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The original language of the New Testament

The New Testament was written in Greek, in the everyday form of the language called Koine [1]. Jesus and his first followers, though, spoke Aramaic [1], [2]. So even the oldest Christian writings already give Jesus’ words in translation, and a few places in them still show the Aramaic underneath. This primer covers why Greek, what the Aramaic traces look like, what the oldest manuscripts show, and where the popular claim that the New Testament was first written in Aramaic comes from.

A few terms

• New Testament: the early Christian writings that Christians added to the Jewish scriptures: the Gospels about Jesus’ life, the Acts of the Apostles, letters, and Revelation.
• Koine Greek: koine means “common.” It’s the everyday Greek that most educated people in the first-century Mediterranean used, simpler in style and grammar than classical Greek [1].
• Aramaic: a Semitic language closely related to Hebrew, the everyday language of Jews in Palestine in Jesus’ time. A few parts of the Old Testament are written in it too [2], [1].
• Septuagint: the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, begun in Egypt in the third century BCE (“before the common era,” the same years as BC) [3].
• Manuscript: a handwritten copy. Every New Testament book survives only in copies, and the copies differ from one another [4], [5].
• Syriac: a dialect of Aramaic, first spoken in northern Syria, and the language of the Syriac churches [3], [6]. The Peshitta is the Syriac Bible.

The languages around Jesus

First-century Palestine used several languages at once: Greek, Aramaic, Hebrew, and to a lesser degree Latin, each by different communities in different ways [7]. They weren’t used for the same things:

The sign on Jesus’ cross shows the mix: according to the Gospel of John, it was written “in Hebrew, in Latin, and in Greek” (John 19:20) [8].

The difference between speaking a language and writing in it explains a lot. When Luke describes Jesus reading scripture in a synagogue (Luke 4:18), the scroll was plausibly in Hebrew, and Jesus would have explained it in Aramaic, and yet Luke tells the story in Greek [7].

Why the New Testament is in Greek

Greek was the shared language of the eastern Mediterranean [1], so it reached the most people. Paul’s letters are thought to be the oldest writings in the New Testament, older than the Gospels [4]. When Paul quotes scripture, he quotes the Greek Septuagint, not the Hebrew [1]. The Gospels came after: Mark is usually dated to the late 60s or early 70s CE, and Matthew drew on Mark, so it came later still [9]. By the end of the first century and the start of the second, Christian communities were already using Gospels, letters, and other writings, all in Koine [3].

The New Testament was written in Greek from the start; it wasn’t translated into Greek from something else. Its words for Jesus’ teaching, though, are a translation, because he taught in Aramaic [1].

Aramaic words left in the Greek

In a few places the Greek text keeps Jesus’ own Aramaic words, spelled out in Greek letters, and then translates them [1], [2]:

Translations of each verse are from the NRSV Updated Edition [8]. Mark stops to translate every one of them, which he’d only need to do for readers who didn’t know Aramaic.

A few Aramaic words survive outside Jesus’ sayings too. Paul uses abba in his letters (Romans 8:15, Galatians 4:6) [10], and he ends 1 Corinthians with maranatha, which means either “Our Lord, come” or “Our Lord has come,” depending on where the word is split. It suggests it was an early prayer, and that the first Christians probably already called Jesus Mar, “Lord,” in Aramaic [11].

When “Hebrew” means Aramaic

The New Testament sometimes says “Hebrew” where it most likely means Aramaic. When Paul speaks to a crowd in Jerusalem “in the Hebrew language” (Acts 21:40), and when John says the sign on the cross was written “in Hebrew” (John 19:20), the NRSV Updated Edition adds a footnote to each: “That is, Aramaic” [8]. That fits the period: by then Jews in Palestine spoke mostly Aramaic [3]. So when an English Bible says “Hebrew,” check the footnote before assuming it means the language of the scriptures.

What the oldest manuscripts show

No original copy of any New Testament book survives. The oldest piece of the New Testament ever found is a scrap of papyrus about 9 by 6 centimeters, now in the John Rylands Library in Manchester and usually called P52, holding a few verses of John 18 in Greek [12]. Its first editor dated it to 100 to 150 CE by comparing the handwriting with other manuscripts. More recent research puts it nearer 200 CE [12]. Either way it’s a copy, not the original.

The oldest complete New Testament is in Codex Sinaiticus, a Greek Bible written by hand in the middle of the fourth century [13]. Its New Testament is in Koine, and its Old Testament is the Septuagint, the version early Greek-speaking Christians used [13].

The claim of an Aramaic original

Some people hold that the New Testament, or at least the Gospels, was first written in Aramaic or Hebrew and later translated into Greek. The scholarship cited here doesn’t support that, but the claim has two real sources.

An early report about Matthew. Papias, an early Christian writer who said he learned from people who had followed the apostles, wrote that “Matthew wrote the oracles in the Hebrew language, and every one interpreted them as he was able.” The line survives because the church historian Eusebius quoted it [14]. Whatever Papias had in mind, the Gospel of Matthew we have is in Greek, and it draws on the Greek Gospel of Mark [9].

The Syriac Bible. Syriac is a form of Aramaic, so the Peshitta, the Bible of the Syriac churches, can look like Jesus’ own language preserved. In 1940 George Lamsa, a translator from the Church of the East, published an English New Testament “translated from original Aramaic sources,” which treated the Peshitta as the original form of the New Testament. Scholars of Syriac describe his religious thought as unorthodox, and his influence as strongest among small groups in the United States that still reprint his books [15].

The history of the Syriac New Testament runs the other way. It starts with Tatian’s Diatessaron, a second-century harmony that merged the four Greek Gospels into one story and translated it into Syriac [3], [6]. Next came the Old Syriac Gospels in the third century, the first translation of the four separate Gospels. The Peshitta, in the early fifth century, was a revision that brought the Old Syriac closer to the Greek [6]. Each step came from the Greek, not before it:

Jesus spoke Aramaic, but the written New Testament starts in Greek, and the Syriac versions were translated from the Greek and then revised to match it.

The Peshitta still matters. It shows how Syriac-speaking Christians read the Greek New Testament in the fourth and fifth centuries, and it’s still the Bible of the Syriac churches [6].

From handwritten copies to printed Greek

Until printing, the Greek New Testament was copied by hand. The first printed edition was published by the scholar Erasmus in 1516, from a few Greek manuscripts, most of them from the 12th century. Later editions largely repeated his text, and it became known as the Textus Receptus, the “received text,” behind the King James Version of 1611 and nearly every English Bible until 1880 [5].

From the late 1700s scholars gained access to manuscripts six to nine centuries older than the ones Erasmus used, Codex Sinaiticus among them. These showed that the text had grown slightly as it was copied, by about 16 verses that the oldest copies don’t have [5]. That’s why some verses in the King James Version, like Matthew 18:11, are missing or footnoted in most modern translations. Modern translations work from printed Greek editions that weigh the oldest manuscripts most heavily [5], so an English New Testament today is still translated from Greek.

References

Every source cited across the primers is collected on one page.