-
Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.
Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:- Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
- Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
- Access to private conversations with other members.
We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!
Why the NT was written in Aramaic and Greek
- Thread starter FearGod
- Start date
Caladan
Agnostic Pantheist
Don't you think it is a bit lame to start another thread while your questions above were already answered in the other thread (and ignored by you), while spreading the same misinformation in a separate thread?
Go back to the original thread and finish the job.
Go back to the original thread and finish the job.
Last edited:
FearGod
Freedom Of Mind
Just to see the opinions of the others about Jesus native language and the gospel.
Caladan
Agnostic Pantheist
Already answered and corrected in original thread.
Already answered in original thread.
The others who? Are you expecting a new and fresh crowd who will have completely different things to say about the topic? What about actually taking the challenge and listening to what several members have taken the time to say on the matter? Isn't it disrespectful? Why should anyone try to answer these questions seriously and honestly again if you did not appreciate the effort the previous time?
FearGod
Freedom Of Mind
FunctionalAtheist
Hammer of Reason
Just because Jesus was a Jew does not mean he spoke Hebrew. And whether he did or not, he did nor write any portion of the bible. It's my understanding that the common tounge spoken through out much of the ancient world, from europe and north africa to india, was greek. Latin was spoken during official business. Aramaic was spoken by several ethnicities in the near middle east in addition to greek. By the time of Jeses, Hebrew was seldom used accept among the priests. And by the time the bible was written, Hebrew was for all practicle purposes a dead language.
That is, his words weren't recorded in Hebrew because, with few exceptions, no one could write it, and no one could read it.
It's far more likely that all of the New Testament was originally written in Aramaic and Hebrew, with only Luke and Acts in Greek.
Originally, Christians were not self-identified. They were Hebrew-speaking Jews (and those from Galilee also spoke the Galilean dialect of Aramaic). It was a number of years before they would even tolerate the idea of allowing Gentiles convert, and some years after that that it occurred to them that Christianity was a different religion.
Thus in the early years, evangelism was exclusively among Jews in the cities they visited. I see no reason to suggest that the original writings were in any other language besides those two I mentioned.
(Roman historians had the same problem. They had trouble differentiating between Christians and Jews so much that when the Jews were expelled from Rome, Christians were not. Nero was likely the first to know the difference.)
gilligan8914
Member
All NT books were originally written in Greek. Historical fact. Jesus was a Hellenized Jew, because he quoted only the Septuagint not the Hebrew scriptures. We have older fragments of the Septuagint than we have of any Aramaic or Hebrew versions of the OT. Makes you wonder what language the OT was originally written in.
sojourner
Annoyingly Progressive Since 2006
The considered opinion is that the NT was written in Greek. Jesus' sermons are recorded in Greek. I don't know where you're getting this felonious information; it's patently WRONG.
sojourner
Annoyingly Progressive Since 2006
He may have (and probably did, especially in Synagogue). However, the compelling issue is that we don't have any extant proof of that. All we have is written in Greek. His words were recorded in Greek, because the texts were largely written to Gentiles, who spoke and understood Greek.
Sees
Dragonslayer
The language of love and thinking outside the box. It was probably languages just by nature of the society. My 5 year old daughter speaks two languages for the same reason.
sojourner
Annoyingly Progressive Since 2006
Paul was evangelizing the Gentiles (who spoke Greek) within 18 months of the Jesus Event. Gentile churches were already well established by the time he wrote his first epistle in about 48 c.e. The earliest extant texts of the gospels were all written in Greek. While Mark likely had hebraic (and oral) roots, and while the Q material in Matt. and Lk. is likely hebraic in origin (and likely oral -- not written), the writing was all done in Greek for largely either Gentile audiences, or for Jewish audiences living Gentile territory, commingling with Gentiles.
sojourner
Annoyingly Progressive Since 2006
Hebrew. I understand that Aramaic wasn't originally a written language.
sojourner
Annoyingly Progressive Since 2006
I speak English, thanks for asking. :takeabow:
This used to be a matter of some debate, up to and including the 90s. One the one hand were those like Crossan who depicted a 1st century Galilee as permeated by Gentile culture and teeming with Gentiles that even the most rural Jews would be in frequent contact with, not to mention urban residents living in cities that were practically as Hellenistic as Alexandria. On the other side were those like Freyne who argued that, despite undeniable influences through Hellenization and Romanization, 1st century Galilee was thoroughly Jewish, had minimal contact with gentiles and resisted (even in cities) gentile cultural influences, and that to the extent there existed pockets of Gentiles Jesus avoided these.
This debate is pretty much over. There are perhaps studies that mark a turn in the tide better than does Chancey's The Myth of a Gentile Galilee (Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series), but I choose his monograph because it is close enough and because in the volume A Wandering Galilean: Essays in Honour of Seán Freyne (Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism), it was Chancey who both pointed out Freyne's role in the debate and that it was essentially over. Archaeological surveys in the late 20th and early 21st century and "the corroborating findings of three different systematic reviews of the region's first-century material culture".
The Galilee of Jesus' day was thoroughly Jewish, deliberately Jewish (i.e., deliberately resistant to the adoption of Gentile traditions, culture, etc.), and using Hellenization as a method to understanding Jesus is less useful than using Reform Judaism.
He didn't. The authors of the gospels did.
We also have older versions of the gospels than any work by Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Euripides, Plautus, Sophocles, Homer, etc. Outside of NT textual criticism, we're almost always working with a few medieval manuscripts for any given ancient Greek or Latin author/text.
