Hebrew can be found in the books of the New Testament on three different levels.<\/p>\n
First is the plain linguistic level. Theologumena such as Pesach, Satan and Qorban appear in close proximity to such titles as Rabbi, Abba and Messiah, followed by names and appellations like Israel, Beelzebub, Abaddon, Iscariot, Boanerges, Armageddon, as well as liturgical terms like Hosanna, Hallelujah and the ubiquitous Amen, which in the Gospel of Matthew alone occurs no less than thirty-one times.<\/p>\n
Secondly there is the conceptual level. No less Hebraic in their etymon than the above-mentioned Hebraisms are such mainstays of the evangelical vocabulary as the Kingdom of Heaven, the End of Days, Eternal Life, Divine Grace, Saviour, The Covenant, Election, Redemption, to mention only the most important ones.<\/p>\n
Last, and not least, there is a third category of Hebraisms and Hebrew word-groups which escape the superficial reader, but come to light upon retroverting into Hebrew those Gospel passages which contain either textual implausibilities or bad Greek bordering on solecism. Some of these tentative re-hebraisations look like the blurred handwriting of palimpsest, an inkling of the lost Quelle behind the Gospel text, which not only shed old-new light upon a number of New Testament obscurities but sometimes arouse the eerie impression that ipsissima verba<\/em> are being revealed.<\/p>\n Needless to say, all such linguistic exercises can lay claim to little more than an intriguing theory – though their cumulative weight may well carry some power of conviction. For a few Bible scholars, at any rate, they may bear out Bishop Papias, who around 130 C. E. recorded a tradition according to which Matthew had \u201ccompiled the Sayings (of Jesus) in the Hebrew language, and everyone translated these, as well as he could\u201d.1<\/sup><\/a>The History of the Church<\/em>, by Eusebius; English edition by G. A. Williamson, London, 1965, pp. 152.<\/span><\/span>