The Bible of Christ and His Apostles. By Alexander Roberts,
D.D. (Cassell, Potter, Galpin, and Co.)—It has been commonly supposed that our Lord and his Apostles spoke a Hebrew which was a sort of patois made up of a mixture of Syriac and Chaldee. Of course, by that time the Hebrew of the Old-Testament Scriptures was a dead language. The Jews of the period were probably a bilingual people, that is, they spoke Greek, or rather the Hellenic dialect of Greek which the conquests of Alexander had diffused, and what scholars have agreed to call Aramaic, the patois above mentioned. It is remarkable that even so learned a man as josephus was but imper- fectly acquainted with the old Hebrew, a fact quite sufficient to dispose of the notion that the original Hebrew text could have been the medium employed when our Lord quoted from the Scriptures in his addresses to the people, or when they, in turn, did so in conversation with him. Was there, then, an Aramaic version of the Old Testament in popular use ! No, says Professor Roberts, and the authority of the late Mr. Deutsch, he points out at some length, has been wrongly appealed to in evidence of the existence of any such written version, though oral translation into the Aramaic was, no doubt, common enough from the time of, the Captivity. But this translation, in our author's view, was based on the Septuagint, which was, in fact, he is persuaded, the "people's. Bible of the period, the authorised version, so to speak, of Palestine at the commencement of our era," He believes that in our Lord's time the Septuagint version was regularly read in the Jewish syna- gogues, and that it was generally intelligible, as by that time the country was thoroughly Hellenised. This version, then, was the Bible of Christ and his Apostles, and the result is that, so far from there being a gulf between us and the Christianity taught by Jesus, we still possess his very words in the language in which they were originally spoken. Professor Roberts's theory is not generally accepted by scholars; but he has certainly argued in its favour with considerable ability in this little volume, which will, we have no doubt, be widely read, as, we think, it deserves to be.
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