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Originally Posted by Difflugia
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Edit: I just reread your post where you said that "...scholars say that the New Testament was written in Aramaic..." and I think you're referring to the idea that Matthew initially wrote his Gospel in Aramaic. That's a claim attributed by Eusebius to Papias and is often repeated in evangelical commentaries. Matthew as we have it is pretty much certain to have been composed in Greek, but there is some conjecture (and only conjecture) that Matthew wrote a separate collection of "logia" in Aramaic. |
I think that more than one teacher that I've had, some "expert" (to one degree or another), and/or some author made the blanket statement that the Gospels were penned in Aramaic, and later the Gospels were translated into Greek. That circumstance reminds me of something that I remember as coming from Mark Twain: "don't believe everything that you read in the [news]papers."
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.
If Ehrman is right, that potentially means that there is evidence that two of the four Gospels were originally written in Aramaic.
However, Papias, if Eusebius is correct, said that Matthew wrote the
logia (sayings) of Jesus in Aramaic. It may be impossible to determine if Papias was speaking of the Gospel of Matthew or some other writing of Matthew's (now lost). But anyway, the position that Papias
was speaking of the Gospel of Matthew is what Difflugia was referring to when he commented that at it "is often repeated in evangelical commentaries."
There are a couple of different reasons that non-evangelicals would prefer that the Gospel of Matthew was not written by Matthew (aka "Levi"), the Gospel of Mark was not written by Mark, the Gospel of Luke was not written by Luke, and the Gospel of John was not written by John. I refer you to NT Pod(cast) 83--"Who Wrote the Gospels and When?", a 21 minute podcast at
ListenNotes.com (I'm sorry, but I think that I'm not able to give you a specific webpage, because the webpage of the podcasts keep changing, as new podcasts are added (the podcast to which I refer is the most recent one, as of this writing)). It is a great, succinct discussion of pro's and con's concerning the authorship of the individual Gospels. NT Pod(cast) is Mark Goodacre's. Goodacre is professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at Duke University. Goodacre, though not being an evangelical, seems fair-minded and presents facts on both sides of an issue of who wrote the Gospels. A bonus is that he has a pleasant voice (however, he is from England or some other part of the U.K. and some people on this side of the Pond might have to strain to understand something that he said. But maybe that's a good thing).