My challenge Bring your evidence Ill bring $100,000 I have been concerned about certain forces within the Hebrew Roots movement and where this is leading. While understanding the Hebrew foundation of Christianity is something all Christians should pursue, there is something sinister going on below the surface. There seems to be an attempt to draw Christians away from the simplicity of the Gospel back under the Old Covenant (Law) into Judaism. Eventually, I believe the result for those who are absorbed into this movement will be forsaking the only begotton Son of God for another “Yeshua” who was just a Jewish sage. The destination seems to be the same as the Jesus Seminar, it is just arrived at via another route. I realize that this is a tough statement. But, after interaction with several who have been involved in this movement for some time, I am convinced it is accurate. One of the subtle attacks on the Christian Faith comes from the notion that the New Testament was not written in Greek, but in Hebrew. This may seem benign at first, but it is not. It is an attack on the reliability of the text of your Bible. If the Greek text is unreliable and has been corrupted by Greeks, as is charged by some, there is no longer a standard of truth. The Protestant cry of Sola Scriptura is meaningless unless we have a historically stable and reliable text. Once the New Testament itself is discredited, the rope tying your boat to the dock has been severed, and you are bound to be “carried about with every wind of doctrine.” ”We must pay more careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away.” [Heb. 2:1]. No ancient Hebrew manuscript of the New Testament has ever been found from the early centuries of Christianity. The oldest are Greek. The oldest papyrus fragment [a portion of the Gospel of John] dates back to the late second century. So the manuscript evidence alone weighs heavily against the concept of Hebrew “originals.” The proponents of the Hebrew New Testament claim that internal evidence suggests the original language of the text was “Hebrew.” Actually, the “Hebrew” of the Torah was not widely spoken at the time of Christ. It was the language of the Jewish scholars, but not widely spoken by common Jewish folk. It was like the “Latin” of the day. It had long since gone out of common use since the Babylonian captivity. In Israel of the first century, Aramaic [or “Chaldee”] was fairly common, which is similar to Hebrew. But, this was the language picked up during the Babylonian captivity, which found its way into Jewish life. [There are a few parts of the Old Testament written in Aramaic, parts of Jeremiah, Daniel, and Ezra]. So, lets not begin with a false impression that true “Hebrew” of the Torah is even a possible candidate for the original documents of the New Testament. It is not. No one except a few Jewish scholars would have been able to read it. When the New Testament refers to the “Hebrew tongue” it is not referring to pure “Hebrew” of the Torah, but to “the common language of the Jews” ie., the common tongue spoken by Jews, Aramaic or “Chaldee,” adopted from the language of the “Chaldeans” [Babylonians].
Posted on: Sat, 26 Oct 2013 02:56:59 +0000
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