6. Ancient historians had a purpose for writing, and for including or excluding certain material.
Ankerberg: All right, now, talk about the methodology of writers in ancient history as well as the New Testament writers, how did they go about organizing their material? In other words, Matthew seemed to be writing to a certain crowd; Luke seemed to be writing to a different crowd; John seemed to be writing to a different crowd. Is that bad? Does that automatically knock one writer out versus another? How did people in ancient history write?
Evans: Well, that’s how they wrote. And the whole idea in writing a story was, there was a moral to it. There was something about it. It taught the youths something. It conveyed and passed on values. That was the whole purpose. And so there was always a slant to how one wrote. But the Gospels, what are interesting about them in comparison to other biographies an antiquity, you have this very old, very archaic material that survives. Sometimes even though the Greek gets bumpy because of the underlying Hebrew or Aramaic, and it smacks of antiquity and originality, authenticity. You don’t just have real smooth, polished Greek speeches the way you usually do in the Greco-Roman sources. But you get a little bit of this...you know you read and you think, "This is kind of funny. It sounds a little better in Hebrew or Aramaic." And I think that’s a sign of the originality and antiquity that we see at work in the Gospels.
7. Jesus probably spoke predominately in Aramaic.
Ankerberg: What language do you think Jesus spoke?
Evans: Well, I think He predominantly spoke Aramaic, but linguistic study in late antiquity in Israel—and by that I mean inscriptions that we find. We find inscriptions of graves, on ossuaries, bone boxes; the manuscripts that we have found and so on—you can’t rule out Greek and even Hebrew. I think in Judea itself and in Jerusalem the language spoken there was probably more Hebrew than it was Aramaic. You go up into Galilee where Jesus ministered and where He was raised, and it’s more Aramaic than it is Hebrew. And yet you’ve got Greek everywhere. And so I think it’s distinctly possible that when Jesus was speaking, for example, to the Syro-Phoenician woman He may very well have been speaking to her in Greek. When He was being interrogated by Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, that conversation may very well have taken place in Greek. |
