Dear Bro Craig:
Bro, I have a question.
Why is the Old Testament written in Hebrew and the New Testament written in
Greek, although during the New testament time it was the Romans who we the
masters of the area? This has been in my
mind for quite a while.
That's all and love of
Jesus goes with you always.
Your bro in Christ
Paul
Dear bro Paul,
I know that for a beginner
it can be difficult determining the origins of the ancient Bible languages,
which punctuates the importance of purchasing some good Bible software. I use Biblesoft’s 4.2 version, Reference
Library Plus, as it is very easy and integrative. You could learn much by simply purchasing a Bible Dictionary or
Bible Encyclopedia, which document the early origins of the Old Testament and
New Testament scriptures.
The Bible was written
across a period of several centuries in the languages of Hebrew and Aramaic
(Old Testament) and Greek (New Testament).
With the changing of nations and cultures across the centuries, these
original writings have been translated many times to make the Bible available
in different languages.
Ancient versions of the
Bible are those that were produced in classical languages such as Greek, Syriac,
and Latin. Ancient versions of
scripture were made during a 600-year period from about 200 BC to A.D.
400. The oldest Bible translation in
the world was made in Alexandria, Egypt, where the Old Testament was translated
from Hebrew into Greek for the benefit of the Greek-speaking Jews of that
city. A Jewish community had existed in
Alexandria almost from its foundation by Alexander the Great in 331 BC. By this time in history, the Jews had
forgotten their native Palestinian language of Hebrew and they needed the
Hebrew Scriptures rendered into the only language they knew, which was Koine
Greek.[1]
Of all the languages in
which the Bible was originally written, the most famous is Hebrew, the original
language of the Old Testament, and Koine Greek, used in the writing of most of
the New Testament. However, most
Christians are unaware of the fact that several other ancient languages also
had an important bearing on the writing or transmission of the original texts of
the Bible.
For example, the Aramaic language,
which exists today as the basis for spoken Arabic and other Semitic dialects,
was spoken from at least about 2000 BC, and Aramaic eventually replaced many of
the languages of the ancient world (e.g. – Hebrew) in popularity and usage. Parts of the Book of Daniel were written in
Aramaic and Aramaic was the common language spoken in Palestine in the time of
Jesus. Most scholars agree that Jesus
probably spoke Aramaic as his everyday language, but as a teacher, he was also
fluent in Hebrew and Greek.
During the ministry of
Christ and his twelve disciples, the written form of Greek also co-existed as
the common Hellenistic speech, and was used widespread during this era of the
Roman Empire. This ‘Koine’ form of Greek
still remains in tact today in the 21st century (2005). From as early the 16th and thru
the 20th centuries AD, Koine Greek was assumed by most scholars to
be a crude form of the Attic (Classical Greek) and tantamount to street slang
as a dialect. However, recent
archaeological discoveries and linguistic research has verified that the Koine
Greek of the New Testament is neither a slang nor a foreign language, as was
assumed for many decades.
In all crucial respects,
the colloquial speech of Koine Greek, during the 1st century A.D., was the
‘lingua franca’ of the Greco-Roman empire, handed down to the Romans via the
legacy of Alexander the Great's conquest of the East. Koine Greek as a world-speech was still viewed by intellectuals
as being at bottom the late Attic vernacular, mostly due to dialectical bias
and provincial influences. Koine Greek
was not a decaying tongue, but a virile speech admirably adapted to the service
of the many peoples of the time.[2]
Koine Greek became so
widespread once the Romans conquered Greece that it even penetrated Hebrew
culture and became the primary influence of the Septuagint.[3] While the New Testament was written in the
Greek language, the language which Jesus spoke was probably Aramaic. For example, in Mark 5:41 below, Jesus
speaks in Aramaic:
Mark 5:41 Then He took the
child by the hand, and said to her, "Talitha, cumi," which is
translated, "Little girl, I say to you, arise." NKJV
The words Jesus speaks to
the little girl, “Talitha, cumi,” in verse 41 have been transliterated from
Aramaic, preserved in English versions of the New Testament. Other names for the Aramaic dialect used in
the early churches throughout Asia Minor is Syriac and Chaldee.
The New Testament also
refers to Latin-the language which sprang from ancient Rome (Luke 23:38; John
19:20). Most of the Roman Empire also spoke Greek in Jesus' day. But as Roman power spread throughout the
ancient world, Latin also expanded in use.
