Have you ever wondered what the Gospel of Matthew was like before translators and theologians got hold of it? We now have documents that answer this question! And by the way, they are written in Hebrew—the language in which Matthew wrote his gospel!
For hundreds of years, 28 ancient Hebrew manuscripts of Matthew have been locked away in libraries around the world. Now, like prying open oysters and harvesting their treasures, our groundbreaking Hebrew Gospel Pearls studies are opening these manuscripts and bringing the pearls to the surface for all to see their value!
Studying these documents raises questions we didn’t even know we needed to ask and provides answers that have eluded readers for centuries. At last, we can set aside what translators and theologians want us to think and focus on what Matthew intended us to understand.
No one else is doing anything like this! Don’t miss this unique opportunity to encounter the Gospel of Matthew “B.T.T.” (before translators and theologians). We believe these ancient manuscripts have a message for us today!
Have you ever wondered what the Gospel of Matthew was like before translators and theologians got hold of it? We now have documents that answer this question! And by the way, they are written in Hebrew—the language in which Matthew wrote his gospel!
For hundreds of years, 28 ancient Hebrew manuscripts of Matthew have been locked away in libraries around the world. Now, like prying open oysters and harvesting their treasures, our groundbreaking Hebrew Gospel Pearls studies are opening these manuscripts and bringing the pearls to the surface for all to see their value!
Studying these documents raises questions we didn’t even know we needed to ask and provides answers that have eluded readers for centuries. At last, we can set aside what translators and theologians want us to think and focus on what Matthew intended us to understand.
No one else is doing anything like this! Don’t miss this unique opportunity to encounter the Gospel of Matthew “B.T.T.” (before translators and theologians). We believe these ancient manuscripts have a message for us today!
Nehemia:
So Keith, I don't know if you realize how huge
Keith:
This is. This is a game changer.
Nehemia:
When I saw this, I just couldn't believe it. My mouth was like on the floor.
Narrator:
You are listening to Hebrew Gospel Pearls with Nehemia Gordon and Keith Johnson - exploring Hebrew New Testament manuscripts for yesterday, today, and tomorrow,
Nehemia:
Shalom and welcome to Hebrew Gospel Pearls, episode number 12 at the end of season one. Today, we will talk about section 12 of Shem Tov zebra, Matthew, which is Matthew chapter four, verses 23 to 25. Keith, I'm so excited that we're finally - to use your terminology, your traditional terminology - we're coming to the end of a dispensation, which is Matthew chapters one through four. Chapters five through seven is a whole different ball game. It's the sermon on the Mount, which I'm really excited about, which hopefully, Yehovah willing, we will tackle in season two.
Keith:
Excellent. We're going to 23 to 25, but we've got some unfinished business in the earlier episodes.
Nehemia:
Well, we'll talk about as much as we can in this episode and then anything we don't get to, will be in Hebrew Gospel Pearls Plus over on my website, Nehemiaswall.com, where you can join my support team and get full access to the plus episode.
Nehemia:
But now let's go into the public episode. I'm going to read verses 23 to 25, and then we'll jump back and talk about a couple of things we left over from last time. Verse 23, (Hebrew) "And Yeshua turned to the land of the Galilee to teach their congregations and to announce the good news to them. A good gift in the foreign tongue of UnGaleo from the kingdom of heaven and to heal all the sick and all the infirm among the people. (Hebrew) "And the rumor concerning him went through all the land of Syria, and they lifted up to him, or they brought up to him, all the sick from all kinds of sickness - those who were seized by demons, and those who are terrified by an evil spirit and those who were shaking and he healed them." [Hebrew] or actually says me Capoli [Hebrew] and they went after him many from the capitalists and from Galilee and from Jerusalem and from Judah and from trans Jordan.
Nehemia:
Yes. So boy, there's a lot in this passage. It's interesting. It's three little verses, but it may cover, you know, there's people who they spend a lot of energy and trying to figure out what the chronology here is. I don't know that we'll have time to get to any of that, but if you start to look into the chronology, how many chapters are there in Mark and Luke, and maybe in John, that are covered by these three verses. How many days or weeks, or according to some people maybe even years covered by, you know, he turned and he's preaching in their congregations, uh, such as one incident, right? That could be over a period of weeks or months or years. Like I said, we're not going to necessarily have time to get into that, but I want to jump back to verse 18 and really verse 21, because we can't understand something in verse 23, without first looking at verse 21.
