> The Bible wasn't originally written in Latin. The New Testament was
> a Greek translation from Aramaic, the language of the disciples.
There has long been a fashionable **theory** that the New Testament was not written in Greek, and is instead a translation from some "lost" version -- there is no need for such a theory, given that the lingua franca of the Eastern Mediterranean at the time, including Palestine and Syria, Northern Egypt and the Grecian islands was Koine Greek.
The original Christians were a disparate bunch of various nationalities, and so naturally they would have spoken Greek when gathered among themselves, more often than Aramaic or Hebrew and other local vernaculars. Certainly they would have written their distributable documents in Greek rather than any other language, including the various texts that would eventually become the New Testament. The only really important *lost* text(s) that are scientifically likely to have existed, were some collection(s) of direct quotes of Jesus' sayings, of which only some corrupted, modified, editorialised versions are now extant ; as these theorised lost text(s) were most likely used as source material by the Gospel authors. It is possible that some of these may have been in Aramaic, but that is just plain guess work frankly.
The actual Aramaisms in the texts (apart from the few short extracts of actual Aramaic that mostly provide local colour) are easily explained by slips into local dialect and/or occasional mistakes by non-mother-tongue Greek speakers/writers, with no need for any unscientific hand-waving imaginary Aramaic source text nonsense.
Oh, and the *real* Aramaic Bible is a translation from the original Hebrew & Greek.
ie the New Testament was originally written in **Greek** ; and furthermore the Dead Sea Scrolls have **definitively** proven that the text has been pretty much faithfully handed down by copyists over the centuries, even though no absolutely faithful copy of the text was ever widely (or even narrowly) distributed until the latter half of the 20th century and the philological/critical editions were able to provide texts pretty much devoid of the inevitable slips and errors in the typical copying process.
> The
> Old Testament was originally Hebrew. Nor was Church Latin the same
> language as Roman Latin.
The three most important variants of Latin are Classical Latin, which was the literary and snobby high cultural idiom of the Roman Empire's governing class and its littérateurs ; Vulgate Latin which was the language spoken on a daily basis by everyone, including the rich people just alluded to whenever they didn't need to show off ; Church/Medieval Latin which was the result of a misguided attempt by Charlemagne and his Court to "purify" the Latin vernacular of the time, but in fact ruining Latin as a living language.
The Bible was translated by a team of translators (whose editor-in-chief was Saint Jerome), into a very clean version of Vulgate Latin (ie with very good spelling and grammar), which was the common language of the Western Empire at the time, and easily understandable at the time even for those who didn't have an expensive education. Church/Medieval Latin on the other hand **requires** just such expenditure.
Oh, and those who claim that the Vulgate is a bad translation have usually never studied any Vulgate Latin, and generally do not read the text correctly, as though it were in Classical Latin instead of Vulgate (although some few translation mistakes did inevitably occur, and other perfectly normal translation issues and mishaps -- occurrence of which is generally MUCH higher in the "better" translations into our own modern languages).
Julian Lord
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