Hi Artintel,
I thank you for your reply. Let me share and clarify some of my concerns:
1. There are a priori positions in biblical scholarship which I find faulty, and which kind of dictate the findings. As long as these a priori positions are unorthodox, if not anti-orthodox, one cannot trust the conclusions because they simply impair the way the data are seen and interpreted. These a priori positions are constructed as such to challenge and undervalue the Orthodox Christian positions.
2. Among these faulty presuppositions is that the Synoptic Gospels could not have been written before 70 AD; that the Gospels are not written by Saints Matthew, Mark and Luke; that these Gospels were arbitrarily selected by the Church from among a myriad of authentic traditions about Jesus Christ. That these Gospels were copied from one another or were dependent on one another in their creation, or they were dependent on the mythical \\"Q”, or the collection of the sayings of Jesus as hypothesized by \\"scholars\\".
3. Another faulty belief is that somehow Aramaic was the language Jesus mainly taught in and the Apostles mainly spoke. Greek was simply used later on when the message had to be spread to the gentiles. It\'s simply a belief, which is contrary to the cultural milieu in the 1st century, the witness of the Fathers and the writings of the New Testament.
4. Another one commonly seen is that if a writing contains Semitic influences and imagery, then it must have had some Aramaic or Hebrew originals. This is mistaken, for any Aramaic speaking person writing in Koine Greek and influenced by the language of the Septuagint could produce a Greek work with Semitic idioms and imagery. This is the case of the New Testament: It is Greek in language while Semitic in idioms and imagery.
We must realize that the Greek language as changed and transfigured by the biblical mindset played a providential role in communicating the Good News to the whole world to this very day. Our Lord spoke it and taught with it, as Greek was so common in Judea and especially in Galilee of the gentiles where our Lord came from. And yes the quotations in the New Testament are derived from the Septuagint not the Masoretic Hebrew texts, and this further proves the widespread use and acceptance of the Greek language as influenced by the biblical mindset in 1st century Palestine.
I used \\"Judeo-christian\\" to designate those Jewish sects who accepted Christ as the Messiah, but rejected the essence and substance of the Gospel in its universality and chose to lead a life of isolation from the Church. They grew more heterodox and eccentric in beliefs, and it is among those that you find apocryphal gospels written in Hebrew scripts, mistaken for authentic traditions of Jesus Christ, which only survived in the Church as we have them in the Four Gospels and the New Testament, handed down to us from the Lord through the Apostles in Koine Greek.
In Christ,
Promise
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