Subject: New Covenant written in Hebrew?
Date: Fri, 9 Jan 1998 00:36:10 +0000
From: heb_roots_chr@mail.geocities.com
Reply-To: heb_roots_chr@geocities.com
To: "Hebraic Heritage Newsgroup"<heb_roots_chr@geocities.com>
From: Stefan Blad
To: Hebrew Roots <heb_roots_chr@mail.geocities.com>
Subject: New Covenant written in hebrew?
Beloved Eddie
There is a question I would like to know a little more about. There are
some people who say that the New Covenant was written in Greek, others
say it was written in Aramic, and others that it was written in Hebrew.
Some Jews get very upset when Christians say it was written in Greek,
and some Christians get very upset when the Jews say that it was written
in Hebrew.
Could you devellop some facts about this?
There is an article written by Julio Dam which was strongly
contradicted by a Christian bible teacher who knows Hebrew
and Greek.
Here it follows.
Love in the Messiah.
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IN WHICH LANGUAGE WAS THE NEW
TESTAMENT ORIGINALLY WRITTEN?
By Julio Dam
Messianic Pastor
Why is it important to ascertain in which language was the New Testament
written? Because a language possesses an inner structure, a specific
flavor, and idioms of its own, and brings with it a cultural background. All
of
these elements shape the way of thinking of those speaking it. If one
wishes to understand more precisely and with any real depth the language of
Jesus and His disciples, one should read His words either in the original
language, as do the Jews with the Tanakh, the "Old" Covenant, or try to
reconstruct it from the language one has at hand. In addition, a
language's idioms are only fully comprehensive in that language and in no
other. To
translate a language idioms directly into another language only makes it
absurd and reveals the foreign origin of it.
All of the above elements should be assayed when one tries to answer the
above question about the importance of the original language of the New
Testament. Take the problem of idioms, for instance. What does "taking
my hair" mean in English? Nothing at all, since it is from an idiom in
Spanish, "tomar el pelo", meaning "to pull one's leg." In order to translate
it
dynamically, then, one has first to know it was originally in Spanish,
and only then one may try to find an equivalent idiom in English, as we did.
On the other hand, what would happen if we assumed "tomar el pelo" was
taken from the French? We would be at a loss to find in French anything such
as "prenez les cheveaux." We would conclude, erroneously, that the original
came from a poor French, or some assumption like this. For this is
exactly what happened with the New Testament language, as we shall try to
prove,
with the "French" in our hypothetical example standing for Greek and/or
Aramaic, and our "Spanish" for Hebrew.
What we will try to prove, then, is that the New Covenant's original
language was neither Greek nor Aramaic, as popular wisdom goes, but
Hebrew, the same Hebrew as the "Old" Covenant was written in. It is only
natural
that it should be Hebrew, since we are dealing with the same country,
only in a latter period of its history. Are there any proofs that the
original language was Hebrew, and not Greek or Aramaic? Yes, there most
definitely are: there are external and internal proofs. We will deal with
the
external proofs first.
THE EXTERNAL PROOFS FOR A HEBREW ORIGINAL
There are several external sources, i.e., outside Scripture, pointing to
Hebrew as the written language of the New Testament, as Dr. David Bivin
has most eloquently attested. [Bivin and Blizzard Jr, Understanding the
Difficult Words of Jesus, 1988, pp. 45-78.] These sources are: the
testimony of the Church fathers and the Dead Sea Scrolls. We will
examine these two external sources, albeit briefly.
The testimony from the church fathers.
Papias, bishop of Hierapolis, c. 150 A.D. said: "Matthew put down the
words of the Lord in the Hebrew language, and others have translated them,
each as best he could." Irenaeus (120-202 A.D.) Bishop of Lions, France.
"Matthew, indeed, produced his Gospel written among the Hebrews in their own
dialect." Origen (c. 225 A.D.) said: "The first Gospel composed in the
Hebrew
language, was written by Matthew...for those who came to faith from
Judaism." Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea (c. 325 A.D.) "Matthew had first
preached to the Hebrews, and when he was about to go to others also, he
transmitted his Gospel in writing in his native language"
(Ecclesiastical History III 24, 6). And, also, Ephiphanius, Jerome,
translator of the Scripture into Latin, the so-called called Vulgata
version,
say the same.
THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS
The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered by an Arab shepherd boy in the caves of
Qumran, in the Judean wilderness contains a treasure load of Scripture:
some 40,000 fragments of rolls, with 600 partial manuscripts, both
scriptural
as well as non-scriptural. Says Dr. Bivin: "Of the ten major non-biblical
scrolls published to date, only one, the Genesis Apocryphon, is in
Aramaic.
The most recently published scroll, and the longest to date (28 feet,
equivalent to over 80 Old Testament chapters), is the now famous Temple
Scroll, also written in Hebrew...If we compare the total number of pages
in these ten sectarian scrolls, we again find a nine-to-one ratio of Hebrew
to Aramaic (179 pages in the nine Hebrew scrolls to 22 pages of Aramaic in
the Genesis Apocryphon)." [Bivin & Blizzard Jr., op. cit. p. 49, 52.]
In sum, as far as the external evidence is concerned, both the Church
Fathers as well as the recently discovered Dead Sea Scrolls state quite
clearly and without any subtetly that Hebrew was the language spoken and
written at the time of the Rabbi Yeshua.
THE INTERNAL PROOFS FOR A HEBREW ORIGINAL
Internal proofs for Hebrew being the original language spoken by the
Rabbi Yeshua are equally direct and even more convincing, for we can take
the
New Covenant and prove it now, in our own native language, be it English or
Spanish or any other. First of all, Scripture itself says the language
of the Rabbi Yeshua and His disciples was Hebrew. Despite this scriptural
proof, various translations, especially the NIV, has changed the
original Hebraisti (which does not require one to be a Greek scholar to
understand it says "Hebrew") for "Aramaic" (see John 19:13,19; Lk. 23:38;
Acts 21:40).
In addition, there are over 5366 manuscripts of the New Covenant in
Greek, each differing from the other and containing several hundred
variants. However, in each one of these manuscripts there are idioms
which are almost meaningless in any language-including Greek--except
in Hebrew! How can such a thing be explained unless it is because the
original
was Hebrew?
There are many of these Hebraisms, one of the most common of them being
"Son of man". What does "Son of man" mean in English, Spanish, German, in
any
language? Absolutely nothing--except for Hebrew. The expression "Ben
Adam" means literally "son of Adam" and by extension "son of man", and
"man",
Adam being of course the first man alive. In any street corner in Israel you
may hear "here comes this Ben Adam", meaning "here comes this man." This
example, which occurs no less than 92 times in the Tanak (the Jewish
Scripture) and 43 times in the New Covenant (Cruden's Concordance) is
obviously the same Hebrew idiom.
It is said that the New Covenant was written in Koine Greek, common
Greek, because it is found to be a poor kind of Greek. When we find these
many
Hebraisms as there are there, we begin to understand that it is not
Koine Greek lying there, in the substratum of the text, but a Hebrew
original
which was almost literally translated into Greek which make it sound
like poor Greek.
Let us take another example, the idiom "Peace be to you", appearing
twelve times in the New Covenant. What kind of a greeting is "Peace be to
you"
in English, Spanish, French, or any other language--except in Hebrew? It is
meaningless, again. Only in Hebrew does it make any real sense. This is
the most common, everyday greeting in Israel today, the wordwide famous
"shalom", literally "peace", but really an everyday greeting meaning
anything from "Hi", to "How are you?" according to the intonation and
the mood of the speaker.
The third and last internal proof of the Hebrew character of the New
Covenant is the use of two very Jewish ways of speaking: that of
repeating things twice, and the answering of a question with another
question.
Yeshua did both quite often. In Matthew 27:46: "...My God, my God, why hast
thou forsaken me?" and in Luke 20:2-3: "And spake unto him, saying, Tell
me, by what authority doest thou these things? or who is he that gave thee
this authority? And he answered and said unto them, I will also ask you one
thing and answer me..." What is important to stress is that these two
characteristics, especially the former, comes with the Hebrew. It does
not appear in English, or in any European language, for instance.
