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Biblical Languages

By Rowland Croucher and others ⋅ January 5, 2003 ⋅ Post a comment
From: Gordon Coleman <>
Newsgroups: aus.religion.christian
Subject: Re: Aramaic Gospels.Sean (was catholic stuff)
Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1999 11:27:25 +1000

Able,

I'm genuinely confused by some of the comments you make here.  They
stand in stark contrast to everything I've heard and read from various
scholars and historians (conservative, liberal and non-Christian alike).

Able wrote:
>
> Hi Sean,
> New things Sean..move on..move on..
>
> I find this a compelling subject ( The Aramaic Gospels) and would like
> to end the current  interesting discussions with you in favour of
> this. You have helped to focus my attention. Thank you. It is a
> pleasure to correspond with such a bright and active  mind., and a
> somewhat of a gentleman atheist I may add.
>
>   Anyway Sean, enough of the bulldust.
> On to meatier things.
> It is part and parcel of the same subject that we discussed before.
> i.e The Gospel parallels etc. In which you have presented a case for
> dependence of the Gospels on a Common Greek manuscript.
>
>   First let me explain why I think the autograph of the Gospel of
> Matthew was in Aramaic.
> Now I will ramble on  for a while..and will not be offended by
> correction. Stop me if you have heard it all before.
> Thoughts will come as I give them utterance in writing.
>
> 1. It is acknowledged that the Greek of Matthew is clumsy, and the
> word order is odd..not at all like Luke, which is relatively
> straightforward. I am not sufficiently familiar with Greek to
> substantiate this personally, but I can reference quite a few Greek
> Scholars who would not dispute this.

My Chinese and Korean friends, who speak and write in English, produce
similarly clumsy documents when they try to write in what is their
second language.  That doesn't necessarily mean that they were first
written in another language - although it's entirely possible that
Matthew based his gospel on memoirs he had recorded (in his native
Aramaic) at an earlier stage.  This is *not* an argument for translation
(which would surely have been into "good" Greek if done by someone whose
Greek was reasonable), but rather that the Greek version, translation or
not, was written by someone whose written Greek was not great.  A lot of
documents from around this time, written in Greek by Hebrews, contain
"Semitisms" - that is, word forms in the Greek language that reflect a
tendency to adhere to grammatical constructions from the Aramaic or
Hebrew.

> 2.  Papias quite unmistakably said that it was in the Hebrew tongue.
> That they ( he was the Bishop of Heirapolis in SW Turkey )  had to
> translate as best they could. Prime evidence I would suggest.

A very difficult quotation to account for.  I believe he actually says
"Everyone translated as they were able", or words to that effect - which
would imply that there should be multiple variant translations lying
around.  There aren't.

> 3. Jesus spoke Aramaic, could anybody dispute this?
> Most Scholars would say this is a given.
> Aramaic is a sematic language , full of idioms and metaphors (such as
> ..."thick as two short planks", it is interesting that Tigger cannot
> come to grips with this or translate it accurately..)

Aramaic was the "lingua franca" of the region Jesus grew up in.  Hebrew
was the language of religious learning.  Greek was the language of
trade, and the "lingua franca" of the wider world in which Jesus lived.

> 4. The Gospel of Matthew was written to the Hellenistic Jews.
> They spoke Aramaic..This is exactly the same language as the Hebrew of
> Biblical times..not Hebrew of today..but the Hebrew language from
> 700BC to 1300AD..at which time the language reverted to modern Arabic.
> Except in a few villages near Damascus where it is preserved in tact
> to this day.

Wrong and wrong.  The Old Testament was translated into Greek (the
Septuagint) primarily for the benefit of Hellenisitic Jews, who could no
longer read Hebrew because they had been secularised and isolated.  

Aramaic is *not* Hebrew.  They are (and were) distinct languages, but
are both Semitic.  Aramaic was the language of the Babylonians, which is
why Daniel is written half in Hebrew, half in Aramaic.

> 5. The Hellenistic Jews spoke and wrote Aramaic..they did not speak
> Greek.
> Three points..
> a. A jewish saying of the time..It is better to feed your children pig
> food than to teach them Greek.

Source, please?  It is clear that Peter and Paul, at least, spoke Greek,
as they most certainly would not have been able to communicate the
gospel to Gentiles in Hebrew or Aramaic.  That said, much of their
interaction between themselves, in first Century Judea, may well have
been in Aramaic.  My in-laws were Chinese folk who grew up in Cambodia.
They are multilingual - their own dialect, which they use to talk to
family members, two other Chinese dialects, Cambodian/Khmer for
communication with the wider community, and (now) English, which they
learned on arrival in Australia.  Multilingualism is well-known in
contexts such as this.

> b.Josephus testimony..nobody ever profited from learning Greek.
> Many Jews tried unsuccessfully.

Others were obviously successful.  See above.

> c.Greek was not spoken in the area at all,
> a case can (and has been ) made for Jesus never having even heard the
> Greek Language spoken. So the words he spoke on the Cross were in
> Aramaic..not Greek.

His conversation with Pilate would most likely have been in Greek.  A
good case can be made for Jesus and the disciples being trilingual
(though not necessarily equally fluent in all three languages).

> d. It was undisputedly the Lingua Franca of the time and the place.
>
> So why would Matthew initially write to the Jews in anything else than
> his and their native tongue?

Because he intended his gospel to reach a wider audience than the
immediate group for which he wrote?  Just a thought.

Regards,

Gordon
-- 

=======================================
Gordon Coleman
School of Physiology and Pharmacology
University of New South Wales
Sydney NSW 2052
Australia
Phone:      +61-2-9385-2549
Fax:        +61-2-9385-1059
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