What language was the Bible written in? New Testament GREEK or ARAMAIC?

What language was the Bible written in? Specifically, what was the original language of the New Testament? While the broad concensus is that it was Greek, some have hypthosized that Syriac/Aramaic was the language of the original text. What do the experts say?

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[yiannisroubos]

Most Luke Ranieri statement.

"I dont know Syriac, yet"

[AngryCenturion]

I’m a Christian and I’ve been using the Vulgate to improve my Latin. It’s especially helpful because if you’re a Christian you’re already familiar with many of the passages, so even if you don’t understand every word in the Latin, your mind fills it in intuitively because you already know the story and context

[ProfessorMichaelWingert]

Yes!! Optima magister! Thank you so much for putting the Syriac language (and Aramaic language more broadly) on the map. This sort of exposure is so important for the future longevity of the language. Great job!

[Edodod]

It appears to me that there is not yet a video of Luke Ranieri speaking Ancient Greek to modern Greeks, like you have with Ancient Latin to Italians.
I'd love to see that. Maybe in the future! It was quite interesting.

[HighWideandHandsome]

Greek, no doubt in my mind. That said, it is fascinating to see the stylistic differences between the apostolic writings, as a result of their influences, linguistic or otherwise. Luke is a great example: in his prologue (Luke 1:1–4) he writes in a very classical style, but the rest of his Gospel is much more indebted to the style of the Septuagint translation. His is the most difficult of the four Gospels to read, for that and other reasons. Thanks for the video.

P. S. I was wondering why I hadn't seen any videos from either of your channels lately, but I checked today and it seems that many of them evaded my notifications. I have it set to "All", so I don't know what would cause this. Perhaps others have had the same problem.

[tbhziov]

Και πάλι η εκπομπή σου είναι εξόχως διαφωτιστική. Ευχαριστώ Λουκά.

[benkorb]

13:00 I've been using the Bible to improve my Chinese for a while now, to great effect! In January, I finally decided to order a physical copy of the Catholic translation from Hong Kong but it still hasn't arrived :(
A few months ago I also started saying the Liturgy of the Hours in Chinese, which has been a great opportunity to polish pronunciation and intonation. And it's all online for free! Christian language learners are really missing out if they don't make use of these resources.

[CharlesSchaum]

At seminary (now 30 years past) I learned Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, with a "drive-by" attempt at Aramaic. I already knew English and German, plus some of my grandmother's Norwegian dialect. I have worked with people who knows Syriac. What you presented was the consensus that I learned. The early date of P52 and other papyri fragments, which are in Greek, attests to the earliness of the Greek NT. The Peshitta is older as an OT translation, but by at most 300 years. So it looks like the activity of translating the biblical sources into Syriac was ongoing, since the Syriac NT started to be translated in the second century AD through the 5th, and P52 appears in the third. John tends to refer to the Lord in the nominative case because there was a bias among Aramaic speakers not to manipulate the divine name. So what I learned agrees with what you said. Also, in producing maps for The Lutheran Study Bible and The Apocrypha: The Lutheran Edition with Notes, I learned about the intrinsic role of Jewish trade routes in early Christian mission. So it would appear that the common language of trade was a primary decision to be as well-positioned as possible when using the trade routes to spread the Gospel.

[JonBrase]

One question when you ask what the "original language" was is what you mean by "original". The written text of the New Testament was originally in Greek, but much of the text of the Gospels records conversations, sermons, etc. that were almost certainly in Aramaic. The grammar of Mark and Revelation reveals that, whatever language they were written in, the thoughts of the authors were in Aramaic. But for a thought, or a conversation to be written down, it first has to be thought, or spoken. So arguably the original language was Aramaic, even if it was never written down.

[Jonassoe]

It was written in God's own language, American English.

