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Originally Posted by GtrsRGr8
Bart Ehrman (a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a prolific author), who is not an evangelical now (he has described himself as an agnostic with atheistic leanings) pointed out, in his book Did Jesus Exist?, an instance in the Gospel of John which shows that it must have been originally written in Aramaic. I don't see a copy of the book here in my office at the present moment, and I don't remember what the passage it is that he had referred to. Anyway, I won't take the time, now, to find (out); if someone wants to know what the specific passage in the Gospel of John is from which he made the argument, and/or what the argument is, let me know and I will do some sleuthing to find it.
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The example you're looking for is in chapter 3 of
Did Jesus Exist? He's discussing several recorded sayings of Jesus that originated in Aramaic. The specific example from John, though, is the other way around. John 3:3 begins a conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus that, according to Ehrman, must have been composed in Greek because it includes a misunderstanding that could only have happened in Greek.
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As it turns out, some sayings of Jesus cannot be translated into Aramaic. Jesus could not have said these things since he spoke Aramaic. Let me give one rather famous example.
In John 3 comes the well-known story of Jesus’s conversation with the rabbi Nicodemus. Jesus is in Jerusalem, and Nicodemus comes up to him and tells him that he knows he is a teacher from God. Jesus tells him: “Unless you are born anothen you will not be able to enter into the kingdom of God.” I have left the key word here in Greek. Anothen has two meanings. It can mean “a second time,” and it can mean “from above.” And so this is the passage in which Jesus instructs his follower that he has to be “born again.” At least that’s how Nicodemus understands the word because he is shocked and asks how he can possibly crawl back into his mother’s womb and be born a second time. But in fact Jesus does not mean “a second time”; he means “from above.” This is what the word anothen means in the other instances it is used in John’s Gospel, and it is what Jesus means by it here, as he then corrects Nicodemus and launches into a lengthy explanation that a person needs to be born from the Spirit who comes from above (the upper realm) if he wants to enter into the kingdom of God.
This is a conversation, in other words, that is rooted in the double meaning of the key word anothen, which Nicodemus understands in one way but Jesus means in another. Without that double entendre, the conversation does not flow and does not quite make sense. But here’s the key point. Even though the Greek word anothen has this double meaning, the double meaning cannot be replicated in Aramaic. The Aramaic word for “from above” does not mean “a second time,” and the word for “a second time” does not mean “from above.” In other words, this conversation could not have been carried out in Aramaic. But Aramaic was the language Jesus spoke—and the language he certainly would have been speaking in Jerusalem with a leading Jewish rabbi (even if he were able to speak another language, which is doubtful). In other words, the conversation could not have happened as it is reported.
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This is to illustrate the point from earlier in the chapter:
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Even though the Gospels were written in Greek, as were their sources, some of the surviving traditions were originally spoken in Aramaic, the language of Palestine.
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I won't analyze whether or not I think he's correct, but I will point out that while Ehrman and most other modern scholars think the entire New Testament was composed in Greek, there is an important minority that disagrees.
George Howard's
Hebrew Gospel of Matthew is an analysis of a medieval copy of Matthew's Gospel in Hebrew that is, Howard claims, descended from a Hebrew original that isn't dependent on any of the known textual sources. He concludes that Matthew wrote two versions of the same Gospel, one in Hebrew and one in Greek. Some of his analysis can be read in
the Google Books preview.
Another interesting book that was published in 1922 and is available in its entirety at Google Books is
The Aramaic Origin of the Fourth Gospel.
Google the phrase "Aramaic primacy" and you'll find a number of web pages addressing the subject.