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"And this is exactly the sort of thing that Crichton attacked and attacked with clarity."

I don't know whether Crichton has done much translation or not, but I've been translating professionally from Japanese to English for 15 years now, and I can tell at a glance when a document was translated from Japanese to English not by a native speaker of English but by a Japanese person, no matter how good he may be.

Even in a text translated by a native speaker of English, unless he was both very good *and* completely free to deviate from the manuscript for the sake of making the English natural and colloquial, which is rare, I can tell if the English text was translated from a Japanese manuscript rather than originally composed in English.

While I am not equally sensitive WRT to Japanese manuscripts, I can also tell--without fail--when a Japanese manuscript was composed by a native speaker of a language other than Japanese.

With a Japanese manuscript written by a native speaker of Japanese, I can often make a good estimate of the age of the writer.

The grounds for theorizing that the Gospels were originally written in Hebrew (described more thoroughly in the article linked by Daijal) may not qualify as "scientific," but to me, as an experienced translator, they are entirely plausible.

Actually, I'll go further than that: when you back-translate and in several places find wordplay that works in the second language but not the first, it's downright convincing.

Generally speaking, such things are readily evident in instruction sheets for major products and usually only because the translation is extremely poor. I would venture to say that looking at a KJV and not knowing from what language it was originally translated, it would not be possible to tell it came from Greek. It might be said that it would be easy to translate back into Greek; but, that would not neccessarily be the case. Greek is quite a specific language whereas the King's English was not by comparison.

I would further note that it has been pointed out that there are parts of the Greek language which have no parallel in Chaldee. This has been one of the sticking points from my understanding.

Furthermore, there are phrases that originate in english that are easier to say and more intuitive in other languages. That doesn't mean the original thought was in the other language, just that the happenstance exists. So it is counterintuitive to say that because it's easy to translate a piece from one language to another that it must have originated in the language being translated to. I think this is obvious to anyone who has taken foriegn language classes at any point in their life.

So, while it may be a cute aside, it isn't science nor is it evidence in a practical sense. It's about as useful as
looking at word patterns and trying to guess whether the same person wrote two works based on that. That isn't science either, though some have tried to pass it off as such.

In all honesty, the level of scientific honesty I've seen to date from others with regard to this work have extended to the point of stating as though factually that the book originated in Aramaic, that there is only one aramaic word for "rock" or "stone" and that 16:18 would have to be rendered a certain way because of this. It's stated as a given by many. The simple fact is that Chaldee has so many words for rock and stone that there is one to describe small cupped stones. Cupped, as in having a hollow that could hold water. There are over a dozen words for various forms of stone in Chaldee if memory serves. So that doesn't stand up. Further, no 1st century equivalant of Matthew has ever been found written in Aramaic. And if I'm not mistaken, nor have any of the other Gospels.

As someone who learned the scientific method early and took it to heart, i've little patience for consensus approaches that lack any factual grounding that can be tested and confirmed. That attitude permeates science and religion both. And it should be stopped, though I've no hope that it will, nor that junk science will cease to prevail.