When we investigate the roots of the New Testament's teaching we must bear in mind that the Apostles were eye witnesses of the gospel events. Peter testified to the Great Sanhedrin, "We cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard", and in his letters, which even in liberal circles are nowadays treated more sympathetically than they were previously, he says, "We did not follow cleverly invented stories . . . but we were eye-witnesses of his majesty". John writes: "That . . . which we have heard, which we have looked at and our hands have touched -- this we proclaim . . . The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it . . . We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard."⁵⁰ The Book of Acts insists that only they "who have been with us" from the time of John's baptism were acceptable for the apostolic office.⁵¹

This gives rise to the question: What guarantees do we have that the same scrupulous care was observed in the recording of the gospels themselves? We might also ask: When and how were the gospels written? It is certainly obvious that each one of the gospels gives a witness peculiar to itself, even in regard to its structure. It would hardly be possible for any of today's star reporters to attain the same level of accuracy. Nevertheless they are not merely the equivalent of four tape recordings, repeating the same things word for word. The disciples did, after all, follow their Master for about 3½ years, and only when we remember this can we understand the last verse of John's gospel: "Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.

There are hundreds of books written solely on the origin of the gospels. Similarities between the accounts written by the four evangelists have been pointed out since the time of the church father Augustine at the turn of the 4th and 5th centuries. Even though many critics have observed now and then that behind the Greek reports there lie Semitic originals, they have nevertheless been studied on the basis of their supposed affinity with the other Greek literature of antiquity, in other words the Christology of the New Testament was said to be inextricable from the wider culture of the Hellenistic age. One fundamental point of departure was, for example, the assumption that Jesus could not have spoken in his own time about the destruction of the Temple, therefore all the gospels must have been composed after the year 70 AD. It was assumed that they reflect ideas which had already taken root in the churches rather than giving us insight into the mind of Christ making its impact on history. The Finnish professor Heikki Ríisínen, for example, concedes, according to the title of one of his books, that "science is still trying to decide what to make of the Bible". "At the moment", he goes on to say, "critics are not agreed as to whether there ever did exist a pre-Christian myth upon which Christian speculation could have been founded." He points out that, "with the demise of the Hellenising hypothesis the researcher is still left wondering about the relevance from our point of view of these Jewish speculations which Christian thought in its day used to its advantage." In his opinion "no indisputable Christological-myth prototypes have been found in a Hellenistic milieu."⁵²

If this is so, all the modern theories must be called into question and the date and nature of the origins of the gospels must be looked into anew. The letters of Paul are acknowledged even in liberal circles to be on the whole authentic and they are dated between the years 50-60 AD. Thus there is in this sense no disputing the matter. But if the gospels were not composed until after the destruction of the Temple then their authenticity too must be suspect. It will be of prime importance, then, to establish first, whether Jesus really did speak of the destruction of the Temple before the event, and secondly which language he spoke.

Did Jesus really speak about the destruction of Jerusalem

as the gospels say? There are so many indications of this being the case that it is difficult to claim the contrary. In Matt. 22:7, where Jesus is telling his parable of the Wedding Banquet, he says that the king sent his army and "burned their city". At the end of the following chapter he says how he longed to gather the inhabitants of Jerusalem together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but since they were not willing he says, "Look, your house is left to you desolate" -- in Hebrew the the word used for 'Temple' is bayith, which means 'house'. Luke 21 also states that Jerusalem will be surrounded by armies and that its "desolation" will then be near. "And Jerusalem will be trampled on by the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled." Such things are not the mere inventions of hindsight.

The destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem was predicted not only by Jesus but also by other learned Jews of the time. There are 3 fragments in the Talmud which refer to something terrible happening "40 years before the destruction of the Temple", which is said to have had various consequences, one of them being that the "sacrifices lost their efficacy". Johanan Ben Zakkai, a friend of Nicodemus, cried out when the Temple gates once opened of their own accord, "O Temple, Temple . . . I know that thou shallt be destroyed!" He was referring by this to Zech. 11:1, "Open your doors, O Lebanon, so that fire may devour your cedars!"⁵³ 'Lebanon', according to the Rabbis, is a cryptic name for the Temple, because its root letters form the word 'whiten': the Temple therefore "whitens" the nation's sins.