Nehemia:
And in that context, we'll also look at verse 18. So it says there that there was a man named, two brothers and one is named Shimon and the other is named Andrea. And then it says Shimon, who is called Simone, who is called Peter Petros, which is very strange. So in the Hebrew version of Matthew, this character Shimon or Simon has three different names. He's got the Hebrew name, Shimon, he's got the Greek name, Simone, but it's really the Greek form of the Hebrew name. And then he's got a Greek name now, what do I mean, it's the Greek form of the Hebrew name? So my name is [inaudible], but when I talk to people here in Texas, they can't say, huh, so they pronounce it Nehemiah. And so the English form, the anglicized form of Natavia is Nehemiah. The Greek sized or Hellenized form of Shimon is Simone.
Nehemia:
So why would he be Matthew? Give that form of the name. That's really the question I want to ask and answer that we have to look at the ossuaries that were discovered in archeological excavations in the land of Israel. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of these ossuarys and ossuary is a bone box. Now let's back up. When we bury somebody today, you put them in a, well, I guess it depends what your heritage is. Some people embalmed the body. In The Jewish world, when you bury somebody in Israel, you wrap them in a shroud and you put that shroud directly into the ground. And then you cover that with stones and cement. And it's actually what you do and then with dirt,. In the ancient world, what they would do in Israel in the second temple period is they would take a body and they would put it in a cave and then they would seal the cave and they'd come back a year later.
Nehemia:
And then we're told in the writings of the early rabbis, blessed it as the man who collects the bones of his father. And what that meant is it was, it was considered a righteous deed to crawl through the tiny little opening of the cave. I mean, I would have to like squeeze through, and these are very small openings. You get into the cave and then it opens up in the cave and you can stand up and you see the body was lying on the stone slab, but now all the, all the flesh is gone. It takes about a year in Israel for all the flesh to be gone. And then all you have left is bones and you collect the bones and you put them in a box. Yes. And that's called the second burial. And the box where you put them in is called an ossuary.
Nehemia:
If it's a full sized box, meaning of the length of the body, let's call the sarcophagus. But the small little one, essentially it's the length of the longest bone, right? So if your longest bone, I think is maybe your femur, that's the length of the ossuary. And you put the bones in there, all the bones. And then what they would do is they would take a nail and nail that they would bring with them, or they'd find it on the ground there. Or they, you know, from previous time or they bring it with them into the burial cave. And by lamplight, they would scratch in the name of the person whose bones, they just stuck into the box. And sometimes two or three people were put in the same box. And from these names that have been scratched into the box, we learn all kinds of different things, all kinds of important things about the languages spoken in the culture of the first century. Israel,
Keith:
Might I ask a question? This is not a diversion, but I want to ask the question. You said it takes about a year for the flesh to decompose. Present date Israel, there's also something that happens about a year from the time that the person is buried. For example, if I remember right with your father, for example, there was a year later. I'm not saying there's a connection between them. It is,
Nehemia:
Oh, there's definitely no question. There's a connection. In other words, in ancient times, the family would come together and someone who is brave enough and maybe the first born son would crawl into the cave and he'd collect the bones. And you could imagine what the smell was like. It's a closed, sealed cave where flesh has been decomposing over a year, which is why we hear about how people would bring spices, right? They would pick and bring perfumes. To this day they do that. They bring perfumes or meaning at the actual first burial (t there's no second burial today, right?) So when they actually do the burial today in Israel, there's a tradition that some people have, they'll take a bottle of perfume of commercially bought perfume, right? Like Chanel number five or something. And they'll throw it down into the grave and it smashes and covers any smells that might come out.
Nehemia:
Right? And now we buried, you know, like I said, with a cement on top of, you know, to keep animals out. So I don't know that you'd smell a whole lot, but, uh, back in the old days, you crawl into the cave after a year and you collect the bones. And so today they have a ceremony, which is usually in English is called the unveiling ceremony. I told somebody recently I was going to Minneapolis for my grandmother's unveiling ceremony. And the response was, what's an unveiling ceremony. I thought everybody did it. Apparently it's a Jewish ceremony that after one year you go to the grave and you present the tombstone, right? That's the modern version of collecting the bones and putting them in the box.
Keith:
There it is.
