Theodotion

Theodotion's Greek version belongs to the Hebrew Bible tradition and survives today in substantial fragments. Working from the Hebrew together with a Greek predecessor, it takes as its base text the Hebrew Bible and earlier Greek Scripture, with the Septuagint or Old Greek serving as predecessor and base translation. As a translation or revision tradition it stands closer to the Hebrew than the Old Greek does, while remaining less extreme in its literalism than Aquila, and it is thus commonly grouped with the other early revisions of the Greek Scriptures. Its importance is heightened by its reception: Christians largely replaced the Old Greek text of Daniel with a Theodotionic form, so that the version passed into wide ecclesiastical use in that book. A distinctive complication for scholarship is that the historical Theodotion and the earlier kaige or Theodotionic revision phenomenon are not perfectly identical.