The much-quoted adage from Sidney Jellicoe ‗He who would read the New Testament must know Koine; but he who would understand the New Testament must know the LXX‘ has been rightly understood as an exhortation to NT scholars to acquaint themselves with the Old Testament Scriptures as produced and transmitted by Greek-speaking Jews of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Thanks to the work of Martin Menken, Steve Moyise, Craig Evans, Stanley Porter, David Lincicum, Ross Wagner, and others, much has been done on the aspect of exegesis of the scriptures by NT writers. However, it is also important to understand the ways in which Jesus-believers in the first and second centuries CE actually encountered Jewish scriptures in Greek, in terms of both text-type and physical format. Important surveys on early Christian manuscripts have been produced by Eldon Epp and Larry Hurtado in particular. However, there has been rather less work on Jewish Greek scriptures at the juncture between Judaism and Christianity, probably because the evidence is somewhat sparse and hard to interpret.