Nehemia:
So, now they put the bones in the box, they wrote the guy's name on the box with the nail usually, right? It wasn't professionally chiseled in, they're doing it by candlelight. It's very difficult to read. So on display at the Israel museum in Jerusalem is an ossuary, one of hundreds or thousands. And it has written in Hebrew characters, but the language is Aramaic, but the name it writes is Greek. And the name of the person there on the ossuary at the Israel museum, it says (Hebrew), which is Simon, the builder of the sanctuary. So it says an Aramaic (language), he's the builder of the sanctuary. I mean, he's somebody who worked in the building of the temple. And so somebody who actually worked on the reconstruction of the temple, the renovations that were begun by Herod, but continued after that, there was a guy named Simon or Shimone.
Nehemia:
So why doesn't it say his name was Shimon? Because people called him Simone and you might say, wait a minute. How could that be? We have a perfectly good Hebrew name here, which is Shimon. Why would they write in Hebrew characters in an Aramaic sentence, Simone? And the answer is that the three languages, Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic, were used by many people interchangeably. In fact, according to this wonderful collection book by a man named Rokmani, and for most people would be a very boring book. But to me, this is one of those fascinating books ever written. It's called "Catalog of Jewish ossuaries and the collections in the state of Israel" and Rokmmani lists - it's 461 pages of all these different ossuaries and what it says on the ossuary. And one of the things he points out in this book is that the ossuary inscriptions, where they would take a nail and scratch the name of the person proves that even the poor people in Israel or in Jerusalem at least had some working knowledge of Greek. He says they probably didn't know grammar, and they maybe couldn't speak Greek, but they knew enough Greek where they could write the person's name on the ossuary.
Nehemia:
And then sometimes they used Greek forms of names. And you say, why would they use a Greek form of a name if they're speaking Hebrew, or if they're speaking Aramaic. And the answer is that Greek culture is the dominant culture. There was an Israeli politician back in the 1990s and his name was Tommy Lee [inaudible]. And you say, Tommy, what kind of name is Tommy? Well, Tommy is an English name. So he was actually born in Yugoslavia, which today is I believe Serbia. He fled from there after the Holocaust or during the Holocaust arrived in Israel. His real name was Yosef or Yosi, but he was called Tommy. Now, why was he called Tommy? Because English is the dominant culture today throughout the world. That's just the way it is. You go to China where I live for a year and everyone has an English nickname, right?
Nehemia:
They don't have a Swahili nickname. Why is that? Because English is the dominant culture throughout the world. So people in the first temple period had Greek nicknames. Now are they even had the Greek form of their Hebrew name was used. So here we have at the Israel museum, the mans, his name is Shimon [inaudible]. He's known as Simon Shimon and the builder of the, of the sanctuary. However, on the ossuary, his son or some relative of his takes a nail and scratches in Simone, Simon, the builder of the sanctuary. And he spells sanctuary incorrectly and Aramaic with, Hey, instead of a dolef, because you know, maybe his grammar wasn't so great in Aramaic either. So we've got all these different cultures, the Hebrew, the Aramaic, and the Greek, and the conclusion that the scholar has is that people spoke different languages and specifically Greek...
Nehemia:
Let me read you what he writes about the Greek. So there's a section on page 13 of the book called language, and he talks about how there's bilingual inscriptions. I mean, there is, scriptions where the name is written in both Hebrew and in Greek. Sometimes it's written in Hebrew in another language, but usually it's Hebrew and Greek. And then he says, he concludes "from these inscriptions it can be concluded that in and around Jerusalem and Jericho, even the lower classes of the Jewish population knew some Greek. This knowledge was probably limited to everyday speech. And in general did not include a profound familiarity with the language its grammar or its literature." Hmm. And then he says there was a similar thing at bait shall remain Northern Israel from a later period. So in other words, people could kind of get by in, in Greek, they could speak some basic Greek, but they weren't, you know, fluent necessarily in reading and writing Greek.
Nehemia:
And so you have this mix of cultures throughout the Mishnah, which is written in Hebrew. You have Aramaic words and you have Greek words. So this is exactly what we'd expect that in the second temple period, you have a man. When they call him to the Torah, they call them Shimon. And when some of his friends see them on the street, they call them Shimon and other friends call them Petros or Petros Peter. And he's known by all three of those names. That's a possibility. Where do we have a parallel to that? In this book, by Rokmani where he brings the different inscriptions. We have the bilingual inscriptions. And one of the really fascinating ones is that there's a man whose name is Yeshua. So here we have ossuary number nine. And let me tell you about Ossuary number nine. It probably originated somewhere in the Jerusalem was found in the antiquities market.
