Wasn't the Old Testament written in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek?

Question

Where does the Aramaic fit in? I thought that was Jesus' native tongue, though it is reasonable to speculate that he spoke Hebrew and an early Latin language due to the interference of the Roman Empire in the region at the time.

Answer 1

In the Old Testament, there are many Aramaic words, and the books of Daniel and Ezekiel were mostly written in Aramaic. This was due to the fact that Aramaic superceeded Hebrew as the spoken language of the Jews during the exile to Babylon.

As for the New Testament, the final version that we have today was transmitted and mostly composed in Koine Greek, the common language of the Roman Empire (which superceeded Latin after Rome conquered Greece, ironic yes).

However, there is a -lot- of evidence that there is at least an Aramaic -layer- to the New Testament, and people who believe in such a view, like myself, are known as "Aramaic Primacists."

If you think about it, if Jesus and his disciples spoke in Aramaic, at the very least his words have their root in Aramaic (or so we hope!). Having Aramaic words translated and retranslated begins a game of telephone and glitches and errors are bound to happen. :-)

A very common example of such a glitch has to do with the parable of the "camel (καμηλος) through the eye of a needle." (Mark 10:25, Matthew 19:24, Luke 18:25) In Aramaic, the word for "camel" (גמלא) is spelled identically to the word for "ship-binding rope" (גמלא), suggesting that the correct phrase was "rope through the eye of a needle," making the hyperbole more symmetrical and lending to the quirk that many of Jesus' early followers were fishermen.

Another good example lies within Romans 5:6-8. The Greek, translated to English, reads:

6 For while we were yet weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. 7 For one will hardly die for a righteous (δικαιος) man; though perhaps for the good (αγαθος) man someone would dare even to die. 8 But God commends his own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

Some argue that the progression of the author's argument does not seem to follow logically, in that the author claims that Jesus of Nazereth died for the "ungodly" rather than for the "righteous," so the author's statement that "one will hardly die for a righteous man" seems to be out of place given the paradox of "[God's ] own love towards us."

It is suggested that this reading lies within an Aramaic source. In Romans 5:7 of the Peshitta (a Syriac Aramaic version of the New Testament), where the Greek reads "righteous," we find the Aramaic word for "wicked" (רשיעא) rather the word for "righteous" (רשינא) as expected.

In several Aramaic writing systems, contemporary to the times of Paul, the words "wicked" and "righteous" look confusingly similar. This leaves the implication that a scribe while translating, whatever the source of the discourse was, from Aramaic to Greek could have simply misread the word.

Another example takes into account that Aramaic is a Semitic language, a family of languages where all words come from three-letter roots. As a result, speakers of the language employ puns that play on roots with similar sounding consonants, or with the same consonants re-arranged. In applying this principle, Aramaic primacists study the dialogues of the New Testament and claim that how a choice of words that apparently seem completely unrelated or awkward in Greek may originate from an original Aramaic source that employed puns.

For example, in the True Children of Abraham debate within the Gospel of John, some Aramaic primacists note possible examples of punning between the words "father" (אבא, abba), "Abraham" (אברהם, abraham) and the verb "to do" (עבד, `abad):

John 8
39
They retorted and said to him:
"Our abba (father) is Abraham!"
Jesus says to them:
"If you are Abraham's children, `abad (do) as Abraham would `abad (do)!"

And similar puns are found throughout the dialogues of John that do not occur in the Greek.

Finally, there is even some evidence between the Gospel accounts for different interpretations of the same Aramaic source.

Out of the three Synoptic Gospels which tell the story of Jesus appointing twelve Apostles, Luke is the only book to label the last Simon as ζηλωτην ('The Zealot'). Matthew and Mark refer to the last Simon mentioned as κανανιτης ('The Canaanite'). In Aramaic dialects of the first century, the word for "Canannite" is קננטא, and when we take off the יא suffix, we are left with the word קננא (Canann). We can immediately see how this could be confused with טננא (Zealot), as the only thing that seperates the two words is that one starts with a ק (Qof) where the other starts with a ט (Tet), two sounds which can be easily confused by the ear. In a few Aramaic scripts, these letters also look somewhat similar.

In short, Aramaic has thoroughly influenced the NT as we know it.

Answer 2

Most of the Hebrew books that would become the Hebrew Bible (which Christians call the OT) were written centuries before the NT writings. In the span of time between when most of the last Hebrew Bible books were written and when the NT was written, there were conquests of Israel by nearby Aramaic speaking peoples. Because of this, the national language of the Jews switched over to Aramaic, the language used by their conquerors.

Jesus grew up in a time and place where Aramaic was still spoken, and when what we call Koine Greek was the international language, not Latin. It was much more likely that Jesus spoke Aramaic, and maybe even some Greek (scholars have been supporting this idea of a Greek speaking Jesus more recently.) Jesus or any of his earliest disciples probably did not speak Latin.

Answer 3

The Old Testament was written in Hebrew and Aramaic. The New Testament was written in Greek.

Answer 4

The previous testomony,written very almost fullyyt interior the Hebrew language between 1200 and a hundred BC, the previous testomony (additionally talked approximately as the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh) is an account of God's dealings with the Hebrews as his chosen people. Christian call for the Hebrew Bible, which serves because of the fact the 1st branch of the Christian Bible.The designations “previous” and “New” look to have been accompanied after c.A.D. 2 hundred to distinguish the books of the Mosaic covenant and those of the “new” covenant in Christ. New testomony writers, besides the undeniable fact that, purely call the previous testomony the “Scriptures.” the recent testomony became written in Greek, think of of who Paul became: the "Apostle to the Gentiles". for sure he became writing to Greek speaking people, so he might write to them in Greek.