” ‘WE’? I don’t care. If you read upthread, Papias is hardly my first defense. But apparently, The Roman church listens to it’s own fathers the same way it listens to the Word - Take what ‘confirms’ and throw out the rest. Frankly, I should have been expecting that.”
Indeed, Papias is irrelevant to your position. So, where’s your defense here? What evidence do you possess that the Gospels were originally written in Hebrew not Greek? All you’ve provided in this thread is plent by of opinion, but precious little fact. My argument is simple.
The earliest documentary evidence that we possess is in Greek. If the books are indeed translations from the Hebrew into the Greek, wouldn’t it be more likely that the first documents we possess would also be written in Hebrew, not Greek?
You must have missed the link I provided in my original argument in #154... Which no one has made any attempt to refute.
The earliest documentary evidence that we possess is in Greek. If the books are indeed translations from the Hebrew into the Greek, wouldn’t it be more likely that the first documents we possess would also be written in Hebrew, not Greek?
considering the paucity of extant texts prior to 350AD (of any kind), when the Hebrews had been dispersed for a couple of generations already, and considering the campaign to discourage anything of the Jews in that time and onward, it is of little surprise that such texts have been lost to time.
But, that does not explain the Aramaic structures within the Greek, and certainly does not explain the Hebrew structures hidden to the casual eye. One must translate the Greek back to Hebrew to find them.
And btw, my position is that what we possess is third generation... From an Hebrew original, to Aramaic, to Greek... That cannot be specifically defended as well, but it is the only way to account for both Hebrew and Aramaic structures therein contained - Unless one cares to assert that some amalgam of the two was present in the original, which I must needfully deny.