[kennethconnally]

Hm, while I certainly trust the expert consensus here that the texts were originally Greek, I didn't find Mr. Polymathy's supporting argument that a Greek-speaking translator wouldn't produce "errors" in Greek very persuasive. It depends what kinds of errors we're talking about, but there definitely is a phenomenon of texts in translation retaining some grammatical features of the original that don't work, or don't work as well, in the target language. Especially with a text considered sacred, the translator might do things like deliberately preserving the word order from the original even though it's awkward or confusing in the target language, using the same word to translate the same word each time it occurs in the original text even when that isn't the best choice for the context, etc. You can see that all over the place in translations of the Bible itself, for instance the Vulgate and KJV, which preserve various idioms from the Greek and Hebrew into Latin and English that could clue us into the fact that these are translations if we didn't already know. In fact, the phrase "New Testament" itself is an example of this; it's supposed to mean "new covenant" (as in, the Hebrew Bible recorded God's original covenant with the people of Israel, whereas these texts present God's new covenant based on Christ's sacrifice), but "testament" in English and "testamentum" in Latin instead mean "will, " as in your "last will and testament." This error occurred because the Greek word διαθήκη can mean either "covenant" or "will, " and the Latin "testamentum" was chosen to translate it (wrongly, in that context).

[alfonsmelenhorst]

My native language is Dutch. I studied Sanskrit. There is little material from my language to learn Sanskrit. I have used German textbooks. The New Testament has been translated into good classical Sanskrit. I therefore compared the Dutch Bible with the Sanskrit translation. I learned a lot from that and can now read classical Sanskrit literature in the original language.

[DarranUaM]

The New Testament in Coptic (both Bohairic and Sahidic) really helped me become fluent at reading the language, especially when combined with speaking aloud. Somehow it has a nice mix of repeating itself in some ways and having enough variety to push your ability.

[balkanmountains-]

Very interesting! May I ask, will we ever get a video on Medieval Greek? Sadly, there is not a single video on Youtube about it.

[GnosticInformant]

This hypothesis gets beat up pretty bad by some academic articles. Mark also has some latin idioms too. But these texts are written for greeks (many who are Hellenized Jews) living in Asia Minor, Egypt, etc. The explosion of Christianity in the late 1st/early 2nd century happens in greek cities and rejected by hebrew/aramaic speaking jews who begin a new rabbinic form of Judaism. Christianity is heavily influenced by Middle Platonist philosophy and the places that Paul and John are writing to are all greek speaking cities. Even the early Syrian Christians like Simon Magus, are writing in greek, and we know his native toungue was aramaic, so that could show that these people are eastern but still writing for greek audience. For this to be true, we would need to see more aramaic speaking cities dominating the early Christian scene.

[andrelegeant]

I don't give much credence to the Aramaic primacy concept. The poorness of the Greek in Mark is overstated. The poorness of the Greek in Revelation is understated. But even if neither author had "good" Greek, that doesn't mean there was a translation. It just means they were not strong in their Greek, and their native tongues may have influenced how they wrote Greek. I am confident my English influences how I write Ancient Greek (though not as much as my Latin does, oddly enough). But I am fairly well convinced that Jesus and the Apostles not only would have known some Greek simply because of its importance, but that they would have been more familiar with the Septuagint than a Hebrew text. (People will say, oh, Jesus wasn't educated, Peter was a fisherman, etc., but they would still have learned Greek to some extent just like Spanish-speaking manual laborers in modern America learn English.)

[NicholasproclaimerofMessiah]

This is a very intelligent and well conveyed perspective on this; I appreciate it.

[stephenhoyle]

A number of years ago I began reading the Bible in Chinese in order to improve my reading ability in Chinese. Given that I have read the Bible in my native English since I was fairly young, I reasoned that my familiarity with the text in English would help in me in trying to read it in Chinese. And it worked! Consequently, I would strongly agree with Luke that this is one of the best ways to improve one's reading ability in a second language. Incidentally, I started trying to read the New Testament in the original Greek about a year ago, and although my progress has been sometimes a little slow, I do believe I am making some progress. I started off with short books with relatively uncomplicated vocabulary, like the Epistles of 2 John and 3 John, and found that helped.

[chancylvania]

Well for the most part, it was written in Greek. However, all of our 2nd century sources that talk about the gospels and where they come from say some part of the gospel of Matthew was written in the “tongue/dialect/language of the hebrews, ” and later translated to Greek (which is where the similar parts from Mark would come from). But other than that, the only language it’s ever been is Greek.

[SylveonSimp]

As far as I've been told, the Bible was orignally transmitted in AASL.