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ignorant of the Old Testament itself ; for how but in Greek could they have read it ? The case of the Epistle to the Corinthians stands on somewhat similar grounds , with this difference , that there is no reason to believe that Corinth , although restored and colonized by Caesar after its devastation by Mummius , has any title to be considered as what can be properly called a city of Romans or Latins , or as inhabited by persons speaking exclusively the
Latin language , still less as remaining at the distance of a century unac- « quainted with the Greek language , though in the vety heart bf Greece and Grecians . Reason and probability will assure us , that the main population of such a city must always have been or would soon become Greek ; that the Roman settlers ( if , indeed , they were properly Romans at all ) would soon amalgamate with the population of the country ; and that the persons likely to be the earliest Christian converts would be of the same description as in the other cities , particularly of the Eastern portion of the empire .
One frequent cause of misunderstanding on the important question discussed in the works before us , appears to rest on a similar mistake to that to which we have before alluded , and which every one is apt to make , in not sufficiently distinguishing the state and uses of the books now composing the New-Testament Canon in the early periods of Christianity , from what we now see and feel . We are apt , unconsciously , to talk ( as the author of the Palaeoromaica justly observes , that the accusers of the ancient heretics for
rejecting this or that canonical book always talk ) " as if the New . Testament in its proper form had been published at once by some Jerusalem bookseller at a cheap rate , had been advertised in newspapers and reviews , " and , we may add , read in all churches and chapels as a combined and mutually dependent code . Our Saviour and his disciples lived in Judea , and taught and talked in the vernacular language of their country ; their earliest converts used that same language for the ordinary purposes of life ; why ,
then , it is said , do we find the earliest records of revealed truth , the sacred books written for their religious instruction and for the conviction of the unbelieving multitude , in what was to a certain extent a foreign tongue ? Now , what evidence is there that these sacred books were primarily intended even for such purposes as the books of the law were used for in religious exercises ? As a collection it is out of the question ; but even singly , are not their composition and subsequent use in the churches facts which would
naturally arise only as time removed further back the period of actual oral relation from eye-witnesses of the transactions recorded , and out of a gradual analogy to the use of the ancient Scriptures in the Jewish synagogues ? At the period , then , at which the necessity , the demand ( if we may use the expression ) for these writings would arise as evidence of the truth , what was the situation of the church ? It was a rapidly increasing one among the Gentiles and Hellenized Jews scattered over the Eastern and Grecian
provinces of the empire , all more or less using the Greek language , and already possessing their ancient Scriptures in that tongue ; but it was a more confined and gradually declining churqh as identified and incumbered with the local customs , language and law of Judea . Then is not the received notion of the facts as to the Scriptures written for such a church , actually according
in the strictest sense with this state of things ? There was one Gospel originally Written in Hebrew or Syro-Chaldee , the call for which in that form so speedily passed away ; that all trace of the Original was soon lost in a Greek version . There were fow other histpricfiil books all written in Greek , m adapted to the then situation of the great majority of the ctyprch , and particularly of those portions of the Geitfile cpnverte for wisose infortattati , as
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242 Original Language of the New Testament .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), April 2, 1827, page 242, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1795/page/10/
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