I ended last week’s article with a question why the Jewish scriptures were translated to Greek.  Alexander the Great had conquered most of the known world, taking the Greek language with him. Around the same time because of persecution, Jewish Christians fled to other major cities such as, Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch.  This dispersion is what is known as diaspora.  The Jews who lived outside of Judea, for the most part, spoke Greek and had adopted many other aspects of Greek culture. In the book of Acts, Luke refers to them as Hellenists. Luke calls the Jews who lived in and around Jerusalem Hebrews, and they spoke Aramaic or Hebrew. On the day of Pentecost, Jerusalem had been filled with Hellenistic Jews from Greek-speaking countries who were in town to celebrate the religious feast. Many of these Hellenistic Jews accepted the Gospel message they heard being preached by Peter, so the first Christian community is composed of two groups of messianic Jews—Hellenists and Hebrews. This situation required the Hebrew scriptures to be translated into Greek.  This translation happened around 3 B.C and is called the Septuagint.  In Latin this means seventy.  According to the legend, during the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus of Egypt (285-246 BC), he requested Eleazar, the chief priest in Jerusalem, for seventy-two men that includes elders from each tribe of Israel to translate Torah into Greek.   Upon arrival in Alexandria, Egypt they were placed in a secluded place.  They took seventy-two days to complete the translation.  Though they translated them individually, all the translations agreed with each other perfectly.  From the letters that were written at that time some of the information in the legend can be verified, but not all.  All throughout ancient literature and letters the authors wanted to communicate a central idea or an event but ignored the actual details of how that event transpired.  This is not how we look at history in present day literature.  Comparing ancient literature with the present-day historical literature leads to question the authenticity of the Bible.