If this is so, you will ask yourself, how did it come about that it is
"known" that the New Testament was originally written in Greek or
Aramaic? We will deal with these questions now as they provide the latter
half of the answer to the original question of this article: In which
language
was the New Testament originally written? The assumptions and prejudices
leading to both the Greek and Aramaic theories. First of all, let us say
that the
issue of the New Covenant being written in Greek or Aramaic was non-existent
prior to the Fourth or Fifth Century A.D. It has been a rather modern
theory.
The question is: What basis does the "Aramaic theory" have? What are its
external and internal proofs? The answer, quite unbelievably is: None!
There are neither, except for a few isolated loaned words in Aramaic present
in the New Covenant, which are far outweighed by its Hebrew words. As far
as the "Greek theory" is concerned, the only basis one can think of is the
fact that the versions we have left are in that language, and not one single
copy remains of its Hebrew original. This is, admittedly, a good enough
basis, provided all we have said above would not exist, i.e, the above
statements by the church fathers, the Hebraisms, the idioms, the discovering
from
the Dead Sea Scrolls, etc.
In sum, what we have are assumptions by theologians, assumptions and,
what is more, assumptions very probably based upon ugly, anti-semitic
prejudices. Why do we say the latter? Is there a basis for raising up the
ugly
specter of antisemitism within the Church? You judge by yourself.
THE CHURCH: A HISTORY Of UNREMITTING ANTI-SEMITISM
Historically, the Church has had a consistent record of being very
anti-Semitic most of the time, if we take its 2.000 years of history.
Consider the Inquisition, with hundreds of thousands of Jews (and real
Christians) tortured and slaughtered simply because of their being Jews.
Consider the anti-Semitic statements by the fathers of the Church, such
as Chrysosthom, Eusebius, Origen, Cyril, Hyppolitus, and, yes, Marthin
Luther, the father of the Reform of whom we have only space for quoting a
couple of brief paragraphs of the sermons the latter wrote just four days
before he died.
"The Jews deserve the most severe penalties. Their synagogues should be
razed to the ground, their homes destroyed. They themselves should be
exiled to living in tents, like the gypsies. Their religious writings [the
Old
Testament and the Talmud] should be taken away from them. The Rabbis
should be forbidden to teach the Law (the Torah). They should be forbidden
to
do any profession. Only the hardest, most strenous work should be allowed
to them. Their fortunes should be confiscated from them..."
"A Jewish heart is as hard as a stick, a stone, as iron, as a devil."
[Eric W. Gritsch, Was Luther an Anti-Semite? Christian History Magazine,
Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 38-39. Retranslated from the Spanish by the author.] The
famous historian, the late William Schirer, author of The Rise and Fall
of the Third Reich, in page 294, says one of the two factors explaining the
behavior of the German Church towards the Jews during the Holocaust is
Luther's influence.
Throughout the centuries there has been a ha satan-led motion away from
anything Jewish. In this spirit, the Church was forbidden to celebrate
Passover on the "Jewish", i.e., scriptural dates set for it, and had to
do it on any other date EXCEPT the Jewish one. Even today the Church
celebrates "Easter," not Passover. Those who insisted on celebrating Pessakh
on the correct date were called "quatorcediman" from the fourteenth day of
the
first month, where Passover was ordained by God to be celebrated. The
Jewish sages' wisdom in the many-volumed Talmud, from where the Rabbi
Yeshua drew countless parables and examples was condemned by all within
the Church, including Luther, as we just quoted; not merely condemned but
burned and their owners with it. A sustained campaign of dejudaization began
which continues to this day. We can only offer some brief highlights here:
* Statements by almost all of the Fathers of the Church like
Chrysosthom, Hippolytus, Origen, Cyril, Eusebius ("Abraham was a Christian,
he was not a Jew".), Bishop Agobard, Luther.
*The Jews were accused for twenty centuries of kidnapping Christian
children and drinking their blood for Passover meals. (The last time this
accusation surfaced--would you believe it?-- was in 1992 in the Soviet
Union.)
*Jews were accused of murdering God. [Can you murder God!]
*All sorts of doctrines were made judenrein (free of Jews), as if the
New Covenant was never made with "the House of Israel and the House of
Judah" but with the Church.
