Good day,
I was speaking with a fundamentalist family member about the NT gospels. His opinion is the gospels were written by who they say they were written by and by the people who walked with Jesus.
He referred to a blog post (I think it is anyway) by a Theologian, Matthew Ervin of Apple Eye Ministries. The writing claims that an old dude named Papias around 130AD claims that Matthew wrote his book in Hebrew.
In many of Bart’s lectures he opens with a story about giving a pop-quiz to his students. One question is what language it was written in. The answer given is Greek. It being written in Hebrew is called out as a wrong answer.
Is there information within this site that discusses the authorship and language of Matthew specifically or any of the NT books? I am sure there is, but I am brand new here and am still getting my feet wet.
Besides, i am an engineer and not a researcher.
Thanks for your time
I believe that one key argument is that the author of Matthew did not know Hebrew is the presumed misreading of the prediction of a virgin birth in Isaiah. The Greek word in translations does indeed imply virgin, while the original Hebrew just means a young woman. The assumption is that a native speaker of Hebrew would have known this distinction.
Welcome TJohnston!
I must say it’s good to have all the new voices at this place.
I was speaking with a fundamentalist family member about the NT gospels. His opinion is the gospels were written by who they say they were written by and by the people who walked with Jesus.
Yes I have fundamentalist family as well. The problem is that the gospels don’t say who they were written by. The titles were added much later by folks who privileged apostolic witness. I have to say I’ve always found the idea that the Christian community produced so much anonymous literature fascinating in itself. Were the authors known and the names lost over time? Or were they always unattributed? Did they just not care about that?
I think if you do a search on Prof Ehrman’s ‘Recent Posts’ page you will find comments he’s made over the years about authorship. There are his books of course. His ** you do not have permission to see this link ** first rather then the vendor named after a big ole river in South America.)
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert