More Thoughts on the Authenticity of the Documents of the New Testament

     If you've ever watched the British production of Poirot with David Suchet, you'll know right away that English isn't Poirot's first language. He peppers his sentences, nearly every sentence with "Frankisms," French words, phrases, and pronunciation. In the series, he says he doesn't have to speak that way, but he does it in a calculating way to throw people off their guard so they will be dismissive of him and thus more likely to be careless in what they say or do. But his heavy accent is a perfect example of what I was reflecting on this morning.
     Growing up in Southern California, you're introduced to speakers of other languages at an early age. There's something like 200 different languages spoken in Orange County alone on a daily basis, sixty at my High School alone. The only way anyone could and did communicate was by speaking English, but it was generally very clear when English wasn't the other person's first language, even if they were perfectly understandable. And even if English was technically their first language, their particular accent or dialect was frequently heavily influenced by the first language of their family or close knit community. With Spanish speakers, sometimes an article would be left out, or they would only pronounce English words with the five vowels of Spanish. With Vietnamese, the tones would be weirdly applied to English at times, and several consonants simply couldn't be formed correctly. With Arabic or Semitic language speakers, they might form the possessive using the "for me, for you" construction depending on how familiar they really were with English. Russian speakers form their sentences awkwardly in English. And on and on there are just little tells that, if a person isn't fully aware of them, can pin exactly which language or language family is their first.
     Much has been made of the Aramaicisms which pepper the Greek of the Gospel narratives. From Aramaic metaphors, to vocabulary, to awkward Greek grammar in places. Some have insisted that, because of this, the Gospels and even the New Testament at large was originally written in Aramaic (Classical Syriac to distinguish it from Biblical Aramaic, which is five hundred years older; the suggestion that they were originally written in Hebrew, a dead language in the first century, is laughable). But if these works had originally been written in Aramaic, why would the translator, presumably fluent in Greek himself, have not used regular Greek vocabulary, grammar, and syntax in rendering it throughout?
     Rather, the Aramaicisms in the text, in my opinion, more reflect the authentic originality of the Greek texts in that they were recorded, either written themselves or dictated to an amanuensis in the cases of those who were illiterate, with the same kind of heavy accent and cultural influence you would expect from those for whom Greek was a second language, and not their first or their family's first. John in particular speaks with these Aramaicisms, and all of the Gospels record Jesus speaking with a heavy Syriac accent. Paul rarely if ever uses them, Luke virtually never. Other authors use them to varying degrees. There is no real uniformity of language use between the authors, also arguing for the originality of the Greek text by each author and none of them being a translation.
     There are a number of people now who talk about the New Testament, and the Bible in general, having only come about or been written in the fourth century by the Church, three hundred years after the events they describe. Any honest examination of the language of the text will reveal that is absolute nonsense. Each document of the New Testament reads exactly as you would expect it to read if they were written by the kinds of people you would expect in those dialects, in that language, in that culture, in that region, and in that time period they were purported to have been written. If these documents had been written three hundred years later by theologians, they would be radically different, uniform in language, and anachronistic in content in lockstep with the theology and culture of the fourth century.
    A comparison might be made with the Book of Mormon, purported to be a translation of an ancient American text from the seventh century written in a language descended from Hebrew and Egyptian, and written by multiple authors. Even a cursory reading of this text by someone familiar with both ancient American culture and languages and ancient Middle Eastern/Egyptian culture and languages will tell them that this is complete nonsense, and that this text reflects the period and religious language and landscape of 1820s American Protestantism, is completely uniform in language usage, and reflects a single author who was fluent in the American dialect of English in the early 1800s. They will also tell you that the purported examples of this ancient language's vocabulary, person and place names as well as names of weights and measures (excluding the obvious Biblical names), do not reflect or represent any ancient American or Middle Eastern language. This is in addition to the startling number of anachronisms.
     Whatever one might believe about the content of the documents of the New Testament, all internal evidence reinforces that they were written by whom they say they were, when they say they were, and where they say they were. Anyone who says otherwise either has not done the research and is ignorant of what they're saying, or is deliberately trying to malign the New Testament for their own reasons.