New Testament, Trasnlated From The Greek Text Of Tischendorf

By: George Rapall Noyes, Constantin von Tischendorf, Robert Ainslie, Ezra Abbot, American Unitarian Association 1869

Excerpt From Book:

TO THE ENGLISH READER.

Had we been sitting together "on the Mount," listening to "Jesus the Nazarene," we should have heard from his lips his divine sermon in the Aramean tongue, or " Palestinian Aramaic," then, and by the earliest ecclesiastical writers, called Hebrew. The oldest testimonies we have, inform us that the gospel " according to Matthew " was written in this language.
Papias, Irenaeus, Pantaenus, Origen, Eusebius, and Jerome agree in this statement. Jerome says that " Matthew composed the gospel of Christ in the Hebrew language, and wrote it with Hebrew letters ; but who the person was who afterwards translated it into Greek is not satisfactorily known." The first of these witnesses, Papias, was a disciple of Polycarp,
and died in the earlier part of the second century.  The last of them, Jerome, died A.D. 420. To what extent the other writings in the New Testament, except the epistles of Paul, were first composed and circulated in Greek is unknown. The Eev. S. C. Malan, in the preface to his elaborate and learned work on the Gospel according to S. John, says, " We can form no just idea of our Saviour's teaching and of his conversation by reading them in the Greek of the Evangelists, which he never spoke ; hut we must look for the real spirit of them in the venerable idiom of the Peschito." The Peschito, that is "the simple, clear, or uncorrapted,"
is one of the earliest translations of the Greek text, but it is probable that several books were first known in the Palestinian Aramaic, or Syriac. The Apostles Peter and Paul addressed the people in the vernacular Hebrew, and the speech on the day of Pentecost, by
Peter, and the speeches hefore Felix and Agrippa, by Paul, we have only in a Greek translation. Paul's short hut suhlime discourse delivered at the Areopagus before the philosophers was in Greek. But whatever MSS. of Holy Scripture were written during the 1st
century, whether autographs or transcripts, have perished; what MSS. were transcribed in the 2nd and 3rd centuries have likewise perished. Many causes contributed to their loss, but the chief cause was the rigid execution of the decrees published by Diocletian, A.D. 302-303, for the utter destruction of all the books and writings of the Christians throughout the Roman empire, with the view of rooting out the " superstition '" and annihilating the Christian name. Eusebins tells us : " I saw with my own eyes the houses of prayer thrown down and the inspired and sacred scriptures consigned to the fire in the open
market place."