Ruminations of a Preacher

Life experiences and recent memories in the Christian faith, and my family.

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Hebrew, Latin, and Greek

I am returning to a Bible study website that I have ignored for many months.  It is Studylight.org.  On the side of the home page, there are listings for various writer’s thoughts and works in various areas of thought.  One of these is titled as “Difficult Sayings.”  Today, the line is about the apparent difficulty of Petroj and petra in Matt. 16:18.  The author goes to great lengths to explain how the New Testament was written in Greek, but the languages spoken by Jesus and the disciples would have been Aramaic or Hebrew, depending on the situation.  He further tries to demonstrate that Petroj & petra would have been borrowed or loan words from Greek into Hebrew/ Aramaic.  However, the entire question is being over complicated by the assumptions.  But Doctor Luke tells us Luke 23:38 “Now there was also an inscription above Him, ‘THIS IS THE KING OF THE JEWS,’” which the KJV attributes as in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.  Although the Greek for Luke does not support the attribution for Hebrew, Latin, and Greek, the Greek text of John 19:20 does: kai. h=n gegramme,non ~Ebrai?sti,( ~Rwmai?sti,( ~Ellhnisti,Å  Literally “Hebrew, Roman, and Hellenic.”  A.T. Robertson said: “Latin was the legal and official language; Aramaic (Hebrew) was for the benefit of the people of Jerusalem; Greek was for everybody who passed by who did not know Aramaic.”  Everyone who lived in the ancient Roman world spoke some combination of two of the three, or even all three.  Although I disagree with the author of the article, I have learned something about the NT that I did not know before.  Thankyou.

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