The Spanish humanist Luis Vives is sometimes quoted as having been the first to have exposed the fictitious character of the Letter, in his In XXII libros de civitate Dei commentaria (Basel: Frobenius, 1522), on Aug. Book XVIII, 42. But a lecture of the Latin text reveals that Vives only transmitted Jerome’s criticisms of the Aristeas story, and added nothing critical of his own account. The inconsistencies and anachronisms of the author, exposed by many 17th-century scholars were collected and presented with great erudition and wit by Humphrey Hody (1659—1706), Hody placed the writing closer to 170-130 BCE. His Oxford dissertation of 1685 provoked an “angry and scurrilous reply” from Isaac Vossius (1618–1689), who had been librarian to Queen Christina of Sweden, in the appendix to his Observations on Pomponius Mela, 1686, to which Hody conclusively replied in notes to his reprint of 1705. Due to this, the author of the letter of Aristeas is most often referred to as pseudo-Aristeas.
Modern scholarship is unanimously with Hody. Victor Tcherikover (Hebrew University) summed up the scholarly consensus in 1958: “Modern scholars commonly regard the “Letter of Aristeas” as a work typical of Jewish apologetics, aiming at self-defense and propaganda, and directed to the Greeks. Here are some instances illustrating this general view. In 1903 Friedlander wrote that the glorification of Judaism in the letter was no more than self-defense, though “the book does not mention the antagonists of Judaism by name, nor does it admit that its intention is to refute direct attacks.” Stein sees in the letter “a special kind of defense, which practices diplomatic tactics,” and Tramontano also speaks of “an apologetic and propagandist tendency.”
Vincent characterizes it as “a small unapologetic novel written for the Egyptians” (i.e. the Greeks in Egypt). Pheiffer says: “This fanciful story of the origin of the Septuagint is merely a pretext for defending Judaism against its heathen denigrators, for extolling its nobility and reasonableness, and first striving to convert Greek speaking Gentiles to it.” Schürer classes the letter with a special kind of literature, “Jewish propaganda in Pagan disguise,” whose works are “directed to the pagan reader, in order to make propaganda for Judaism among the Gentiles.”
Andrews, too, believes that the role of a Greek was assumed by Aristeas in order “to strengthen the force of the argument and commend it to non-Jewish readers. Even Gutman, who rightly recognizes that the Letter sprang ‘from an inner need of the educated Jew,’ sees in it ‘a strong means for making Jewish propaganda in the Greek world.’ ” But Tcherikover continues, “In this article an attempt will be made to prove that the Letter of Aristeas was not written with the aim of self-defense or propaganda, and was addressed not to Greek, but to Jewish readers.”
In 2001, Bruce Metzger writes: Most scholars who have analyzed the letter have concluded that the author cannot have been the man he represented himself to be but was a Jew who wrote a fictitious account in order to enhance the importance of the Hebrew Scriptures by suggesting that a pagan king had recognized their significance and therefore arranged for their translation into Greek. Scholars avid for the scant information about the Library and the Musaeum of Alexandria have depended on ps-Aristeas, who “has that least attractive quality in a source: to be trusted only where corroborated by better evidence, and there unneeded,” Roger Bagnall concluded.
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