The real tension over the Septuagint emerged after Jesus’ lifetime

There’s no evidence that Jesus ever addressed the Septuagint at all—either to ban it or to endorse it.

Jesus and his disciples used Hebrew scrolls from the synagogue; when Jesus read from Isaiah in Nazareth, he received a Hebrew scroll.[1] However, this doesn’t mean he rejected Greek translations. Even in Palestine, including Jerusalem, many Greek-speaking Jews—Hellenists—worshipped in synagogues where scriptures were read in Greek.[1] Jesus’ own use of Hebrew texts simply reflected the linguistic context of his immediate ministry in Judea.

The real tension over the Septuagint emerged after Jesus’ lifetime. When the gospel spread into the Greek-speaking world, the Septuagint became the primary text Christian preachers used; Paul, for instance, based his arguments on the Septuagint when preaching in synagogues.[1] Because New Testament writers used the Septuagint, Christians adopted it as their Old Testament, and when they began citing it to demonstrate that Messianic prophecies were fulfilled in Jesus, Jews grew concerned about its reliability and abandoned it.[2]

The irony is that Christians appropriated the Septuagint so thoroughly that Jews became increasingly disenchanted with it; eventually, one rabbi compared the day the seventy elders translated the Law into Greek to the day Israel made the golden calf.[1] The Septuagint’s fate was shaped by Christian use, not by Jesus’ stance toward it.

[1] F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 1988), 48–50.
[2] Victor Vadney, Jesus Christ Fulfills Messianic Prophecies (Abilene, TX: Desert Willow Publishing, 2014), 14.