Aramaic was the spoken language of the Jews of Palestine. Consequently, it is believed that Jesus and his disciples spoke and taught in Aramaic. The earliest oral tradition of Jesus’ deeds and sayings undoubtedly circulated in Aramaic. However, the four Gospels were written in an entirely different speech, common Greek, the spoken language of the civilized Mediterranean world, to serve the majority of the Church, which was becoming Hellenistic (Greek-speaking) instead of Palestinian.
Aramaic is a Semitic language which gradually supplanted Akkadian as the common tongue of the Near East in the 7th and 6th centuries BC. It later became the official language of the Persian Empire. Aramaic replaced Hebrew as the language of the Jews; portions of the Old Testament books of Daniel and Ezra are written in Aramaic, as are the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds. Its period of greatest influence extended from 300 BC until 650 CE, after which it was gradually supplanted by Arabic.
[The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 1, p. 516]
Traces of Aramaic survive in the Greek Gospels. For example, in Mark 5:41, “Taking her by the hand he said to her, ‘Tal’itha cu’mi’; which means ’Little girl, I say to you, arise.’ ” and Mark 15:34, “And at the ninth hour, Jesus cried with a loud voice, ‘E’lo-i, E’lo-i, la’ma sabachtha’ni?’ which means, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ ”
The New Testament Gospel of Mark, though considered by Church scholars to be the oldest of the Gospels, was not written by a disciple of Jesus. Biblical scholars concluded, based on the evidence contained in the Gospel, that Mark himself was not a disciple of Jesus. Furthermore, according to them, it is not even certain who Mark really was. The ancient Christian author, Eusebius (325 C.E.), reported that another ancient author, Papias (130 C.E.), was the first to attribute the Gospel to John Mark, a companion of Paul. Others suggested that he may have been the scribe of Peter and yet others hold that he was probably someone else.
The same is the case with the other Gospels. Although Matthew, Luke and John are the names of disciples of Jesus, the authors of the Gospels bearing their names were not those famous disciples, but other individuals who used the disciples’ names to give their accounts credibility. In fact, all the Gospels originally circulated anonymously. Authoritative names were later assigned to them by unknown figures in the early church.
| Books | Authors |
|---|---|
| Gospel of Matthew | Unknown |
| Gospel of Mark | Unknown |
| Gospel of Luke | Unknown |
| Gospel of John | Unknown |
| Acts | The author of Luke |
| I, II, III John | The author of John |
J.B. Phillips, a prebendary of the Chichester Cathedral, the Anglican Church of England, wrote the following preface for his translation of the Gospel according to St. Matthew:
“Early tradition ascribed this Gospel to the apostle Matthew, but scholars nowadays almost all reject this view. The author, whom we can conveniently call Matthew, has plainly drawn on the mysterious “Q”, which may have been a collection of oral traditions. He has used Mark’s Gospel freely, though he has rearranged the order of events and has in several instances used different words for what is plainly the same story.
The Gospels in Modern English
The existence of Q was once challenged by some scholars on the grounds that a sayings gospel was not really a gospel. The challengers argued that there were no ancient parallels to a gospel containing only sayings and parables and lacking stories about Jesus, especially the story about his trial and death. The discovery of the Gospel of Thomas changed all that. (The Five Gospels, p. 12.)
Thomas contains one hundred and fourteen sayings and parables ascribed to Jesus; it has no narrative framework: no account of Jesus’ exorcisms, healings, trial, death, and resurrection; no birth or childhood stories; and no narrated account of his public ministry in Galilee and Judea. The Coptic translation of this document (written about 350 C.E.), found in 1945 at Nag Hammadi in Egypt, has enabled scholars to identify three Greek fragments (dated around 200 C.E.), discovered earlier, as pieces of three different copies of the same gospel. Thomas has forty-seven parallels to Mark, forty parallels to Q, seventeen to Matthew, four to Luke, and five to John. About sixty-five sayings or parts of sayings are unique to Thomas. (The Five Gospels, p.15).Since the late 18th century, the first three Gospels have been called the Synoptic Gospels, because the texts, set side by side, show a similar treatment of the life and death of Jesus Christ.
The Fourth Gospel (John) was opposed as heretical in the early church, and it knows none of the stories associated with John, son of Zebedee. In the judgement of many scholars, it was produced by a “school” of disciples, probably in Syria in the last decade of the first century.
