Bishop John Shelby Spong on the News and Christian Faith "A New Christianity for a New World" for Thursday, 26 June 2014 "Questions and Answers"

Bishop John Shelby Spong on the News and Christian Faith "A New Christianity for a New World" for Thursday, 26 June 2014 "Questions and Answers"
Question & Answer
Arthur Stillwell, via the Internet, writes:
Question:
First, thank you for your writings which, I believe, are indicative of your great mind. One question: if, as you say, the gospels were written from a Jewish perspective, why were they not written in Hebrew or Aramaic? Did the Jews read and talk in Greek in their synagogues? 
Answer:
Dear Arthur,
Thank you for your letter and for your assessment of my mind. My mother would probably agree with you, but I would not want to face the voters if that were a proposition on a ballot!
Your question is a good one. While Aramaic and, in rare cases Hebrew, were the languages of the street in the land of the Jews, Greek was the language of the intellectual discourse and of business. Even the Hebrew Scriptures had been translated in Greek around the year 250 BCE by seventy scholars, which is why this translation is called the Septuagint. Paul wrote all of his epistles in Greek to synagogue communities living in Greek cities or regions like Galatia, Thessalonica, Corinth and Philippi. He obviously wrote in Greek for most of them would not have understood anything else.
Though we are not sure exactly where each gospel was written, the best guess would locate Mark in Rome, Matthew in Antioch, and John in Ephesus. Luke is harder to locate. The reality is, however, that all were Greek speaking cities. By the time the gospels were written (72-100) almost every Christian community was made up of Jewish followers of Jesus and Gentile proselytes. Almost all of these proselytes would be Greek-speaking and so would almost all of the Jews once one journeyed a hundred miles out of Jerusalem.
The problem for most people comes in that they really do not embrace the span of time between the crucifixion and the writing of the gospels. They also do not embrace the low level of literacy present in the world at that time. We can date the crucifixion with some conviction around the year 30 CE. We can now also date the writing of the gospels with little debate as occurring between 72 CE and 100 CE. That means that the gospels were written 42 to 70 years after the life of Jesus. In the Middle East in the first century only about one of every hundred people could read and only about one out of every thousand could write. The synagogue was the womb in which Christianity was born, but while Matthew is the most Jewish of the four gospels, he himself might not have read Hebrew. Every time he quoted the Old Testament, for example, he quoted from a Greek translation of that text. The best indication of this is when he quotes Isaiah 7:14 in his birth story. Matthew quotes the text to read: “Behold a virgin will conceive.” The word “virgin” is not in the original Hebrew text of Isaiah. If Matthew had gone to the original Hebrew, he would have known that. Isaiah’s text says rather: “Behold a woman is with child.” Those two translations are obviously not the same!
So by the time the gospels are written, they are addressed to a Greek-speaking church. In Mark and Matthew it is probably still part of a synagogue. By the time Luke and John are written, the fracture between church and synagogue had probably taken place.
I hope this helps.(John Shelby Spong)
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