Nehemia:
And it says on one side of the ossuary, Yeshua bar Yehosah. Yeshua is the short form of Yehoshua, right? So it's Yeshua the son of Joseph, no connection to the man in the new Testament, right? There's a very common name. And on the other side of the ossuary, it says, Yashu now Yashu, we've been told in the Jewish world is an acronym that stands for [inaudible] (his name and memory be blotted out) and that the rabbis took the I and the last letter off Yeshua and turned the name Yashu into a curse. And we find out from this ossuary, that that is not true, but that is a rabbinical fantasy. That in fact, on the streets of Nazareth, the dirt covered probably streets of Nazareth, right? I don't know if they had actual cobbled streets, but in the back alleys of Nazareth, his friends probably called him Yeshua and they never occurred to them and had anything to do with this phrase, (may his name be remembered and blotted out). On the contrary,
Nehemia:
It was just the way people spoke. They didn't pronounce the ( ) became the issue. And it has nothing to do with what the rabbis say and this ossuary proves it. And what's interesting is Yeshu was essentially the Aramaic form of Yeshua in this dialect of Aramaic. They didn't pronounce the ( ) maybe even the dialect of Hebrew in Northern Hebrew. They didn't pronounce the ( ). We know that as well,. We've talked about that. And so Yeshua, became Yeshu and we can see this on, uh, on ossuary number nine. By the way, there's a lot of people who are named Yeshua. Uh, so we have Yashu and Yeshua are on ossuary number nine, but then we have ossuary number 50 and an ossuary number 50, there's a man named Yesus. Yesus is where we get the Greek form.
Nehemia:
That then becomes Jesus in English. Now I've heard people say, Oh, Jesus, that means, Oh, hail Zeus. No, it doesn't. Zeus is written with the Greek letter Zeta. This is written with the Greek letter Sigma. It has nothing to do with Zeus. Yesus is simply a second temple Jewish form of Yehoshua but in the Greek language. In fact, Yesus is exactly like writing Shimon as Simone, in Hebrew letters. And here they wrote Yesus in Greek letters. It's simply how they pronounced it. And you say, wait a minute, why do they have the seh at the end? Because Greek names tended to end with a seh like Joseph becomes Josephus and you Yeshua becomes a Yesus. Why is it your Yeshus or your Yeshua in Greek? Because remember Greek doesn't have a sheh sound. So it becomes a seh just like Shimon becomes Simone.
Nehemia:
That was ossuary number 56. And by the way, in the same ossuary, along with Yeshua or Yesus is a man named Joseph, which is written as Yosis. Yosis is the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew, Yosah which then is short for Yosaf or Joseph. Ossuary number 89 mentions a man named John, the son of Yesus, right? John, Yohoken on the set of Yehoshua, right? These were very common names back then. Ossuary number 113 has a man named Yesus the son of Judah. So we have numerous people who are named Yeshua. It's a very common name. And here there's another one, ossuary number 114 has Yesus alof. I'm not sure what alof means. Maybe it's aloe. So you have numerous people. I'm not even bringing all of them cause we don't have time, but there's numerous people here who have this name.
Nehemia:
And then, my point is that somebody named Yeshua in the first century would have been called by some people Yehoshua. Other people would have called him Yashu, which was the Hebrew nickname. Other people would have called him Yesus, which is the Greek form of that name. And that's why we find Peter being called Shimon in Hebrew, Simone in the Hellenized form of the Hebrew. We have him called Petrus and we have haven't called having called Kapha, not in this passage, but other passages in the new Testament is called Kapha, which is an Aramaic translation of Petrus of stone. So it would not be unusual for somebody to have these three or four different forms of their name and for them to even be written that way on their ossuary, it could be, I mean, so, so there's nothing, nothing unusual or problematic,
Keith:
You know, it may not be unusual, but isn't it a gift like just, just from that one verse and having his name three different ways. We just had an entire, like, almost like a telescope into the first century in terms of what happens with language. That is so cool.
