Why I use Hebrew to translate the New Testament
Roy Blizzard © 2012
I hope I don’t offend anyone, but I rarely read other Christian books. I just don’t see the point. Most authors don’t read, write or speak either Hebrew or Greek and usually have no working knowledge of Aramaic or Latin, French or German. So they usually begin their books with a faulty theological or linguistic premise built upon a lack of knowledge and lead others down the same primrose path they are on. It is sad really, the blind leading the blind into a realm of total darkness and ineffectiveness in God’s Kingdom here upon this earth and quite possibly lead them out of God’s hand entirely.
Let me make myself clear though, there are some books which I love to read and have read them several times. These books are mainly books of testimonies of men and women who have lived an existence with God that demonstrates the transformational creative power of God in their lives today. They are called in total The Bible.
Most of the other books I read are dictionaries, lexicons, Jewish theology books and science and geography books that I have to study in order to make sense of The Bible. I took a lot of Classical Greek courses at UT Austin and thoroughly enjoyed them because the Greek authors had an impact on the cultural life of ancient Israel in the times of Jesus. I enjoy archeology and paleontology as well. For you see, all this information is critical to the understanding of the Biblical Text. Do you really want to trust your eternity to someone who gets their information 10th hand and doesn’t even understand it when they read it?
Look folks, Jesus or Yeshua came as a Jew in the 1st century AD / CE. He wasn’t a Greek or Roman or an Aramean even though he would have been very familiar with these cultures. He wasn’t a Baptist or a Christian or a Lutheran, etc, etc, etc. He spoke at least 4 languages fluently as did most Jews in his day, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and Aramaic. He was primarily a follower of the theology of the Pharisees and the school of Hillel although on some subjects such as marriage and divorce he followed the school of Shammai. He also was a part of the sect of the Hasids (not the same ones as today). These men were so pious that others sent children to request things of them.
Even though there are many people who want to believe the New Testament was written in Greek and some who want to believe it was Aramaic, it makes no sense that the book would be in anything but Hebrew, but the Hebrew in the first century was called Mishnaic Hebrew. Mishnaic Hebrew was a living language. It was busy absorbing all sorts of lingo from Greek, Latin and Aramaic, just like English does today. This is probably the greatest proof of all that Hebrew in Israel was the prima lingua or first tongue since it was doing the absorbing not the other way around.
There is little doubt that without a wide knowledge of the culture and languages of Israel and the nearby regions that the Biblical text is quite incomprehensible as seen by the fact that there are at least 30,000 different denominations of Christianity all believing substantially differing things almost all of which are based upon errors in translation. This simple fact has kept the organism of Christianity ineffectual at its primary mission which is to create life from darkness. I bet you didn’t even know there was a primary mission in Christianity.
If you read any of my articles here on hubpages or my new book The Gospel of John, An Actual Translation you will notice that what I write is quite different then what you have usually read in any other “translation” of the Biblical text. This is due to the fact that I have no agenda to push, no denomination to prop up, no need for you to let me pick your pockets for my own gain by lying to you about some new sensational BS that can’t be substantiated in the text, etc, etc. All I care about is what is the true meaning of the text and how it relates to the real story being espoused and how it relates to me and my walk of intimacy with my creator.
Leave a Reply