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• By the time of the Maccabean Revolt, as we saw, Jews fundamentally resisted the Greek language, Greek customs, Greek learning and Greek philosophy. There were pockets of Greek-speaking Jews, but Jews in Israel, specifically, were discouraged from learning Greek.
• As we saw, the historian Josephus repeatedly refers to Aramaic as being “the language of our country” (Israel). We also saw that the New Testament itself contains many words and phrases in Aramaic, and repeatedly refers to translating or interpreting Aramaic phrases.
• In the lesson about Aramaic and the Church Fathers, we saw that early historians such as Eusebius (in his classic Ecclesiastical History), and the Church Fathers, repeatedly refer to the Gospels and other New Testament writings as having been first written in Syriac (Aramaic) and then translated into Greek (and later, of course, into Latin and English).