various publications, defends the proposition that Jesus and his apostles spake Greek, and cited the version of the LXX. Only, Voss went so far in his zeal as to defend the inspiration of that hoary translation. Voss was followed by Dominic Diodati whose book, De Christi Graece Loquente, Neapoli, 1767, was based on Voss' De Sibyllinis Oraculis (1680), but increased the evidence by contributions from classic and rabbinic sources, from coins and inscriptions. Diodati, however, could not carry his Italian compeers with him, for the influence of the name of J. B. De Rossi, who disputed his deductions, has been too great. De Rossi and Kennicott are the two great names for the eighteenth century in the textual criticism of the Massoretic texts; and their names have not yet lost their weight. The Greek succession, however, was carried on by Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob Paulus, a man by no means in favor among the opponents of German rationalism. Paulus recognized the traces of Aramaic in the New Testament, but protested that while Christ used the Aramaic in private, it was Greek which formed the medium of his public utterances. Paulus' work appeared in 1803, and was followed in 1808 by the Introduction to the Scriptures of the New Testament, from the pen of the Roman Catholic scholar, John Leonhard Hug, who comes to the same result in the use of the same means. With him stands Karl Aug. Credner, whose Einleitung in das N. 7., Halle, 1836, still contains much that is valuable in New Testament literary criticism. Neither is Credner to be neglected in the study of the original manuscripts. The Greek succession continues to the present time in the various publications of Alexander Roberts, D. D., profes or at St. Andrews, whilom member of the English Revision *Committee, and editor of the Anti-Nicene Fathers (T. and T. Clark). In four separate publications from 1859 to 1893 he has striven to maintain the thesis that "Christ spake for the most part in Greek, and only now and then in Aramaic," in order that there might be established a close connection between the Christ and the New Testament. The hypothesis that Christ made use only of the Aramaic continues its hold on biblical scholarship, however, and reached its utmost development in the work of Eduard Bohl (Forschungen nach einer Volksbibel zur Zeit Jesu. Wien, 1873). Bohl advances the notion that Christ and the apostles quoted from a popular version of the Scriptures into Aramaic, which version was not made from the Hebrew but from the LXX., or was, at least, based upon it. Bohl's motive in the explanation given is the desire to escape the force of the argument from the use of the LXX. version; but it is plainly apparent that the solution raises more questions than it solves. 1. We come thus to the question: In what language were the discourses of the Christ uttered? And we can say at once that of the three languages inscribed over the Master's cross, it was surely in Latin that he did not speak. Time was, however, that men said he did use the Latin, and a like reason even to-day leads to similar statements. The Jesuit Melchior Inchofer (died 1648), of Vienna, who had asserted the genuineness of a letter purporting to be written by the Virgin Mary to the people of Messina also "ad Ecclesia Latinæ exaltationem," made the assertion that Jesus spoke Latin while on earth just as the saints do in heaven. Inchofer's theories found little audience, but he had one notable successor, Jean Hardouin, who was at once singularly learned and learnedly singular; for he contended that, with the exception of the works of Homer, Herodotus, and Cicero, the Natural History of Pliny, the Georgics of Virgil, and the Satires and Epistles of Horace, all the ancient classics of Greece and Rome were spurious, having been fabricated by monks of the thirteenth century. According to him the apostles had either written in Latin or else, at the least, had a Latin version of their works made at once; for the Greek text is an arbitrary private performance. The situation in the Gospels, however, demanded that Jesus should use the Vulgate of the Old Testament in his citations; and that had already been turned from Hebrew into Latin, a laudatissimo interprete. At the time of Jesus, only the scholars understood Hebrew; every man of quality, however, knew the Latin which. was taught in the schools, of which mention is made in the Books of Maccabees. Christ preached in Latin in the temple and in the synagogue, and because he understood the Latin so well was Peter chosen to found the Church of Rome. For these propositions the proofs are: (1), The Roman overlordship of the whole known world and the presumptive general use of Latin; (2), The obedience of Christ to the civil powers as shown by the payment of tribute; (3), The commercial dealings of the Jews; (4), The Latin on the cross was the nearest to the Christ. We learn also that Baronius, editor of the far-famed Annales Ecclesiastici, and Bellarmine, think it possible that Mark may have written his Gospel in Latin. In St. Mark's church in Venice, too, Meyer tells us there is a leaf from a Latin Gospel-codex shown to the faithful as part of Mark's own autograph. 