for nearly three hundred years, until the Lord Masih was born, and he went up with him (sic) on this day to the Temple; and Simeon was blind, and when he took him in his arms he (was able to) see, and the Holy Spirit told him that “this is the one for whom you are waiting”, and he blessed God and said Now, O Lord, release thy servant, for He because of whom I have been bound to the life of this world that passes away has come, and I have seen Him […].

(Wasserstein and Wasserstein 2006, pp. 165–66)

Eutychius and the Jacobite synaxarium have in common the miracle of identical translations. Moreover, in both writings, Simeon is called “Simeon the Just”. Here, we have evidence of a symbiosis of Christian and Jewish traditions. Simeon of the Gospel, described as “being just” (Luke 2:25), is identified with Shimʿon ha-Tsaddiq, a character known in ancient Jewish literature, whom Josephus and Eusebius of Caesarea considered contemporary with the Septuagint translation (Coakley 1981, p. 208; Wasserstein and Wasserstein 2006, p. 143).

The remarkable difference is that Eutychius does not explicitly mention Isaiah 7:14 as the source of Simeon’s doubt, whereas the Jacobite synaxarium does. In assessing Simeon’s age, the two accounts do not differ significantly. Eutychius says that Simeon was 350 when he received Christ, and the Jacobite synaxarium states that he lived almost 300 years to see Jesus. This means that the author of the Jacobite synaxarium estimated that Simeon was around 50 when he translated Isaiah 7:14. All of these observations make it likely that the Jacobite synaxarium version amplifies the history Eutychius gave.

7. Comparing the Modern, Byzantine, and Oriental Sources of the Legend

The table below (

Table 1. Synopsis of sources.

	D. Bar-Salibi	Eutychius	Jacobite Sinaxary	Modern Orthodox	Demetrius of Rostov	Chetyi Minei	Kedrenos
Translators	72	70	70	70	70	70	70
Identical translation	-	yes	yes	-	-	-	-
Translated text	Isaiah 7:14	“prophecy about the Lord the Masih”	Isaiah 7:14	Isaiah 7:14	Isaiah 7:14	Isaiah 7:14	Isaiah 7:14
Simeon’s doubt	-	yes	yes		yes	-	yes
Text correction	-	-	“girl” instead of “virgin”	“girl” instead of “virgin”	“woman” instead of “virgin”	(implicit)	-
Scraping-knife	-	-	-	yes	yes	yes	-
Oracle from	-	-	an angel (dream)	an angel	an angel	an angel	the Holy Spirit
Time from LXX to Luke 2	278		Nearly 300			-	-
Age of Simeon		350		360	360		-
Indication of source	Others say	-	-	Ancient historians	Ancient historians	-	Chrysostom

) highlights the similarities and differences in the versions discussed above.

As the comparison of sources shows, Demetrius’ and modern Orthodox versions are very close to the Coptic and Ethiopic versions, which depend on the version in Eutychius.

The proper element in the Slavonic tradition is the “knife” with which Simeon sought to correct the text of Isaiah 7:14. The detail is not anachronistic, for the copying of biblical scrolls in ancient Judaism often implied corrections, and abrasion was one of the methods used by scribes (Tov 2002, pp. 189–209). The erasure method by abrasion was also widely used by medieval scribes, especially in monastic copying (Wakelin 2014, pp. 103–4). The knife was most likely added to the narrative for the dramatic effect it introduces.

8. The Hypothesis of the Lost Byzantine Source of the Legend

Coakley suggests that the tradition retained by Moše bar Kepha and Dionysius Bar-Salibi may be of Syriac origin. Still, the version found at Kedrenos suggests a Greek original that was taken over by the Syriac tradition (Coakley 1981, pp. 208–9). Budge considers that the lives in the Ethiopian synaxarium were translated from the Arabic ‘lives of saints’, which were translated from Coptic, and these from Greek and sometimes Syriac originals. The compilation was probably made in the 12th century (Budge 1928a, pp. xiii–xvi).

Thus, the existence of a Byzantine archetype of the legend of Simeon as a translator of the Septuagint is plausible. This Greek source has been translated into Syriac, Arabic, and Slavonic and underlies the Eastern and Slavic versions. Of course, the hypothesis of a Greek Urtext is highly speculative since material evidence is lacking. But there are some arguments in its favor.

The legend is essentially an apology for the correctness of the Septuagint text. Such an apology makes sense in a Greek-speaking community that uses the Septuagint as the text of the Old Testament. It would have been unlikely that the legend would have arisen in a Christian community that spoke another language and used a Syriac, Arabic, or Ethiopic translation of the Old Testament.

The monasteries in Byzantium possessed significant collections of manuscripts, which the monks copied and translated. The monks living in the same monastery came from different parts of the Orient, and among them were speakers of Arabic, Syriac, and Greek (Lüstraeten 2021, pp. 7–8). This multilingual context facilitated the translation of Byzantine manuscripts from Greek into other languages.

Although it has not been possible for us to find a Byzantine Greek source of the legend of Simeon as a translator of the Bible, we can assume that it existed in the 8th or 9th century. That source could be the writing that Kedrenos calls “Chrysostom’s Hexaemeron”. From Greek, the legend was picked up in other languages, probably in one of the monasteries of Palestine, from where it spread to the Orient in the 10th-14th centuries. However, the Greek archetype of the legend did not enjoy a favorable reception in Greek ecclesiastical circles. At most, the legend was transmitted in abridged form, reduced to the information that Simeon was one of the translators of the LXX and that he doubted the prophecy of Isa 7:14, as Kedrenos retained it. The Slavonic version of the Simeon legend was probably translated from Greek by Bulgarian or Russian monks in Constantinople or Athos sometime after the 11th century. Much Byzantine Greek literature entered Russia via the Bulgarian route (Fedotov I, pp. 40, 49).

The legend interprets Luke 2:25–35, departing from verse 26: “It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Messiah”. Any reader or listener of this verse will have wondered when the Holy Spirit promised Simeon that he would not see death. The legend answers this question by constructing a pre-history of the episode, with Simeon being one of the translators of the Bible mentioned by the Letter of Aristeas. The text of Isa 7:14 in the LXX version was understood as messianic prophecy by the New Testament authors (Matt 1:23) and the Church Fathers. By associating a miracle with the genesis of Isaiah 7:14, even more authority was given to this prophecy, which had long been regarded as fundamental to the Christian faith.

9. Conclusions

The legend of Simeon as one of the translators of the Septuagint was popularized in the Orthodox Churches with Demetrius of Rostov’s Lives of the Saints in the late 17th century. However, the legend existed in Slavic tradition in earlier centuries as well. The existence of the legend in Oriental Christianity in the 10th–14th century in a form very close to that of St. Demetrius supports the hypothesis of a Byzantine archetype of the legend. The Greek version has not survived. Before it was lost, translations into Syriac, Arabic and Slavonic were made between the 10th and 13th centuries.

It is possible that the legend arose as a consequence of the identification of Simeon in Luke’s Gospel with Shimʿon ha-Tsaddiq. Thus, Simeon was placed in the context of the Septuagint translation described in the Letter of Aristeas and relatively well known in the Church as early as the 3rd and 4th centuries (Wasserstein and Wasserstein 2006, pp. 95–131).

Despite the lack of a historical basis for this legend, the analysis shed light on the art of storytelling and the creativity of Byzantine writers when retelling and rewriting biblical narratives.