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New Testament Languages
Someone emailed me a series of questions about this topic; my answers to him are posted here.
First email
There were hundreds of gospels
, written by all sorts of witnesses in the first century, and probably many of them were effective in their day. Some of them had inaccuracies in them, or were not complete, etc.. However, the Holy Spirit chose the writers we know about, and inspired them to write the gospels we now have. Look at Luke: he said that many others had written accounts, and it seemed good to him to write one, too.
There is a mythical document that some scholars claim is the source document that all of the writers borrowed from, called the Q manuscript. They've never found it, and have no actual proof it existed. I sometimes ponder that the document they refer to as Q might actually be the truth of the events the various gospels report… in other words, the gospels are reflecting God's truth as whispered by the Holy Spirit to the evangelists, instead of quoting from some theorized source document.
There are embedded Hebrew or Aramaic words in the NT (Golgotha, Eloi eloi, lamah sabachthani
, etc.). Also, there are readings where it is claimed that the Septuagint (the questionable manuscript LXX, a Greek translation of the OT, done in Alexandria) is quoted. I personally don't know if this last item is correct, and have reasons for doubting the worth of the Septuagint. Did the apostles read LXX? Perhaps. Did they rely on it when writing their gospels or epistles? Probably not.
Hebrew is a language of pictures, and greek of thoughts. Accordingly, the gospel is portrayed in type in the lives of the OT heroes, and explained in detail by the apostles.
Second email
Jesus and his disciples spoke Hebrew or possibly Aramaic, and on the day of Pentecost Peter spoke his native language. However, the Roman empire often relied on Greek throughout their realm. Acts 1:8 says that the gospel was to go OUT from Jerusalem, and the easiest method of preaching to the gentiles was to use the language common to everyone (just as English is the common language of the world today, and especially of the Internet… not every Japanese or Ugandan speaks it, but if they bother to learn it, they can converse with anyone else on the planet).
The letters to some of the churches were written the native language of those churches: Greek. Those letters were floated around to every church, by the way, whether they were mentioned in the NT or not. Again, this is common Greek
or koina
, and not classical Greek, there being some 300 words in the NT that don't exist in classical Greek.
What about the gospels? Luke/Acts (it's really one work, broken into 2 parts) was written to Theophilus
, which may or may not have been a real person, but the word means lover of God
. The opening sentences in both books is extremely long (Luke 1:1-4 and Acts 1:1-4), and in perfect greek. I highly doubt something in Hebrew could have been translated into greek and made to come out like that.