Nehemia:
And the key thing here is, is this idea that while they spoke Hebrew, so there was no Greek and there was no Aramaic. No nobody's saying that. The three languages. I mean, read the misnah which was written in Hebrew. There's a large percentage of the words that are Greek, a large percentage of the words that are Aramaic, but the grammar is Hebrew and the structure is Hebrew, but they had this heavy influence from these other languages. Now I want to jump to the second name or the second disciple in verse 18 and let you run with this. Cause it says here, his name is Andrea. Now we know him in English is Andrew. And in Greek, he's called Andreas. And I texted you the other day and I said, Keith, this name, Andrea, you have a son named Andrew. Why is he called Andrew?
Keith:
It gets deeper than that in the family. So for those that don't know, I have three sons. And when we had a third son, my wife whose name is Andrea, was convinced that it was going to be a little girl. Though, I knew it was going to be a little boy. And I told her that - little tension. So she's pregnant and we're trying to find out. And we decided not to go to the doctor to find out if it was a boy or a girl, but she was convinced it was going to be a little girl and outcomes Andrew. So why did we name him, Andrew? One for the idea of him being the disciple, but there's an underlying issue, which was since it wasn't the little girl, we'll name Andrew kind of after his mom.
Nehemia:
Okay. But what does the word Andrew mean?
Keith:
So I did something really interesting when you texted me. I said, you know, I'm going to ask Andrea, why did your mom call you that? And she said, well, because she had a friend who knew someone named Matt and she says, she thought it was a French name. And she liked the way it was Andrea. So that's why she named her, nothing more. I started looking at other places. What does this name mean? And of course I wasn't really thinking about that until you asked me the question and I found in Latin what it would mean.
Nehemia:
And so what did you find in Latin and Greek? What does it mean in Greek?
Keith:
That has to do with the word for man. I think they even say that in some of the languages, they say that if it's a woman, it means brave, but it really means man. So...
Nehemia:
So it's related to the word anthropos, but it's obviously a variant of it with a delta, not a theta. So Andreas means something like brave, strong, courageous. So we have that name in Hebrew. The name is [Hebrew] First Kings 4:19 there's a man actually in the Northern Israel in Giliad called Gever the son of Ori. So, and then we have the name Gabriel, which means mighty one of God. Right? Gabriel is a longer form of the name Gever. So it's possible that Andrew's Hebrew name was Gabriel or Gever.
Keith:
No, no. You're going to appreciate this. When Andrea went to China, she has her passport (true story). On her passport it made the mistake of female to male. So when she goes to do her test for, you go through the process, you have to go through this physical and all that stuff. The doctor clearly sees that my wife is not a male. She's a female, but it's filling a bureaucracy to change the whole thing. But again, back to the source of the name they use for a woman that she is brave, but really it comes from man, like, yeah. So,
Nehemia:
Well, I want to raise the possibility that maybe an Andrew in the new Testament, in this verse,Andreas or Andrea in the Greek form that maybe his Hebrew name was something like Gever or Gabriel. Whoa, just as Shimon has the name Petrus in Kapha, we actually see in the Tanakh that there were people who had multiple names. Joseph has the name (Hebrew) Daniel 1:7 talks about how Daniel and his three companions both have their Hebrew names and they have their Aramaic names. So Daniel's Aramaic name is Belshazzar and his three friends Hananiah Azaria and Mishel are called a famously, what are they called? Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. Right?
Keith:
Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego.
Nehemia:
There you go. Exactly. So those are their Aramaic names. So it's very possible that Andrew had this Greek name and maybe people called them Andrea or Andrew. And when they called them up to read from the synagogue, maybe they called him Gever or maybe his name was actually Andrew. And I was very surprised. My assumption, what, honestly, when I started reading this case, I thought, okay, when it says, Andrea here, what somebody did is they took the Hebrew name and they put in the Greek or some other European name here so that they would be familiar when they were debating with the Christians. Okay. Even though it said here, something in Hebrew, we've now put in the Greek name. So we know what they're talking about when they bring up these foreign names. And that is a possibility that we'll talk about in a minute. However, I was very surprised.