2. It has been likewise contended that the Master and his disciples could not have spoken Hebrew; and the proof is supposed to be that Hebrew had entirely disappeared from the range of the common people, and was the solitary possession of the scribes; that it was not even read in the synagogues, though it may have been heard in the temple service; and we are referred to the sacred literature of the Hindoos and Persians, and the ecclesiastical Latin, as instances in point. There are those, however, who are not inclined to let such statements pass unchallenged. There was Franz Delitzsch, whose services to Hebrew scholarship were second to none in his day and generation, who was certainly called to the restoration of the Aramaic words of the Lord Jesus; but when he was asked to translate the New Testament into Aramaic, he held it a vain work, perhaps also a desecration of the sacred words. The words of Delitzsch are well worth further repetition, and few of my readers have access to Kautzsch's Grammatik des Biblisch-Aramäischen, whence I take them (page 5), or to the Hebrew New Testament, where they first appeared: "One of my friends will not desist from the request that I would translate the New Testament into the Aramaic idiom, which was spoken in Palestine in the days of Christ and his apostles; that is, into the language of the Talmud and the Palestinian Targum. But this wish rests on an illusion. Even after the exile, the Hebrew remained the language of Jewish literature. The Ecclesiasticus of Jesus Sirach was written in Hebrew, as appears from the fragments in the Talmud. The original of the First Book of Maccabees and of the so-called Psalter of Solomon was Hebrew. The inscriptions on coins and gravestones, the liturgical prayers, were Hebrew; the laws were composed in Hebrew, as appears from their codification in the Mishna. Even the book in which, as Papias says, Matthew has collected the Lord's discourses, was written &ßpaide dialéxty. It is true that in this time païori and yaλdaori were not accurately distinguished, in spite of which it is QUITE IMPROBABLE THAT MATTHEW WROTE IN ARAMAIC. [Emphasis mine.] For the Palestinian Aramaic dialect—which is called in the Talmud-was the language of the daily life, the vulgar speech, in which the people and the cultured classes were accustomed to transact business and to discuss disputed questions; but pais diáλextos, in which Paul (Acts xxvi. 14) was addressed by the exalted Saviour, and in which he himself addresses himself to the people of Jerusalem (Acts xxi. 40; xxii. 2), was the sacred language, the language of the temple-cult, of the synagogal and domestic prayer, of all formulas of benediction, as well as of the transmission of the law. Not the less, also, are the parables, the fables, and the dirges in the Talmuds and Midrashes in large measure Hebrew. The sacred language continued to be the language of the higher modes of discourse; even the familiar saws of the people were only in part Aramaic. When Josephus, in the preface to his work on the Jewish war, says that his narrative was originally composed in their common vernacular for his countrymen in Asia, he certainly means the Hebrew, not the Aramaic. Knowledge of the Hebrew was at that time, as at present, generally disseminated among the cultured classes of the nation. The Aramaic, on the other hand, was understood only by a small part of the Diaspora. So it would be a useless undertaking to translate the New Testament into the Palestinian Sursi. The Semitic wrapper (einschlag) of New Testament Hellenism is Hebrew, not Aramaic. Our Lord and his apostles thought and spoke for the greater part in Hebrew." Such is the judgment of the honored Delitzsch. Kautzsch, who adds an interrogation point to the word "spoke," seems to me also to admit that the reference to Targums in the Talmud does not prove their use in the time of Christ. Next to Delitzsch we may set Dr. Alfred Resch, who has in hand a monumental work, parts of which have appeared under the title Aussercanonische Paralleltexte zu den Evangelien, in the series Texte und Untersuchungen, edited by Harnack and Gebhardt. His aim is to examine the whole range of patristic writings, and to extract therefrom such putative fragments of our Lord's discourses as are preserved in sources extra-canonical, as, for example, the parallel to Luke x. 16-" He that heareth you heareth me; and he that heareth me heareth him that sent me”—where the italicized words are not in the New Testament transmission, but are added by some father of the church. Resch's idea is that there was an Urevangelium in very wide circulation alongside the canonical Gospels, composed originally in Hebrew, but afterwards translated into Greek; and that from this document come the remarkable variants found in even the oldest New Testament codices. Now, Dr. Resch uses the Hebrew to explain such passages as Luke xvi. 16; Matthew xi. 12-"The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and men of violence take it by force"-where there is a play on . When Luke uses ευαγγελίζεται for Matthew's βιάζεται, he reads And Professor Marshall admits (in The אִתְפְרַץ for אִתְפְרַס Critical Review, Vol. VI., page 48, 1896) that were not the same in both Hebrew and Aramaic, he would be obliged to admit the use of Hebrew in the source. Resch tells us, in the third part of his work, that his conviction of the sure character of his presupposition increases as he goes through his material; and that he is more sure of the Hebrew as the language in which our Lord uttered his discourses. Besides Resch we have another notable man to support the theory of Hebrew as the language of our Lord. Professor Eberhard Nestle, of Ulm, stands second to none in the departments of Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, and Greek languages. He is the author of numerous works in Semitic philology, an indefatigable contributor to learned periodicals, a trained collator of manuscripts, and the editor of Tischendorf's text of the LXX. version.' These 1 Various notes by Nestle are to be found in the current volume of The Expository Times (VIII.), but his pamphlet on the original shape of the Gospels contains his most complete exposition of his views. It is: Philologica Sacra. Bemerkungen über die Urgestalt der Evangelien und Apostelgeschichte, Berlin, 1896. Nestle, be it said, is the one great name in Germany that has given adherence to Blass' view as |