The influence of Latin on the Mediterranean world in the time of Jesus
is shown by the occurrence of such Latin words as denarii (Matthew 18:28) and
praetorian (Philippians 1:13, RSV, NASB) in the New Testament.
The Persian language was
also spoken by the people who settled the area east of the Tigris River in what
is now western Iran. When the Jewish
people were taken as captives to Babylon in 587 BC, they may have been exposed
to this distinctive language form, which used a combination of pictorial and
phonetic signs in its alphabet.
Scholars are uncertain if Persian was used in the writing of any parts
of the Old Testament.[4]
The Old Testament, it is
well known, is written mostly in Hebrew; the New Testament is written wholly in
Greek. The parts of the Old Testament
not in Hebrew, namely, Ezra 4:8-6:18; 7:12-26; Jeremiah 10:11; Daniel 2:4-7:28,
are in Aramaic (the so-called Chaldee), a related Semitic dialect, which, after
the Exile, gradually displaced Hebrew as the spoken language of the Jews.
Aramaic is the name is
given to a form of Semitic speech, most nearly related to Hebrew and
Phoenician, but exhibiting marked peculiarities, and subsisting in different
dialects. Its original home may have
been in Mesopotamia (Aram), but it spread North and West, and became the
principal language throughout extensive regions. After the return of the Jews (i.e. – the southern tribes Judah,
Benjamin & Levi) from the Captivity, Aramaic displaced Hebrew as the spoken
language of the Jews in Palestine.
In its eastern form Aramaic is known as Syriac and its occurrence
in the Old Testament, incorrectly bore the name Chaldee until recent
archaeological discoveries determined Chaldee was merely a sub-dialect of the
common form of Aramaic spoken in Babylon.
Ignoring two Aramaic words which occur in Genesis 31:47, the earliest notice
of the use of this language in Scripture is in the request which the
representatives of Hezekiah make to Rabshakeh, “Speak, I pray thee, to thy
servants in the Syriac language,” (Aramaic = `aramith, found in 2 Kings 18:26
& Isaiah 36:11). These narratives
prove that Aramaic, “the Syriac language,” was so different from Hebrew, “the
Jews’ language,” that it was not understood by the inhabitants of
Jerusalem. Further, it shows that
Aramaic was the ordinary language of Assyrian arbitration.
Aramaic is also used in a
verse in Jeremiah 10:11 and if the traditional date of the Book of Daniel is
accurate, there are six chapters in that book (Daniel 2:4-7:28), forming the
greater part of the whole, that are the next and most important occurrence of
Aramaic in Scripture. There are other
Aramaic passages in Ezra 4:8-6:18; 7:12-26, amounting approximately to three
chapters. In the New Testament several Aramaic words and phrases occur,
modified by having passed through Greek.
Also, today we possess several New Testament manuscripts considered
highly credible written in authentic Syriac (Aramaic).
The Semiticisms (Hebraisms
and Aramaisms) found throughout the New Testament scriptures are very natural
results of the fact that the vernacular Koine was used by Jews who read the
Hebrew Bible and the Septuagint translation, and who also spoke Aramaic as
their native tongue. The Septuagint, as
translation of Greek, directly from the Hebrew (or Aramaic), has a much greater
number of these Semiticisms.[5]
Some time before 200 BC
the first section of the Hebrew Bible to be translated into Greek was the
Pentateuch, or the first five books of the Old Testament, and other parts were
translated during the next century. As
mentioned earlier, this version is commonly called the Septuagint, from septuaginta,
the Latin word for 70 (LXX). This name
Septuagint was selected because of a tradition that the Pentateuch was
translated into Greek by about 70 elders of Israel who were brought to
Alexandria especially for this purpose.
Only a few fragments of this version survived in tact from the period
before Christ.
Most copies of the Greek
Old Testament we have in tact today were made by Christians in the first,
second, and third centuries. The
original versions of the Septuagint are a fragment of Deuteronomy in Greek (from
the second century B.C.) and another
fragment of the same book in Greek dating from about the same time exists in
Cairo. Other fragments of the Septuagint have been identified among the texts
known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in 1947.
When Christianity
penetrated the world of the Greek-speaking Jews, and then the Gentiles, the
Septuagint was the Bible used for preaching the gospel. Most of the Old Testament quotations in the
New Testament are taken from this Greek Bible.
In fact, the Christians adopted the Septuagint so wholeheartedly that
the Jewish people lost interest in it.
They produced other Greek versions that did not lend themselves so
easily to Christian interpretation.
