Hebrew and Aramaic are language "cousins"
I think (not sure) Matthew was written in Aramaic, not Hebrew
Hebrew at the time of Christ was purely a liturgical language - people in general spoke Aramaic and Greek
Posted on 01/14/2020 5:16:45 AM PST by Cronos
St. Thomas the Apostle is known as a great evangelizer of India, but another Apostle, St. Bartholomew, is also credited in bringing the Gospel to the subcontinent.
The Roman Martyrology says that St. Bartholomew preached the Gospel in India.
It is believed that Bartholomew reached the Konkan Coast, the rugged section of the western coastline of India, in the 1st century. According to Butler’s Lives of the Saints, Eusebius, in the early Fourth Century, says that St. Pantaenus, about a century earlier, found in India people who still showed him a copy of St. Matthew’s Gospel, “which they assured him that St. Bartholomew had brought into those parts.”
But it wasn’t until after Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama visited the west coast of India in 1498 that widespread evangelization got underway. From the year 1500, missionaries of the different orders (Franciscans, Dominicans, Jesuits, Augustinians, etc.) accompanied the colonists and began to build churches along the coast districts.
When the Portuguese came to India, one of the things they set as a priority was to remove Nestorianism from the Christianity practiced by the so-called “Thomas Christians” on the Malabar and Coromandel coast and bring the community into union with the Catholic Church. This was accomplished by the Synod of Diamper in 1599.
Portuguese missionary activity resulted in large Christian communities formed in the south of India and as far as Madras on the east coast, and Damão on the west, while sporadic efforts were made from time to time further northwards, as far as Bengal, Agra, and even Tibet. The chief successes were, first, within the strictly Portuguese territory of Goa.
(Excerpt) Read more at aleteia.org ...
“For Bartholomew,one of the apostles, had preached to them, and left with them the writing of Matthew in the Hebrew language, which they had preserved till that time”
—Eusebius
Intersting thought, that perhaps Matthew was first written in Hebrew.
Interesting read. Not altogether surprising given the predilection towards revisionist history practiced by the Roman Catholic Church. Perhaps someone should speak to some real “St. Thomas Christians” (not the fake ones that are actually Catholics we see quoted) about the history of the Portuguese and the RCC. Incidentally, the Christian’s were know as Followers of the Way (of the Nazarene) in pre-Catholic India.
Some beautiful old cathedrals there. Worth a visit.
“Intersting thought, that perhaps Matthew was first written in Hebrew.”
Or Aramaic? Is Aramaic a form of Hebrew?
Nestorianism is basically the doctrine that Jesus existed as two persons, the man Jesus and the divine Son of God, rather than as a unified person. This doctrine is identified with Nestorius (c.386-451), Patriarch of Constantinople, although he himself denied holding this belief. This view of Christ was condemned at the Council of Ephesus in 431, and the conflict over this view led to the Nestorian schism, separating the Assyrian Church of the East from the Byzantine Church.
The motivation for this view was an aversion to the idea that “God” suffered and died on the cross, be it the divinity itself, the Trinity, or one of the persons of the Trinity. Thus, they would say, Jesus the perfect man suffered and died, not the divine second person of the Trinity, for such is an impossible thought — hence the inference that two “persons” essentially inhabited the one body of Jesus. Nestorius himself argued against calling Mary the “Mother of God” (Theotokos) as the church was beginning to do. He held that Mary was the mother of Christ only in respect to His humanity. The council at Ephesus (431) accused Nestorius of the heresy of teaching “two persons” in Christ and insisted that Theotokos was an appropriate title for Mary.
The problem with Nestorianism is that it threatens the atonement. If Jesus is two persons, then which one died on the cross? If it was the “human person” then the atonement is not of divine quality and thereby insufficient to cleanse us of our sins.
From Theopedia.
Nestorians reached all the way to Japan before 700 AD and were truly missionaries in any sense of the word.
That is what was universally held until Erasmus doubted the tradition on the sound grounds the he had never seen the Hebrew.
I think his descendants all moved to Missouri.
Jerome is the last father that I am aware of who actually uses the Matthew Hebrew to some extent.
Or Aramaic? Is Aramaic a form of Hebrew?
Late Latin or Early Italian?
It is mostly in the definition.
They’re connected but its more like the way Latin is connected to Italian.
“The heart of Catholic India is in the state of Goa.”
Not exactly. As the article explains, Catholicism in Goa is largely European in origin, being chiefly Latin-rite. In Kerala, the Syro-Malabar and Malankara churches are every bit as Catholic, and save some minor tweaking to come into conformity to heal some divergent evolution, represent Catholicism as it has continually existed in India since the days of St. Thomas the Apostle.
Yep. Portugal
The portuguese in India spread Christianity wide in Western India. They did the same in East Timor. But then in the 1600s they declined and were replaced by Dutch and English who didn’t care about spreading Christianity
The St. Thomas Christians seem to have Jewish blood - and St. Thomas went to india due to the Jewish community (dating to 500 BC) in what is now Kerala.
They didn’t spread the faith too much beyond their community and the propagation stagnated from the 3rd century onwards
Hebrew and Aramaic are language "cousins"
I think (not sure) Matthew was written in Aramaic, not Hebrew
Hebrew at the time of Christ was purely a liturgical language - people in general spoke Aramaic and Greek
To be precise, they weren’t Nestorians in that dogmatic sense.
Nestorius was accused of this, but there’s no evidence he himself believed this. He was accepted in Ctesiphon which was under Sassanid Persian empire and the Persians were happy to have their “own Christians” in schism from the church in the Roman Empire (Rome being their enemy).
But the theological foundations of the Assyrian church were set by Babai the great and they aren’t ‘Nestorian’
This, Assyrian Church (which we see in Mosul and Iraq) spread to Mongolia and yes to Japan.
in the 9th century fully 33% of Christians were under the Catholicos of the Assyrian church (their “pope”) based in Ctesiphon (nowadays a suburb of Baghdad).
A group of them came in commmunion with the Catholics and we have the Chaldean Catholic church
Aramaic and Hebrew are not related to each other in the same way Late Latin and Early Italian are related.
Italian is essentially modern Latin.
Aramaic was not derived from Hebrew, but was a sister language spoken in Aram (modern day Damascus area) that spread due to commercial means.
ok didn’t know, just guessed!
Thanks
I didn’t know that either until a few years ago :)
After university I got really interested in linguistics (go figure, I studied mech engineering, nothing to do with the humanities) and spent a lot of time learning French, then fell in love with Italian, learnt a bit of German, until I met a wonderful Polish lass and spent 10 years learning Polish.
I’ve been trying my hand at Koine Greek and Hebrew — both are hard going as, while I can see relationships between English-French-German-Italian-Spanish-polish-Russian-Farsi-Sanskrit, I can’t see commonalities in Greek and even worse the Semitic languages are all completely new ground.
I’d suggest the book “the power of Babel” to get into Linguistics
ok thanks!
Perhaps Spanish and Catalan would be a better analogy.
Hebrew was getting on to being pretty well dead at the time of Our Lord, but it was dead in the way that Latin was dead from about 800-1920——almost no one is raised with it as a primary tongue, but there are lots of people who can use it to communicate when push comes to shove.
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