The clearest prophecy of the destruction of the Temple is of course the 9th chapter of Daniel, referred to in passing by the Jewish historian Josephus,⁵⁴ who also recorded the remarkable fact of the Temple's east gate opening of its own accord during the night.⁵⁵ The strongest proof that the destruction of the Temple was considered possible is in Josephus' Jewish Wars: During the Feast of Tabernacles "four years before the Jewish revolt", when "the city was still flourishing and in perfect peace", a certain Jesus, the son of Ananus began to proclaim strange tidings, crying out with great volume: "A voice cries out against Jerusalem, against the Temple of God, against the whole nation!" He continued night and day "in all the streets and alleys of the city", and even though both Jewish and Roman officials scourged him until his bones were laid bare, "he shed no tear nor did he rebuke his torturers". He kept this up for "seven years and five months, right up to the siege of the city". Finally, to his cry of "Woe to thee, Jerusalem!" he added the words "Woe, woe to myself also!". Soon after the seige commenced, Josephus tells us, he was killed by a stone from a Roman ballista.⁵⁶

Luke 19:41-44 gives us a more detailed picture of Jesus' prophecy regarding the destruction about to come upon Jerusalem:

"As he approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it and said, If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace -- but now it is hidden from your eyes. The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side. They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognise the time of God's coming to you.'

If Johanan Ben Zakkai "knew" that the Temple would be destroyed, and if this strange expectation was already in the air at that time, then there is good reason to reject theology's sacred cow that Jesus "could not have" spoken of these things beforehand. In this way our attitude towards Jesus' eschatological preaching will also take on a more positive note. Even on Finnish TV the thesis has been presented that Mark's gospel has a shorter eschatological perspective than the others, and that he expected the second coming of Christ in his own day. Nevertheless, Mark too says of the sanctuary that, "not one stone here will be left on another, every one will be thrown down", and that before the second advent, "the gospel must first be preached to all nations".⁵⁸ If we try to determine the date of the gospel origins relying on such spurious presuppositions they will only serve to hinder us from giving ear to the New Testament's own witness.

Doctor Bo Reicke writes in one of his studies that "it is nothing short of jingoistic and uncritical dogma to claim in New Testament criticism that the gospels must have been written after the Jewish revolt [AD 66-70], simply because they contain prophecies of the destruction of the second Temple which could only have been inserted at a later date". ⁵⁹

 What was the status of the Hebrew language at the time of the second Temple?

Among both scholars and laymen the question has been raised throughout the ages as to what language Jesus may have spoken. This is doubly important when we consider that the object of criticism is to determine the original meaning and background of the concepts and terminology he used. Scholars have tended towards the opinion that at the time of the second Temple Aramaic was the principal language of the people. One exception to this was when the Jewish critic M.H. Segal wrote in 1927 that the Rabbis used "Mishnaic Hebrew",⁶⁰ but this thesis did not find general acceptance.

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls from 1947-1963 established finally, beyond dispute, that Hebrew was used not merely in the exposition of Scripture and for prayer but also for non-religious purposes. These scrolls contain approximately 600 manuscript fragments, 179 of which are excerpts direct from the Old Testament. The manuscripts are a thousand years older than any others found up to that date. Ten of the documents furnish us with the principal doctrinal and organisational rules of the Essene sect, nine being written in Hebrew and only one in Aramaic. Even the manuscript known as the "copper scroll" and the fragments from the second century of the Christian era testify to the use of Hebrew at the time of the Roman occupation. Professor Frank Cross, considered one of the foremost authorities on these manuscripts, made a comparative study of the copyists' linguistic proficiency and found that their grammatical and syntactic competence in Aramaic was clearly inferior to their performance in Hebrew.⁶¹