Nehemia:
I just did a search to prove that the name Andrew never appears in Jewish sources. And what do I find? There's a rabbi in the Jerusalem talmud Rabbi Andrena bar Andri, Andrena the son of Andrew written as Andri with an alev or a yud. It's written both ways. It's also (in ?) he's mentioned. And then there's a man also in the Jerusalem Talmud called Bar Andri the son of Andri. So are the son of Andrew. So Andrew was a name that there's even rabbis who were named after had this name, Andrew. And so it was very surprised to see that I had assumed this was, you know, a Greek name that no Jew would ever be called Andrew. And that maybe his name was originally Gever or Gabrielle. And then they transliterated it when they translated it. And then in Hebrew Matthew, it was changed, but maybe he was actually called Andrew.
Nehemia:
Now I want to actually bring up another possibility. Actually I want to jump over to Zebede, I got to talk about this in verse 21, it says, and he saw two brothers, two other brothers, Yacobi Yochanan (Hebrew), Jacob and John brothers, the sons of (Hebrw) Now in Greek is name is Zebedee and in Hebrew is called Zabdeell which is interesting. So Zabdeell means gift of God. Zabdeell is a Hebrew word that means gift. And then it says (Hebrew) in the foreign tongue (Hebrew), which is very strange. Which one is it? It gives two different forms of this name in the foreign tongue. So I was minding my own business, watching a video on Ed X and Ed X, is this really cool thing where you can take these online courses and what brought this up? Actually I'll be honest is T-bone said to me "Nehemia, what can you tell me about Jewish medicine from the middle ages?"
Nehemia:
And I said, honestly, I know almost nothing about Jewish medicine from the middle ages. So I Googled it and I found somebody who was giving a course on Jewish medicine in the middle ages. A professor from Israel was giving a course and I, and I watched the entire course and I learned so much and we're actually going to post the link at Nehemiaswall.com. I recommend people take this course. It doesn't take a lot of time. You will learn a ton. It's free. You just sign up on ed X. So why am I bringing this? Because in this course, he's talking about Jewish medicine, nothing to do with the gospel of Matthew, nothing to do with the Hebrew Matthew. Really, he's not even talking about Hebrew texts. He's talking about Jewish medical texts written in Arabic. And how do we know they're Jewish if they're written in Arabic, because they're written with Hebrew characters and that's something called Judeo Arabic, that is you take the Arabic texts.
Nehemia:
And instead of writing the Arabic lomb, you write a Hebrew lamed. By the way, Jews did this in almost every language. We have a language called Ladino, which is Spanish written in Hebrew characters. You have Yiddish, which is a dialect of German written in Hebrew characters. When I was a teenager, Keith in high school, me and my friends would pass notes to each other. And sometimes when you would pass notes, you would get caught. And the teacher would read the note out to the class and it was very embarrassing. So I developed this method where we would pass notes to each other and we would write the notes using paleo Hebrew characters,
Nehemia:
But the words were English. So he would say something like you would come up. And me and my friends were fluently writing and paleo Hebrew. I think that's a cute girl over in the third row. And we were right. Alef yud yud in paleo Hebrew, I think (?). The teacher couldn't read it. And the teacher, once he got the note, it's like a what? Okay.
Nehemia:
It was very effective. So this is what they did in Arabic. They wrote in Hebrew characters and this professor BARR Alon university Israel, his name is professor Svlongerman. In the course of the history of medieval medicine through Jewish manuscripts. He's talking about a manuscript, which is written in Judeo Arabic, meaning Arabic and Hebrew letters. So it's obviously copied by a Jew, but he knows that that Jew is not a native Arabic speaker. And how does he know that? Because when it comes to writing a certain name, instead of writing the Arabic form of the name, he writes the form of the name in some romance language. And what do I mean by a romance language? Or what does he mean? Meaning it's he thinks it's Portuguese, but maybe it's some local dialect of Sicilian or something he thinks that meets in Sicily. So the book that we're talking about here is called the complete art of medicine, by (?). That's the author of the book, not the copyist, the copyist is a Jew.
