r/AcademicBiblical • u/Adventurous_Vanilla2 • 6d ago

Question Gospel of Matthew in Greek?

How do we know the gospel of Matthew was written in Greek without using Markan Priority?

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u/liamstrain 6d ago

Aside from the oldest existing fragments being in greek? (e.g. P37). Per Kurt Aland, "The Text of the New Testament"

I don't think we've ever found early copies of Matthew in any other language. It is an argument from silence, but aside from a quote from Irenaeus in 180 about Matthew writing a a gospel "among the Hebrews in their own dialect" - Against Heresies 3:1:1, we don't really know. Hebrew was not really a common written language in widespread use among the general population at the time (Cohen "From the Maccabeess to the Mishnah), and while Matthew spoke Aramaic, it's not clear that was the most common language for written communications like this. They even mostly used greek copies of the Torah. So it may well be that Irenaeus was referencing greek. We just don't know.

Papias and Origen both make other claims, one Aramaic, one Hebrew. But both are also another 100 years later.

So - argument from silence or not - Greek seems to be the only one supported by any physical evidence for now.

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u/WantonReader 6d ago

May I add a question quickly here? How widespread was Hebrew as a mother tongue in the first century CE? Was is geographical or divided by class?

As far as I've understood it, Aramaic was essentially everyone's mother tongue in Judea and associated areas.

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u/liamstrain 6d ago edited 6d ago

With the caveat that this is just my surface level understanding, mostly based on the Cohen book, and this is not my area of study.

My understanding was that in 1st century Judea, Hebrew was mostly liturgical, and not spoken in common use by the majority of people. Even those who could read it, did not often speak it (though there may be regional variation here).

Every day communications, most people were conversationally bilingual in Aramaic and Greek, with no clear distinction I can discern favoring one or the other.

Written communications were already a bit rarified - many people being functionally illiterate and relying on oral communications. Written is where greek was more common.

Hopefully someone more knowledgeable in this particular area, can weigh in.