Biblical Hebrew Forum

[George Athas <George.Athas AT moore.edu.au>]

Hi Fred!

I’m sorry, but I don’t think I can engage with you on this topic. I find the 
logic of your position almost impenetrable, and as such I don’t think I can 
intersect with you on anything here. Let me just say by way of final comment 
that the LXX was indeed widely used by the early church. In fact, it seems 
that most of the time the NT writers were drawing from it rather than from a 
MT vorlage. I do not know where you get the figure that two-thirds of the NT 
is recycled OT material. I fear this is an incredibly inflated figure. 
Nonetheless, I just do not see how any of this suggests Hebrew originals for 
the NT documents. Your conclusion that it does is beyond my comprehension. It 
is most likely that Jesus and the apostles spoke Aramaic with a smattering of 
Hebrew (at the very least), and probably also a decent dose of Greek, too. 
But this is an entirely different issue to the language in which the NT 
documents were originally written. I think you may be confusing these two 
issues in a way that leads to some leaps in logic.

Excuse me for bowing out of the discussion.


GEORGE ATHAS
Moore Theological College (Sydney, Australia)
www.moore.edu.au