The Question of the Greek New Testament

[Polaris]

When I was a student at Biola, a 4 year Christian university, the Bible  professors and theologians spoke of reading the NT in the original Greek.  For many years, this sounded cool. I couldn't do it, but it was cool, nonetheless.

In the past few years, though, something occurred to me.  Jesus wasn't Greek. Neither did he speak Greek. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John weren't Greek. Neither did they speak Greek.  Peter, Paul, James and Jude weren't Greek. Neither did they speak Greek. So how could an authentic NT have been originally written in Greek?

A lot of the Bible written after the Gospels and the Book of Acts was likely written in Ancient Greek because the people who were reading the letters of that time were in the Ancient Greek cities. Paul likely could speak Ancient Greek and Ancient Hebrew as well as Latin. I doubt he knew how to speak Aramaic, however.

[Minimalist]

Yes, Greek was lingua franca throughout the east, largely because of Alexander's conquests, certainly among the educated elites.  Romans, when they overran Greece in the 2d century BC were culturally smitten by the Greeks and the upper classes largely adopted Greek language and styles.  This was similar to the adoption of French at the Sanssouci
Palace in Prussia in the 18th century.

It must be kept firmly in mind that literacy was rare in the ancient world and the numbers of people who could handle advanced philosophical texts was far smaller than even that number.

[Jenny A]

A lot of the Bible written after the Gospels and the Book of Acts was likely written in Ancient Greek because the people who were reading the letters of that time were in the Ancient Greek cities. Paul likely could speak Ancient Greek and Ancient Hebrew as well as Latin. I doubt he knew how to speak Aramaic, however.

The Gospels and Acts where written, AFTER Paul's letters, not before.   And by the time they were written there wasn't much of a Jewish Jesus sect left.  And they are written from a Gentile perspective in large part.  There's no reason to believe they weren't re written in Greek.

Paul's first language was probably Greek and at least according to acts he spoke Hebrew.  He spent time in Jerusalem though and may consequently have picked up some Aramaic.  Aramaic and Hebrew are related.  But as Greek was his first language and he was writing to Greek speakers, it would have been odd for him to write in anything but Greek.

[Rhondazvous]

I'm learning stuff here and I love it.

Yes, Paul, or at least the "literary construct" known as paul, spoke Greek. I stand delightfully corrected. I wonder did he ever make it to Jerusalem before his Damascus per I mean conversion.  There's an interesting contradiction between the account of this in the book or Acts and the account Paul gives in Galatians chapter 1. Not to mention the two divergent accounts within the book of Acts itself. Paul seems to have been writing in an information vacuum.

[Minimalist]

The Gospels and Acts where written, AFTER Paul's letters, not before.

Yes, but the question remains, how long after and the even bigger question is, when were they last edited to suit the doctrinal needs of an expanding "church?"

[Rhondazvous]

The Gospels and Acts where written, AFTER Paul's letters, not before.

Yes, but the question remains, how long after and the even bigger question is, when were they last edited to suit the doctrinal needs of an expanding "church?"

An even bigger question is with all the editing and revision they did how did they still manage to leave so many contradictions?

[The Grand Nudger]

A - editing aint easy.
B - what would the impetus to removing every contradiction be...and why assume that the editors saw x and y -as- contradictions?
C - people are remarkably unobservant in this regard....and the editors only did what work they felt..with their myopic fields of view..were necessary to further their aims.

[Jenny A]

Yes, but the question remains, how long after and the even bigger question is, when were they last edited to suit the doctrinal needs of an expanding "church?"

An even bigger question is with all the editing and revision they did how did they still manage to leave so many contradictions?

I think you have a misconception about how the New Testament was put together.  The individual books were written between . But not all Christian groups had copies of all the books and some groups considered other books not in the New Testament to be sacred.  There wasn't a consensus about which books belonged in the New Testament until the 3rd or 4th Century depending upon what you consider a consensus.   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development...ment_canon  And even then it wasn't a really settled matter.  Martin Luther considered taking Jude, James, Hebrews, and Revelations out, and did put them in a subordinate position.

Given that the books were transcribed, edited, and preserved seperately, and not in a single volume, contradictions between them aren't surprising. Or, are only surprising if you think they are divinely inspired.

[Minimalist]

Even after the Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus were cobbled together there were changes to "holy" ( or is it whole-y ) scripture.  The best known examples are the longer ending of gMark and the "woman taken in adultery" in gJohn.  Neither of these make it in to our 'earliest; complete bibles.
They were thus added later.

http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/lying.htm


Scroll down to "The Forgery Mill."  

[Aractus]

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.

Well that's true for any ancient work that isn't etched in stone. Your assertion that we only have conjecture is wrong - we have science. We have scholars who believe they have the original wording for the bulk of the New Testament text. Whether the number of the beast is 666 or 616 is one of the few where the original reading isn't clear. There are 5,800 Greek copies of the NT with an average length of 450 pages, which in total is over 2.6 million pages just in Greek. Even without one single manuscript you would still be able to reconstruct the entire new testament in its original Greek from the quotes that church bishops and priests wrote down and have survived. There are over 2,000 such manuscripts that have bits of the NT quoted in the original Greek. There's at least 10,000 hand written Latin manuscripts and an unknown number in other languages (some estimates say at least 30,000).

Josephus on the other hand, some of his works only exist in translations and not in the original language. Take Antiquities of the Jews as an example - the earliest copy that exists for this first century work is from the 5th or 6th century, it's incomplete, and it's in Latin. The manuscripts in Greek that are used to reconstruct the original text are from the 9th century and later. No single manuscript is complete.

Compare that to say this:



If you don't recognise it, it's Papyrus 75. It is one of the 102 surviving leaves from the codex (there are only 40 or so missing), and as you can see when the gospel according to Luke ends, the gospel according to John begins on the same page. This codex is from the late 2nd century or possibly early 3rd century.

So for Antiquities of the Jews by Josephus the earliest Greek manuscript is from the 9th or 10th century, but with Luke and John the earliest is from the late second or early third century.

Papyrus can't be expected to last for a long time, you know that. Most of the manuscripts from around that time have long-since turned to dust; that's why Biblical papyri are so rare and why most ancient manuscripts we have today, like codex vaticanus, are on parchment and not papyrus.

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.

Paul was a Roman citizen, he spoke Greek (and also Aramaic, and maybe Hebrew), he could read Greek and he could write Greek. Luke the physician we don't know an awful lot about, and that's true for a number of the early church figures. Some of them besides Paul could have also been Roman, but what's more important is the fact that some of them could read and write in Greek, and that's the one thing about Luke that we do know.

Furthermore Greek was a much more advanced language than Aramaic or Hebrew. Consequently it would have been immeasurably easier to learn it compared with Aramaic or Hebrew. Even today, most Old Testament Biblical scholars can read and translate Hebrew into English or another language, but hardly any of them would be able to take an English language sentence and rewrite it into Hebrew. Yet just about any decent NT scholar will be able to translate to Greek without any difficulty. Greek was a much easier language to write in, and there's simply no reason to think that literate people living under Roman occupation wouldn't be able to write in Greek.