*The appropiate name for the land of Israel was obliterated for the last
2,000 years at the bidding of Emperor Julius Cesar who swore to wipe the
name of Judea from the face of the earth-- and he succeeded. Even
Christian authors RIGHT TODAY call Israel "Palestine"!
* The true name of our Lord was Yeshua. What we have is a very
Gentile-sounding "Jesus".
* The name of the Rabbi Yeshua's brother was Jacob--apparently too
Jewish for them--although there is a Jacob in every known language--so the
anti-semites gentilized it to "James", as in the book of "James" [Where
in Greek it says quite clearly EPISTOLE IAKOBUS.]
Marcion, a historically recognized heretic within the Church created two
Gods: A Jewish god, the god of the "Old" Covenant, "Yahweh", aking to a
small deity, severe, for the Jews; and a Gentile God, Jesus, the God of
Love. [How many God are there?] However, the spirit of Marcion lives on
the Church to this day.
*There are several references to Yeshua speaking Hebrew in Scripture and
Paul speaking Hebrew. Westcott and Hort, two New Age occultists (See
"New Age Versions of the Bible by G.Riplinger, A.V. Publications, 1993.)
changed the word *hebraisti* for Aramaic, besides 5000-8000 other
alterations on the Greek text from which versions are made.
The above shows us the "Aramaic" and "Greek" theories were not isolated
mistakes or misconceptions, but very definitely, part of a worldwide,
centuries-old dejudaization campaign by the anti-semites within the
Church to make it judenrein, despite the fact that we are adoring a
Jewish God of Israel and the promised Messiah of Israel.
The external and internal proofs at the beginning of this article show,
on the other hand, that there are more than one proof showing the New
Covenant was written in Hebrew in its original and not in Greek or in
Aramaic.
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From: Steve Rios
To: heb_roots_chr@geocities.com
Subject: Was the New Covenant written in Hebrew?
Shalom to all !!!
There is plenty of research including Dr. Bivins co-authored book:
Understanding the Difficult Words of Jesus; ISBN No. 0-918873-00-2;
New Treasures by E. William Bean; ISBN No. 0-9623950-2-1; and Jesus
the Jewish Theologian by Brad H. Young; ISBN No. 1-56563-060-2 plus a
number of others, all of which give very stong support for a Hebrew
original in the Synoptic Gospels and part of Acts .
David Bivins in his article in Jerusalem Perspective page 28 - 33. in
addressing, "Prof. Safari's assumption that no Hebrew Life of Jesus
will turn up results from his knowledge that in this period the
disciple of a Pharisaic sage was not permitted to transmit in writing
the words of his master." seems to indicate that although he respects
Prof. Safari's view he hasn't come to a conclusion on the matter.
I believe that their is much to support the position of an original
Hebrew Life of Jesus and that even though we do not yet have
"evidence", we do know that the original authors of the Gospel's lived
and thought as Hebrews. To most of them, I believe Greek or Hellenized
thinking and philosophy was as foreign as the culture it came from. It
is historically noted that many of the early sages dispised anything
to do with Greek philosophy and Hellenized thinking to the extent of
even forbidding the Greek language to be used in religious studies and
discussions.
The Jewish people have continued to regard Hebrew as a holy language,
especially in regards to their religious writings. The Septuagint was
written for the Diaspora Jews who through assimilation had lost the
ability to study the Hebrew Scrolls, just as those of us who have not
yet learned to read and understand Hebrew, must rely on the language
of translations to communicate the syntax and idioms of the Hebrew
language and culture, although wtih the correct tools we are able to
understand a great deal.
To Bradley, I would encourage you to continue to study as the Bereans
did (they were Greeks (Macedonians) who studied thoroughly matters of
scripture until they got an answer that could be proven.
I pray that as we all study and seek the truths of scripture, we rely
most on the Ruach Ha Kodesh for our guidance and understanding.
Let everything be established in the mouths of 2 or 3 witnesses. Deut.
17.6; Deut. 19.15 This is a good way to establish solid study habits
and confirm scriptural truths vs theology.
Shalom,
Steve Rios
Tacoma, WA
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