Septuagint
New Testament Quotations
It is a common thing for the enemies of God, espeically Jews, to insist that the New Testament books were written originally in Aramaic. They insist that Yahshua and His disciples spoke Aramaic primarily, and all this helps them to conceal their identity to the general public, and to perpetuate their lies. There is a preponderance of evidence in the New Testament itself that every book of it was originally penned in Greek. There is also a preponderance of evidence in Archaeology that – while Hebrew was spoken in Jerusalem at the time of Christ – Greek was the common language of Palestine. Even all of the coins of Herod and his successors contained Greek inscriptions, and not Hebrew or Aramaic[1], and most of the inscriptions of the period are in Greek, and no other language[2].
Dozens of second and third century papyri have been found in Archaeology containing copies of the New Testament books in Greek, yet no such manuscripts have been found in Aramaic. The earliest Aramaic (also called Syriac) versions date to the 3rd to 4th centuries and are proven to have been translated from Greek[3]. Aside from this, there is also a preponderance of evidence in the Greek language itself, and the variations which occur across all known ancient Greek copies, that Greek was the original language of the Gospel (and so surely Isaiah 28:11 was fulfilled) and there is no other which these Greek manuscripts could have been translated from. There is also the fact that so many of the quotes made from the Old Testament are from the Greek of the Septuagint.[1]
Important Observations
Phoenicians
An examination of Scripture, and especially the Septuagint, reveals that the people whom the Greeks called “Phoenicians” (and the word does not appear at all until it appears in Homer, who was probably a contemporary of Hosea and Isaiah) were certainly Israelites. Yet even the Septuagint in its translation sometimes confused Canaanites with the “Phoenicians”, which was somewhat true in 280 B.C. when the edition was translated. But it was not true of the period which Homer was writing about. For long after all of the Israelites who were deported by the Assyrians were gone, the Greeks continued to call the land “Phoenicia”, and the Canaanites who remained to inhabit it, along with whatever remnant of Israelites remained, they continued to call “Phoenicians.”