Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com>]

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 1:20 PM, James Christian
<jc.bhebrew AT googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
>>
>> Unfortuantely, meaningful discussion on this list would require high 
>> control
>> of Second Temple Hebrew(s), literary and mishnaic, + Aramaic, + Greek,
>
> This sounds to me like to you meaningful discussion would require that 
> everyone agrees with your assumptions about second temple Hebrew.

Why?
No one denies that both literary/classical Hebrew and mishanic/colloquial
Hebrew were in use. Qumran and Judean Desert made that abundantly clear.
And no one denies that Qumran, a contemporary eschatological community, used
literary Hebrew for writing their documents.


> In any case, I'm interested. Why do you think Matthew was originally 
> composed in Greek?
> James Christian

Well, for one, any and all of the evidence used to show that GkMatthew
used GkMark,
would support the proposition. This is not the list to discuss that.
One tidbit, not often in the above: if one uses the Alexandrian texts,
it is clear that Mark had a special stylistic EYQYS, and Matthew has
both EYQEWS and EYQYS but the latter only where Mark has EYQYS. It's
been 40+ years since I've played with statistics, so I'll let someone
else work out the confidence precentages. And as I mentioned, to deal
with the whole question would require monograph length.

So for this list, just let it rest as my opinion.



--
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
randallbuth AT gmail.com
Biblical Language Center
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