The Septuagint thus became
the ‘authorized version’ of the early Gentile churches. To this day, it is the official version of
the Old Testament used in the Greek Orthodox Church. After the books of the New Testament were written and accepted by
the early church, they were added to the Old Testament Septuagint to form the
complete Greek version of the Bible.
The Septuagint was based
on a Hebrew text much older than most surviving Hebrew manuscripts of the Old
Testament. Occasionally, this Greek Old
Testament helps scholars to reconstruct the wording of a passage where it has
been lost or miscopied by scribes as the text was passed down across the
centuries. An early instance of this occurs in Genesis 4:8, where Cain's words
to Abel, “Let us go out to the field,” are reproduced from the Septuagint in
the RSV and other modern versions.
These words had been lost from the standard Hebrew text, but they were
necessary to complete the sense of the English translation.
After their return from
Captivity in Babylon, many Jews spoke Aramaic, instead of the pure Hebrew of their
ancestors. They found it difficult to
follow the reading of the Hebrew Scriptures at worship. So, they adopted the practice of providing
an oral paraphrase into Aramaic when the Scriptures were read in Hebrew. The person who provided this paraphrase,
known officially as, “the Turgeman,” was also an officer in the synagogue.
One of the earliest
examples of such a paraphrase occurs in Nehemiah 8:8. Because of the work of Ezra, the Pentateuch, or the first five
books of the Old Testament, was officially recognized as the constitution of
the Jewish state during the days of the Persian Empire. This constitution was read publicly to the
whole community after their return to Jerusalem. The appointed readers, “read distinctly or, with interpretation
from the book, in the Law of God; and they gave the sense, and helped them
understand the reading.”
The phrase, “with
interpretation,” appears as a marginal reading in several modern Bible
versions, but it probably indicates exactly what happened. The Hebrew text was read, followed by an
oral paraphrase in Aramaic so everyone would be sure to understand. This practice continued as standard in the
Jewish synagogue for a long time. The
“targum,” or paraphrase of the Hebrew, was not read from a written document,
lest some in the congregation might think the authoritative law was being
read. Some religious leaders apparently
held that the Targum should not be written down, even for use outside the
synagogue.
In time, all objections to
a written Targum disappeared. A number
of such paraphrases began to be used.
Official Jewish recognition was given to two in particular-the Targum of
Onkelos on the Pentateuch and the Targum of Jonathan on the Prophets. Some were far from being word-for-word
translations. As expanded paraphrases,
they included interpretations and comments on the biblical text. Today, these written paraphrased
interpretations are known as Aramaic Targums.
The word “targum” means “translation.”
One area of great
confusion, little understood by novice students of the scriptures, and even
scholars find quizzical, are the Aramaic targumic expressions used by various
New Testament writers. Some New
Testament writers indicate knowledge of targumic interpretations in their
quotations from the Old Testament. For
example, “Vengeance is Mine, I will repay,” (Romans 12:19; Hebrews 10:30) is a
quotation from Deuteronomy 32:35; but it conforms neither to the Hebrew text
nor to the Greek text of the Septuagint.
This particular phrase comes from the Targum. Again, the words of Ephesians 4:8, “When He ascended on high, He
led captivity captive, and gave gifts to men,” are taken from Psalms
68:18. But the Hebrew and Septuagint texts
speak of the receiving of gifts. Only
the Targum on this text mentions the giving of gifts. The confusion arises for beginners, who are unable to locate the
Old Testament quotes in either Hebrew Old Testament translations or the
Septuagint version.
The term Syriac describes
the Eastern Aramaic language spoken in Northern Mesopotamia, the land between
the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers northeast of the land of Palestine. Large Jewish settlements were located
there. At some point, the Old Testament
must have been translated into Syriac for their benefit.
As Christianity expanded, this
area became an important center of Christian life and action. The Christians in northern Mesopotamia
inherited the Syriac Old Testament and added a Syriac translation of the New
Testament to it. This, ‘authorized
version,’ of the Syriac Bible is called the Peshitta, (i.e. - the “common” or
“simple” version). In its present form,
it goes back to the beginning of the fifth century A.D. But there were earlier Syriac translations
of parts of the New Testament. Two
important manuscripts of the Gospels exist in an Old Syriac version, which
probably goes back to about the second century A.D.
The Syriac-speaking church
was very missionary-minded. It carried
the gospel into Central Asia, evangelizing India and parts of China. It translated portions of the Bible from
Syriac into the local languages of these areas which it evangelized. The earliest forms of the Bible in the
languages of Armenia and Georgia (north of Armenia) were based on the Syriac
version.
