The Question of the Greek New Testament

[Rhondazvous]

Thanks for your input.

Yes, the verse in 1 Corinthians makes it probable that at least that epistle was written in Greek. In fact, now that you mention it, the pseudonymous nature of so much of the NT makes it possible that it was written in Greek.  My understanding is that1, as you suggested, Jesus spoke Aramaic (a Semitic language). That being the caw, I question the authenticity of a NT originally written in Greek (an Indo-European language).

All the apostles and Jesus would have been able to speak Greek. They were bilingual if not trilingual. Just like India has the largest population of English speakers in the world today, despite their national language being - Indian. Almost all Indian people are bilingual. Similar story with aboriginal people who still speak their native languages - which just goes so much further to prove the point that an Aramaic speaking people under a Greek jurisdiction would have been bilingual.

As for your point about what language were the books of the Bible written in, that's something that can be addressed with Biblical criticism. There was, for instance, the Gospel of the Hebrews - although it no longer exists we know exactly how long it was and what it contained. Despite its existence, the vast majority of new testament scholars do not believe it to be the original textual basis of Matthew which they believe to have been originally written in Greek. Same thing with most, if not all, of the other books of the new testament. There are some books of the Apocrypha which are believed to have originally been written in Hebrew, and the book of Daniel was for a long time considered to have been written in Hebrew. That is until the discovery of the dead sea scrolls, which has now led scholars to conclude that it has always been a curious bilingual work (that starts in Hebrew, switches to Aramaic and then returns to Hebrew).

A "biblical scholar" is a historian that specialises in the history of either the NT times or the OT times. Israel Finkelstein, for instance, is an archaeologist who specialises in iron-age Palestinian(/Israeli) history. You wouldn't ask a new testament scholar about the old testament text, just as you wouldn't ask Finkelstein about the new testament - that just isn't his area of expertise. A "critical scholar" refers to scholars that are non-religious, it's a somewhat ambiguous term since religious scholars can also be quite critical, and one that comes to mind is Dan Wallace. I would take what Wallace has to say more seriously than what Bart Ehrman has to say, even though Ehrman is the so-called "critical scholar". Mind you, I'd pay even more attention to Finkelstein, but as he's an iron-age archaeologist he doesn't have an opinion on who wrote the NT and in what languages, for that we need to ask Dan Wallace and his colleagues.

At the time of Jesus, Israel was under Roman occupation. You indicated in your first post that you do not distinguish between Roman and Greek. Although we use the term "Greco-Roman," they are not the same. Neither Paul nor Jesus nor Peter, James nor John was Greek.  The fact that the Bible ascribes European names to these men and the books they didn't write raises a world of suspicions.

Biblical scholars tell us  that none of the original manuscripts survive.  If the earliest documents we have were just copies of the original manuscripts that did not survive, biblical scholars would not call them pseudonymous. They would just call them copies.  There's no way to compare these later manuscripts to the originals. In fact, calling these Greek copies "original" raises the question of if there ever were any manuscripts before them. We are left with nothing more than conjecture and a fiat insistence on their authenticity.