That's an interesting opinion you have there.
It's seems pretty strange to me, but maybe I'm just missing something. Before I get to my questions let me state a few facts as I understand them, maybe I'm wrong about some of these:
I know that Moslems hold that the Koran was dictated to Mohammed in Arabic by an angel, and that therefore each word in the Koran is the sacred word of God, and if you translate it, it is no longer the Koran, but rather only a translation of the Koran. That's one reason that Islam encourages people to learn Arabic, and one reason that Islam is often seen as a very powerful program to encourage Arabization of other cultures. That is a tool of cultural colonization.
Christianity (ie: New Testament) could perhaps have been said to have been a tool of the Roman Empire in a similar way. Latin was pretty important to the early church.
One of the big breakthroughs of the Reformation, I have always been taught, was that it removed the need for "the common people" to either learn Latin or receive teachings from the Priests and Bishops. To use a modern term: the Reformation "disintermediated" Christianity. And of course the Catholics took a while but eventually (Vatican II) followed suit, and mostly replaced latin with local languages for everyone.
Your claim (if I'm not reading too much into it) suggests that you profoundly disagree with this trend, and take a dim view of translations of the Bible (other than into Hebrew).
To read an untranslated Bible doesn't it need to be in Koine Greek for the New Testament and Hebrew for most of the Old?
Is the use of Hebrew that your feel similar to the use of Arabic by devout Moslems?
Guys, this sounds like a topic for the religion thread or a private pm conversation.
Aren’t you rather nit-picking and missing the jest of what he said? Anyway, God bless and let’s talk Q.
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I don’t know any stats on who reads hebrew, do you?
Only a tiny fraction of those calling themselves “Christian” will be saved; this can be clearly inferred from Yeshua’s words recorded in the gospels.
So, the language in which they read may be more significant than you believe.
Paul stated plainly in Romans that the oracles of Yehova are given only to Judah.
The only language that Judah had ever spoken at that time was Hebrew.
All of the NT was originally written in Hebrew. We have solid proof of that now, and the Tanakh was also given in Hebrew.
>> “The first extant copies of the New Testament, dating to the first century, are in Koine Greek, not Hebrew.” <<
That is a false statement.
The earliest Greek translations appear to date from the 3rd century, and all Greek MS are translated from Hebrew. This can be proven from the broken Hebrew poetry contained in them, and the broken Hebrew idioms also contained.
Very little of the Hebrew NT MS have any evidence of being translated from Greek, and the only determinant of that is the errors carried over from the Greek MS.
there are only a few letters that were back-translated from Greek to Hebrew.
Hebrew NT MS that have unbroken Hebrew poetry and idioms are obviously copies of the Hebrew originals.
The ‘Koran’ has nothing to do with the word of Yehova.
The Greek translations of the NT are clearly tools of Roman paganism.
Christ and the Apostles probably spoke Aramaic. Aramaic words appear a few places in the New Testament. Some scholars claim to have found an Aramaic structure underlying the Gospel of Mathhew.
Because they lived in the Hellenistic Eastern part of the Roman Empire some of the Apostles probably knew Koine, Paul and Luke certainly did. The New Testament was written, I agree, in Koine. In the first 3 centuries it was translated in to Latin, Sryiac, Armenian, probably Arabic, Coptic, and so on.
Oh those goofy Muslims! First they tell you Mohammad was illiterate and did not write, then he’s taking dictation from Angels. Next they will tell us he’s riding a magical horses named Barack to the farthest Mosque in a city that was not conquered by Islam until 3 years after his death!