Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 10.djvu/835

Rh GOSPELS and in thought on the model of the best Greek Apocrypha, I setting forth in the sacred vocabulary of the LXX. the i earliest Christian psalms and hynms that had been com- mitted to writing, would be justly felt by all the churches tn‘ tend to cdification, and would soon find a place in every a.-sembly for Christian worship. 811 Lrrn//uage of the 0n'_r/z'2z.al Tradz'tz'o1z.—It is probable The lan- that the Jews, and more especially those in Galilee, were 811a8e_0f (like the Welsh in the present day) bilingual ; and the ﬁfe ‘1’"' question has therefore been raised whether our Lord, in His t,.::3m0,,_ 1 teaching, spoke Greek or Aramaic. If He spoke Greek, then the Aramaic words ’1'al-ilha cmni and 15'];/zp/zatlza l."l‘ER‘.'.L I£'l DE.'Cl5.] ‘int the resurrection, even more than the incarnation, required amplifications. If Matthew had left gaps in his introduction, still more serious were the deﬁciencies in his appendix to the traditional gospel. Although Mat- thew had added something to the mere suggestions of a resurrection contributed by Mark, he had not added enough. possible. The women, it is true (according to the narra- tive of Mat. xxviii. 9), had held Jesus by the feet, but the disciples themselves were not recorded to have done so; and, besides, the increasing reverence of the church shrank from the thought that the body of the risen H-iviour had been actually touched (Jo. xx. 17), even though He might have offered Himself to the touch of His disciples. As far therefore as the evidence went, it was open to the Jewish sceptic to call the manifestations of the Lord delusions, or at best visions, and to apply to them the words of the angel (Tobit xii. 19): “All those .‘l_-xys I did but make myself visible unto you, and (licl neit/zcr eazt nor drin/r; but ye beheld a vision.” Against so formidable an objection, no proof could better com- mend itself to a close student of the LXX. (such as Lake assiiredly was) than a narrative describing how Jesus ate in the presence of His disciples (xxiv. 43). Agllll, whereas the conclusion of Matthew's narrative leaves Jesus (except by inference) still on earth, Luke omitting the apologetic details which had now become un- necessary, or even liable to perversion (c.g., the Jewish i More proof was required, tangible proof, if, (Mk. v. 41; vii. 34) must be supposed to l)e specially addressed to the young and the illiterate, who would best understand the national dialect. But the names Cephas, Boanerges, given by our Lord to His Galilean disciples, and the use of Aramaic in His own prayer (“A(ib((, Father”), and in His last utterance (as re- corded by Mat. xxvii. 46; Mk. xv. 34), indicate that both for Himself and for His disciples Aramaic and not Greek was the natural tongue. Although therefore it cannot be denied that Greek, even in Jerusalem (see Acts xvii. 2, indicating that Greek would have been un- derstood, though they preferred “Hebrew”), was generally intelligible, yet the scanty evidence derivable from our Lord’s words is that He habitually used Aramaic. The testimony of Josephus tends in the same direction. He, though a man of education, composed certain books first in his own tongue (pref. to ll'm's, 1). He also tells I us that he found it a laborious task to render the history slander that the Lord's body had been stolen from the ' sepulchrc, and the fact that some of the eleven disciples “doubted” when they saw the Lord, apparently for the last time, upon the mountain), describes how Jesus was not parted from His disciples till He had produced com- plete conviction in all of them, and had opened their minds to underst-ind the scriptures. Still, even with these important additions, the appendix of Luke seemed to some, and perhaps to Luke himself, incomplete; and, accordingly, either Luke himself, or some early editor or very early scribes, inserted in the appendix several further additions :——(l) that Peter saw the graveclothes of Jesus lying in the open tomb (xxiv. 12);‘ that Jesus proved His identity to His dis- ciples by showing them His hands and His feet ; (3) that He fed not only on the emblematic “ﬁsh” but also on the " honeycomb ” (xxiv, 42); and lastly, (4) that He ascended into heaven (xxiv. 51). Perhaps the same hand added, in the account of the agony at Gethsemane, the description of the angel from heaven who appeared strengthening Jesus, and of drops as it were of blood falling from Him to the earth. It is by no means im-- probable that Luke himself added these passages in a later edition of his own work, as authoritative tradi- of his country in Greek, “an alien and strange language ” (pref. to Aiztiqu, 2). It is to be presumed that he wrote in Aramaic partly for his countrymen in Judaea ; but he adds that it was also for the sake of “ Parthians, Baby- lonians, and remotest Arabians, and those of our nation beyond Euphrates, and the Adiabeni ” (pref. to Wars, 2). Making every allowance for exaggeration, we are justified in drawing from the fact that Josephus thought it worth while to compose books first in Aramaic the inference that a large number of readers in the East would be more likely to read Aramaic than Greek.3 But it has been thought that the use of the LXX. in our Lord’s quotations from the Old Testament shows that He spoke Greek. The answer is—(l) Even if all the quotations in the synoptists from the Old Testament exactly agreed with the LXX., the agreement would by no means prove that our Lord used the LXX.; for, in trans- lating Hebrew into Greek, the translator might naturally translate the Hebrew quotations from the Old Testament into the corresponding LXX. version, to which his readers were accustomed. This he might do, even though the LXX. did not quite accurately represent the Hebrew; just as, in translating into English a Latin book, with quotations from the Vulgate, we should naturally use our English version, without considering whether the English exactly represented the Latin. But, in the second place, there is scarcely a single quotation4 in the Gospels from the Old Testament that exactly agrees with the LXX. when the LXX. differs from the Hebrew; and many of the quotations differ slightly both from the Matthew. Again. unless they are additions (not forming a part 01 the ﬁrst edition of the Gospel), it is hard to see why any of the best MSS. should omit them, since they would recommend themselves to tions which had subsequently become known to him ; and - all readers and copyists. two or three of them, in somewhat different shapes, will present themselves to us subsequently in the Fourth Gospe-l.‘3 ‘ It is most improbable that this passage has been interpolated in I Luke from the Fourth Gospel (xx. 4-7): for the passage in the Fourth I Gospel is fuller than in Luke, and the tendency of copyists is rather to amplify than to curtail. Besides, there are traces that Luke and John are both diffenent versions of the same tradition, differently understood. 2 Unless these additions were made by some authoritative hand, it is not easy to see why they should have been adopted by so many - of the best MSS. ' 3 The statement of Josephus (Contra Apion., i. 9), that " he alone l understood (néwos ab-res a’uI/i17I/) " the information brought to the , no such additions are found in the appendix of , Romans by deserters from Jerusalem during the siege, must be regarded as a piece of boinbast. For is it credible that a Roman army before a besieged city should have had with it no other interpreter besides one recently captured prisoner? Nevertheless, this exaggeration may be taken as an indication that the lower classes in Jerusalem could not, as a rule, speak Greek; for Josephus assumes this, as a matter of course. Greek, of course, would have been perfectly intelligible to any educated Roman if the deserters had been able to speak it. " An exact illustration may be derived from the Latin tra.nslation, by Ruﬁmis, of the Clementine Recognilzlons, in which (Sanday, Gospds, p. 16]) “ the quotations from the gospels have evidently been assixuilated to the canoxiical text which Itufinus himself used."