Nehemia:
The author is actually a Muslim named Almajucy and Almajucy means in Arabic, the magase right? So he was actually somebody who was originally from Persia and his ancestor was a madgi, maybe not one of the madgi in the new Testament, but he was part of that guild of people who were scholars called the madgi. And he wrote a book called the complete art of medicine around the year 980. And in the book, the complete art of medicine, he quotes Hippocrates, who is the called the father of medicine in the Greek world. And Hippocrates is known an Arabic is Abu Corot. Now I'm going to play the clip from professor Longerman. It's a very short clip, 40 seconds. And you'll see where he's talking about the Jewish copyist who's hundreds of years later in Southern Europe, probably in Italy. He comes to copy in Hebrew characters. The Arabic texts written in 980 by Almajucy. And he comes to the Greek name Hippocrates. Instead of writing the Arabic form of the name, he writes it in some local dialect that's known from Southern Europe. And here's the clip,
Speaker 5:
Oddly enough, when reading up the name of a pocket he's in Arabic, he does not use the standard Arabic spelling. Wasn't the standard, but the most common which would be (?) something which actually sounds Arabic, but he writes it out in Hebrew, that is (?). Uh, so this man who was fluent in Arabic fluent enough to copy in Arabic text still, when he came to a name, he said, well, I'm not going to copy, right, (name). You know, I know this man, this, this, this, uh, authority as, Apocrates and he writes out, (?).
Nehemia:
So, Keith, I don't know if you realize how huge this is. This is a game changer. When I saw this, I just couldn't believe it. My mouth was like on the floor. That was, uh, Arabic work on medicine, copied by a Jewish doctor. Now let's go to the new Testament when we see it in Hebrew. So what scholars have done up until now is they take a manuscript of the new Testament written in Hebrew and they say, we know this was translated from a foreign language. What language was it translated from? The easiest way to find the answer is to look at the names. So if you see the name, Yahockenan written in Hebrew, instead of Yahockenan, they write it as Juwan. Well then, you know, it's a language, where Yahockenan is something like Juan or Schwann, right?
Nehemia:
It's uh, Castilian or, or Catalonia. And it's some language like that. And, and you can draw conclusions or scholars have drawn conclusions based on how the names are transliterated. The Hebrew names are transliterated in the Hebrew versions of the new Testament. And what we learned from professor Longerman, is that you could be copying an Arabic text and you know Arabic fluently. But when you write the name, you write it, not in the Arabic form, you write it in some form that you use in your daily speech. And what that means is that when we see these Hebrew versions of the new Testament, let's take the Cadaline gospels, for example, which, you know, the Cadiline gospels are in the Vatican. And I found two other copies, one in St. Petersburg, and one in Poland, formerly Germany, it's believed that was translated from the Catalonian language.
Nehemia:
And one of the main proofs is that when you see the Hebrew names, those are the Catalan form of the Hebrew names. And what do we find from professor Longerman that we have to be very careful. All that tells me when I see a Cadiline in form of the name is that the copyist was Catalonian. His native language that he spoke on a daily basis was Catalonian. And he felt the freedom to freely change the name from whatever it was in the text he was copying. In the case of professor Longerman, the text was written in Arabic, but he changes it into Portuguese or Sicilian or something. And in the case of Catalonia, maybe he found a perfectly good Hebrew form, but because he's so familiar and used to the Catalonian form, he copies the Catalonian form. And maybe that's what happened here. Maybe the original Hebrew Matthew had something like Shimon who was called Simone, who is called Kapha.
Nehemia:
And the copyist said, Oh, I know that's Petrus, right? Change it to Pietro. I don't know that's possible. I can't prove one way or another, but we have to be aware of that possibility when the copyist puts down, (name) in Hebrew and in the foreign tongue (names), he's giving us two different translations, meaning there's two different languages in which he knows the names of Zaveell to be pronounced either as (names). What those two languages are.,I'll leave that to experts of European languages. But it tells you that you've got to be really careful that the copyist had a role here. Especially when it came to the names. When it came to names, they will transliterate things into terms they were familiar with. Professor Longerman brings another example in his medical texts, in the medical texts, he talks about how there's a list of ingredients that they used in or medicines.
Nehemia:
And one of those is cinnamon. One, cinnamon is a word that appears in the Tanakh. It appears as one of the ingredients used in the tabernacle and the Hebrew word is kinamon. Now kinamon obviously is a foreign lone word. Why would we have a foreign loan word for kinamon? Because it's something that doesn't grow in Israel. It was imported from somewhere else. And in Hebrew, they called it kinamon. Well, in this text that he's dealing with instead of using the Arabic form or the Hebrew form, kinamoan, they use the form Sienamomo. And Sienamomo is something in some European language, right? Probably again, something like Sicilian or Portuguese, some local dialect that isn't familiar from a standard form of language. But the point is that people would transliterate things into terms they were familiar with. And by the way, professor Longerman says, why would they write Sinamomo?
