Re: I'm not a religious man, but......
I'm certainly no expert on this but I'll just let you know what I have found on this subject...<br /><br />Hebrew, from what I have read, came about very early in Old Testament times - around the period of Noah. Any scriptures prior to that time are likely to have been written in another language. As there were many different prophets, some may have written in other languages.<br /><br />Overall, it seems that most scholars agree that the New Testament or at least most of it was originally written in Greek. There have been many other documents found from the New Testament times and it is difficult tell which documents were the original. Examples of documents found include the many Dead Sea Scrolls which were written around New Testament times. The Dead Sea Scrolls are not the same as the New Testament but there are pieces of the Old, New Testament and the Apocrypha within them. Of the 50 texts which were identified among the Dead Sea Scrolls, 33 were written in Hebrew and 17 were written in Aramaic. Let me quote some from this book "The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered". Page 6: More sacred writings were more typically inscribed in Hebrew, the holy language of the Books of Moses. Writers of apocalyptic visions also often preferred Aramaic, probably because of a tradition that aramaic was the language of the Angles."<br /><br />Now of course many people of this day knew Greek and this was the language usually used by Paul as well. This is common knowledge but also we can note that the sign which Pilate put on Jesus' cross was written in Greek, Hebrew, and Latin. (John 19:20)<br /><br />It makes sense that much of the documents written in that day were written in Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, and Latin. Which of these was the original langauge for each document - it seems that is difficult to tell in all cases. Scholars tend to agree though that documents written in Greek tend to be some of the most accurate because this was either an original document or one of the first translations done. And Greek translations could have been done by some of the original writers since many of them knew several languages.