Coptic was a highly
developed form of the native language of the ancient Egyptians, and during the
time when Christianity was planted in Egypt, while some of the twelve apostles
were still alive. With the development
of a Christian community in Egypt, the need arose for a Bible in the Coptic
tongue. To this day the Coptic Church
of Egypt uses the Bohairic version of the Coptic Bible, translated in the early
centuries from the Septuagint and the Greek New Testament into the dialect of
Lower Egypt. Earlier still is the
Sahidic version, in the dialect of Upper Egypt.
Across the Rhine and
Danube frontiers of the Roman Empire lived a race of people known as the
Goths. The evangelization of the
Ostrogoths, those who lived north of the Danube River, began in the third
century around A.D. 360. The first converts
lived south of the Danube River, and settled in what is now Bulgaria. There the Bible was translated into their
‘Gothic’ language and the Gothic version was the first translation of the Bible
into a language of the Germanic family.
English, German, Dutch, and Scandinavian belong to this language group
and many of the words used in modern English versions of the Bible originate
from this Gothic tongue, accounting for the numerous mistranslations.
The need for a Latin Bible
first arose during the second century A.D., when Latin began to replace Greek
as the dominant language of the Roman Empire. The first Old Testament sections
of the Latin Bible were considered unreliable, since they were actually a
translation of a translation. They were
based on the Septuagint, which, in turn, was a translation of the Hebrew Bible
into Greek. Since the New Testament was
written originally in Greek, it was translated directly into the Latin
language. Several competing New
Testament translations were in use throughout the Latin-speaking world as early
as about A.D. 250.
The task of producing one
standard Latin Bible to replace these competing translations was entrusted by
Damasus, bishop of Rome (366-384), to his secretary Jerome. Jerome undertook the task unwillingly,
knowing that replacing an old version with a new is bound to cause offense,
even if the new is better. He began
with a revision of the gospels, followed by the Psalms. After completing the New Testament, Jerome
mastered the Hebrew language in order to translate the Old Testament into
Latin. He completed this work in A.D.
405. Jerome's translation of the Bible
is known as the Latin Vulgate and the best surviving manuscript of the Latin
Vulgate is the Codex Amiatinus.
The Latin Vulgate is
especially important because it was the medium through which the gospel arrived
in Western Europe. It remained the
standard version in this part of the world for centuries In 1546 the Council of
Trent directed that only, “this same ancient and vulgate edition...be held as
authentic in public lecture, disputations, sermons and expository discourses,
and that no one make bold or presume to reject it on any pretext.” Until the 20th century, no
translations of the Bible except those based on the Vulgate were recognized as
authoritative by the Roman Catholic Church.
Until the beginning of the
16th century, all Bible versions in the language of the masses of
Western Europe were based on the Latin Vulgate. Among these, the Old English versions consisted of only parts of
the Bible, and even these had limited circulation. In this period few of the people of ancient England could read
and therefore many of the familiar stories of the Bible were turned into verse
and set to music so they could be sung and memorized.[6]
I hope this has proven
informative bro Paul; you should keep this email on file, as it took a good
deal of research to find and format for you.
Your friend always,
Craigo
Craig Bluemel - The Bible Answer Stand Ministry
1 Peter 3:15 Always be
ready to give a logical defense to anyone who asks you to account for the hope
that is in you, but do it courteously and respectfully.
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[1] BIBLE VERSIONS
AND TRANSLATIONS (from Nelson's Illustrated Bible Dictionary, Copyright © 1986,
Thomas Nelson Publishers)
[2] LANGUAGE OF THE
NEW TESTAMENT; 2. The Revolution: (from International Standard Bible
Encyclopaedia, Electronic Database Copyright © 1996, 2003 by Biblesoft, Inc.
All rights reserved.)
[3] THE BIBLE,
2.LANGUAGES; from International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia, Electronic
Database Copyright © 1996, 2003 by Biblesoft, Inc. All rights reserved.
[4] LANGUAGES OF THE BIBLE (from Nelson's Illustrated Bible Dictionary, Copyright © 1986, Thomas Nelson Publishers)
[5] LANGUAGE OF THE
NEW TESTAMENT - III. The Semitic Influence; (from International Standard Bible
Encyclopaedia, Electronic Database Copyright © 1996, 2003 by Biblesoft, Inc.
All rights reserved.)
[6] BIBLE VERSIONS
AND TRANSLATIONS (from Nelson's Illustrated Bible Dictionary, Copyright © 1986,
Thomas Nelson Publishers)