Nehemia:
Why wouldn't they just write kinamoan? So that when somebody reads this book, he goes to the local marketplace in Syracuse, Sicily, or somewhere. And he asks for kinamoan. Nobody knows what he's talking about. He asks for Sienamomo, even the Gentiles know what he is talking about because that's what it's called in the local dialect. And the point is when they copied Hebrew Matthew, one of their objectives, their stated objectives was to debate with the Catholic priests. And for that purpose, it was important to know, doesn't it matter that we call him Shimon or this friends call them cmon. We need to know what the Catholics are calling him. And the Catholics in that area were calling him Petros, the Catholics in the area maybe were calling him, Andrea,. They were also this other figure they were calling (names). And so it wasn't enough to know that it was Zabdell. We need to know what the Catholic priest is talking about, what he refers to him as, so we can communicate with them. And so that happens in Hebrew Matthew, we have to be aware of that.
Keith:
It's interesting to me, Nehemia. I was sitting here and thinking to myself, you know, it's really kind of cool. People that are listening to the public version just got a taste of what happens in the plus version for this, because you got to
Nehemia:
Wait until we get to the plus version. We've got stuff far bigger than this in the plus.
Keith:
No, no, no. I meant from the previous episode, what you just did is gave them, Oh, that's a good point bonus. You gave the bonus. You gave them a look. Some of the people that haven't gone to plus a chance to see how much deeper, but Whoa, boy, that is really like,
Nehemia:
Well, look, we we've done a lot here in this public version. So I just want to give a taste of what we're going to talk about. God-willing if we make it through it. What I'm planning on talking about in the plus episode, I want to talk about the whole idea of fishers of men. And I want to show how, why I don't want to spoil it, but there's actually something there's a connection there in the Tanack, which is extremely important. And I think it's generally missed, I had missed it until yesterday. I was literally talking to T-bone about this. And I said, wow, you know, the gospel got it wrong. And I looked at it, I'm like, Oh, wait a minute. Maybe there's another way to understand this verse. And I want to talk about the structure of some of the incidents in the life of Yeshua.
Nehemia:
And what do I mean by the structure? Well, John says, there's more things that Yeshua did that could be even committed to writing. Yeah. So when the four gospels chose to share what they were sharing, they had a purpose of why they were presenting it that way. Wow. We're going to talk a little bit about that. Let's see. I want to talk about something, which is a grenade, which is a Matthew 4:23. It says he came to teach in their synagogues. In Hebrew it says in their congregations, who's their chemosabi, right? Is he not a Jew? Why does it say their synagogues, their congregations? Oh, last thing though, in verse 23, there is a play on words that connects to verse. Let's see a connects to verse 21, which is why I insisted last time we have to at least leave verse 21 for episode 12, because you can't read verse 23 without reading verse 21, but I'm going to save that for the plus episode.
Keith:
Excellent.
Nehemia:
I'm going to end in prayer and then ask you to follow up. Yehovah, (Hebrew names) our father in heaven, you know, and our editor knows what challenges we had to produce this episode. Yehovah, these were challenges that they took place before the time of the recording. Some of them ongoing. Yehovah, give us the strength, give us the wisdom to continue to share these things. Yehovah shed light on the Hebrew context and the Greek context and the Aramaic context on the first century context of these incredible events that are described in this book as recorded and preserved in Hebrew and Greek and even in Aramaic. Yehovah, I am so grateful to be a part of this
Keith:
Amen father. Thank you so much for what we have been able to do with your grace over these last 12 episodes, really 24 episodes, 12 public 12 plus. Thank you so much for what is being brought forward that has maybe in many ways not been seen by those that are listening or even heard about. And yet here it is that has been given and we are so thankful. We're humbled that we get a chance to be a part of this process. We ask your blessing protection as we continue to go forward. Give us clear guidance about if and when the next step takes place and how, but we especially thank you for what you did over these previous. Thank you for our producers. Thank you for their patience. Thank you for their diligence and excellence in which the ways that they helped us to communicate this to so many in your name. Amen.
Narrator:
You have been listening to Hebrew gospel pearls with [inaudible] Gordon and Keith Johnson for a more in-depth study, check out Hebrew gospel pearls, plus at [inaudible] wall.com and BFA international.com. Thank you for your support.