The Talmud relates an amusing incident which took place in the Jerusalem of Jesus' time. A learned man called Baba Ben Butta, renowned for his humility, was in the habit of sitting in a certain place to instruct the people. In the vicinity there lived a Babylonian man who was married to a daughter of Jerusalem. This young bride, however, had some difficulties in understanding her husband's language. One day he asked his wife to go to the market and buy him two watermelons. The girl misunderstood the request and bought two candles, for which she was severely rebuked. Finally  her husband said, "Go and break them al rôsh "baba", in Aramaic literally 'on the head of the doorstep'. His young wife went to the nearby Rabbi Baba, who was in the middle of teaching, and broke the candles on his head. The gentle scholar enquired as to why the young lady had acted thus and received the answer, "My husband commanded me to do so". "If that is so", replied the Rabbi, "then you did right in obeying". "May God grant you," he added, "two male children who are like Baba Ben Butta!" This is further proof that Hebrew was used colloquially actually in Jerusalem and, it would appear, in the neighbouring village of Bethlehem, from where Mary and Joseph originally came.⁶²

We mentioned earlier that some critics are of the opinion that Josephus originally wrote his Wars of the Jews in Aramaic for a Babylonian reading public and only thereafter in Greek. In Jerusalem the use of the 'sacred tongue', Hebrew, may have continued without interruption up to the time of the second Temple, whereas in Mesopotamia Aramaic was the official language from the days of Daniel and Ezra. This zone of different Aramaic dialects reached as far as Palestine. We remember that Paul used Hebrew when he stood on the steps of the Antonia Fortress, when the Romans arrested him because of the riot which had begun in the Temple -- and the people immediately "became very quiet" to hear him out. When he speaks of his experience on the Damascus road he also makes the special mention that Jesus spoke to him in Hebrew. It would appear that when we read of the people being amazed because Jesus "knew the scriptures", although as far as they knew he had had no instruction in them, the phrase means that he quoted them in the original language of the Old Testament, Hebrew. The Rabbis forbad the Synagogue interpreter, the meturgeman, from holding the OT scrolls in his hands while interpreting the text from Hebrew into Aramaic "lest the idea should come about that he was reading the Holy Scripture". Regarding prayers there was a specific injunction that they were to be recited in Hebrew, so that the "intermediary angels", who understand only Hebrew, would be able to carry them to God. Perhaps Jesus, being a child of a Bethlehemite family, had the opportunity of learning from early childhood the Hebrew dialect more or less as his own, and it provided a shortcut to the unconstrained reading of the Old Testament.

From the critic's point of view it is worth noting that all the NT concepts reflect Jewish thinking, and that from beginning to end Semitic thought and original linguistic form are reflected in the NT documents. Professor David Flusser of Jerusalem University wrote in the 1960's that "every serious student of the New Testament ought, where possible, to be an authority on Judaism".⁶³ The mastery of Hebrew is not really all that difficult -- even small children in Israel can speak it! However, one difficulty is that the bulk of the Rabbinic commentaries are written in the so-called RaSHI script, which has a totally different appearance from the letters of OT Hebrew.
----------
50.     Acts 4:20, 2 Pet. 2:16 and John 1:1-3
51.    Acts 1:21-22.
52.    Heikki Räisänen, Raamattunäkemystä etsimässä, pp56-57.
53.    Eg. Yoma 39b.
54.    Antiquities X 10-11.
55.    Wars of the Jews VI 5,3. See also the observations of jacob Neusner on this in First Century Judaism in Crisis, pp73-75.
56.    Wars of the Jews VI at the end of 5,3.
57.     Haggiga 5b.
58.    Mark 13:2 and 10.
59.    See Bo Riecke, Synoptic Prophecies on the Destruction of Jerusalem, in Nov. Test. Suppl. Leiden 1972, 121-134.
60.    Matthew Black, An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts, Oxford 1967, p47.
61.    David Bivin & Roy B. Blizzard, Understanding the difficult words of Jesus, Makor Found., Caklif. 1983, p43.
62.     Nedarim 66, at the end of b. page.
63.    David Flusser, Die konsequente Philologie und die Worte Jesu, Jerusalem 1968, p32.