Original Text of the New Testament was written in Hebrew?

 

A few years ago, I was told that a Hebrew teacher from India claimed that the New Testament was originally written in Hebrew. 

        Just this week, another gentleman from Singapore made the same claim. In my follow-up discussion with him, he claims that the New Testament was written in Hebrew and Aramaic.

        Allow me to put my response to this in point form:

1) Lingua Franca 

The entire Old Testament was written in Hebrew, with the exception of certain portions in Daniel that were written in Aramaic.

However, well known manuscripts such as Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (which is based on Codex Leningradensis) and Aleppo Codex do not make any attempt to preserve the Aramaic text.

The fact that the Aramaic text is not even preserved in these manuscripts show that even the Jews themselves did not bother to preserve the original Aramaic text.

2) The Septuagint 

The entire Tanakh was translated by 70 scholars from Hebrew to Greek around 3rd Century BC. Why was Greek chosen, instead of Aramaic? 

The answer is obvious: Greek has already become the lingua franca of the day. Koine Greek (or what I call 'marketplace Greek) was already used widely during era of Jesus and the early church. The translation was necessary as Greek was the form of education that even the Jews in disapora were receiving even before Jesus' era. 

This is similar to our English language which is the lingua franca in our 21st century, while Aramaic is similar to our Chinese dialects such as Hokkien or Teo Chew.  

It is obvious that when God wanted to communicate with the nations of the then known world, He would have picked Greek, not Hebrew or Aramaic.

This is common sense that Aramaic was not an important language in those days. There could have been portions of the Bible translated into Aramaic for the specific groups of people, but Greek was still the common language that people could read and understand. 

While Jesus and His disciples may have used Aramaic in their daily conversation, the gospels and the rest of the New Testament were written in the lingua franca of the day: koine Greek.

Meanwhile, Hebrew was confined to only the synagogues and the Temple during Jesus' lifetime. Put it in the modern context, Hebrew is like Arabic to the Muslims.

For that reason, we have many thousands of early Greek manuscripts compared to what some claim to be the 'original' Hebrew or Aramaic New Testament.

While there may be claims that the early church fathers had cited some Hebrew New Testament manuscripts, the truth remains that God did not bother to bring it to the forefront until recent years.

3) Jewish scholar Nehemias Gordon has also dealt with this kind of claim that the New Testament was written in Hebrew. Although he is not a Christian, Gordon has put it clearly that there is no such thing. He spent a few thousand dollars to purchase a manuscript and studied it. Very quickly, he concluded that it was fake.  

4) What about Hebrew New Testament that we have now?

Bible.Is app, for example, has a Modern Hebrew version of 1995.  It has the New Testament translated from Greek into Hebrew.

I use this occasionally but I would not take it as the original text. It is as good a translation as translations into any other languages. If I want to find the original words used in the Old Testament, I would refer to the Hebrew text, but for the New Testament, it would be Greek.  

If I teach Hebrew to a group of believers, I would use the Hebrew Old Testament as the text, but I would treat the New Testament in Hebrew as just another translation.

5) Repeatedly making his false claims.

Before I decided to block this gentleman from Singapore, he kept repeating one or two statements. I do not understand his intention, whether he was trying to print screen something and show people that I believed what he said about the New Testament.  

However, I think this guy has been so conditioned after 17 years in the Hebraic Movement that he no longer could see the truth any more.