Brent Nongbri on Early, non-Christian LXX Texts

Some Septuagint pieces, however, do seem to be of non-Christian origin. Excluded from my survey [of early Christian texts] are the following: a copy of the book of Job (P.Oxy. 50.3522; L[euven]D[atabase of]A[ncient]B[ooks] 3079) assigned on the basis of its handwriting to “a date early in the first century.” The early date, combined with the fact that the divine name is written in archaic Hebrew letters, strongly indicates that this papyrus was a Jewish production. Two other pieces have been assigned to either the first century or early second century, both papyrus rolls of Septuagint texts, P.Oxy. 65.4443 (LDAB 3080, a column of Esther in which the word theos is uncontracted) and P.Oxy. 77.5101 (LDAB 140272, a collection of fragments of Psalms with the divine name in archaic Hebrew characters). The early date and the roll format suggest that these are pre-Christian productions. (Brent Nongbri, God’s Library: The Archaeology of the Earliest Christian Manuscripts [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018], 342 n. 42, comments in square bracket added for clarification)