No it doesn't. The NT was originally written in Greek and we can still tell the ways in which it was influenced by Aramaic, from phrases like "the son of man" which is Semitic to the inclusion in the gospels of transliterated Aramaic. For the LXX, we're dealing with a translation, not the influence or oral transmission/tradition. Even if we had only medieval Hebrew Jewish scriptures and instead of the Qumran finds (which provided a wealth of textual evidence for understanding Hebrew manuscript traditions) we found Greek texts, we'd still know that the OT was written in Hebrew.
outhouse
Atheistically
Don't kid yourself.
We need to redefine Judaism before we can make claims they were resistant to Gentile traditions.
Hellenistic Judaism had open arms to Hellenism and Gentile traditions.
While Galilean peasants would have fit your description above, that is not the Galilee of Jesus day.
Galilee in Jesus day was multi cultural all within Judaism.
Disagree.
The socioeconomic difference between Hellenistic Judaism and a more traditional Judaism of the Peasant class has to be noted to understand what it would even be like to walk in the shoes of a man from Nazareth.
The Jews of Nazareth, were not the Hellenistic Jews of Sepphoris.
Rest of your post I agree whole hearted.
Pegg
Jehovah our God is One
There is plenty of evidence that Jesus and his apostles spoke hebrew:
Acts 2:22 Men, brothers and fathers, hear my defense to YOU now. 2*(Well, when they heard he was addressing them in the Hebrew language, they kept all the more silent, and he said
3*I am a Jew,Acts 26:14*And when we had all fallen to the ground I heard a voice say to me in the Hebrew language, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? To keep kicking against the goads makes it hard for you. 15*But I said, Who are you, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.
The historian Eusebius (of the third and fourth centuries*C.E.) said that the evangelist Matthew delivered his Gospel in the Hebrew tongue. (Patrologia Graeca, Vol. XXII, col. 941)
Another church historian, Jerome (of the fourth and fifth centuries*C.E.) said: Matthew, who is also Levi, and who from a publican came to be an apostle, first of all composed a Gospel of Christ in Judaea in the Hebrew language and characters for the benefit of those of the circumcision who had believed. Moreover, the Hebrew itself is preserved to this day in the library at Caesarea, which the martyr Pamphilus so diligently collected.
'
There are some small portions of the bible written in Aramaic, but certainly not all of it.
And this isnt surprising, there was a long hisory of contact between the Hebrews and Aramaic speaking people, so they likely adopted aramaic expressions or even words over that time. But what is certain is that by Jesus time, Greek was the common tongue around palestine and that is why the christian scriptures are also called the 'Greek' scriptures....they were mostly written in Greek.
1) There are places in the gospels in which we find an transliterated Aramaic (i.e., Aramaic words written using the Greek alphabet) which are then translated into Greek. For example, in John 20:16 we find "Ραββουνι (ὃ λέγεται Διδάσκαλε
/[rabboun (ho legetai Didaskale)"["rabbouni (which means teacher)"]. If John was originally written in Aramaic and translated into Greek, why would any translator keep bits of Aramaic and add translations? They wouldn't. The reason we find Aramaic transliterations in the gospels that are then translated into Greek equivalents (from Jesus' last words on the cross in Mark and Matthew to the example above from John) is because the gospels were written in Greek but the Jesus tradition they rely on (directly or indirectly) began and continued to exist for some time in Aramaic.
2) Paul wrote letters to converted Gentiles in places like Rome. If he had written in Aramaic, nobody would have been capable of reading any of the letters.
3) The gospels are not all independent. One reason it is almost universally believed that Matthew and Luke shared a common source known as Q is because there are places where we find portions common to both that aren't in Mark. To understand how significant this is you have to understand that Greek word order is very free and the nature Greek morphology (the ways in which word forms indicate things, such as the subject of a verb, that we would use word order to indicate in English). There are, for example, a few hundred ways in which a verb can be written to indicate things like tense, person, number, etc. Yet in the overlapping portions of Matthew and Luke, we find often nearly identical word choice, word order, and morphology. That's because they both relied on the same source, and that source was in Greek.
4) The gospels are ancient biographies or "lives" (more or less; genre in antiquity was quite nebulous). These are usually written centuries after the individual died, because we are dealing with an oral world. Traditions were rarely written down and written works weren't considered as trustworthy (oral sources were). The reason the gospels were likely written so early relative to other lives from those of Pythagoras to that of Apollonius of Tyana was likely (at least in part) because of the Jewish revolt as well as the missionary nature of Christianity. We find very early a rapidly more dispersed and increasingly diverse Christian community, so the gospels served where orality couldn't. As many Jews couldn't read Hebrew or Aramaic and many early Christians were gentiles, to imagine the authors gospels wrote in Aramaic is to imagine that they didn't wish their works to be read.
Like, Paul, who clearly spoke Greek and was a Roman citizen. Or Paul's converts, who weren't Jewish. Jesus may have restricted his movements to rural Galilee, but his followers did not. Peter and James set-up in Jerusalem and a center of the first generation Christians was Antioch.
There was never a time when Gentiles couldn't convert. The issue was mainly whether they needed to be circumcised to convert.
So Nero, in 64 CE, was able to distinguish Christians enough to blame them for the fires, but Christians were unable to do so?
Which is why when Peter visits Antioch (as Paul describes in Galatians), we find Paul telling us that Peter used to eat with the Gentiles but has apparently stopped because of the circumcision issue.
This says nothing about whether there are reasons. There are many, many reasons to be quite sure that the entire NT was written in Greek.
No they didn't.
So local authorities in Jerusalem didn't "know the difference" in 64, but the emperor of Rome did?