UNDERSTANDING THE NEW

TESTAMENT FROM A HEBREW

PERSPECTIVE
by Peter Michas

I am a Greek-American born of Greek parents, raised in a Greek

environment. I have been around Greek culture, language, and customs
all my life.

About ten years ago, an elderly gentleman came into my life, shared the
Scriptures with me, and told me what it really means to have a personal
relationship with Jesus Christ. I had already left the Greek Orthodox
Church, having become disillusioned by all of their doctrines and
traditions, and I really didn't want to hear any more about "religion" -
period! I questioned everything the gentleman had to say, but, thank
God, he persevered. He proved to me through the Scriptures the truth of
God's word.

After I accepted Yeshua (Jesus) as my personal savior, I began to read

my Greek Bible, and I noticed that in many cases the English meanings
did not agree with those of the Greek. I also noticed that the Greek was
not really Greek but that much of what was written was really Hebrew
words spelled with Greek letters.

I pursued this inconsistency and discovered that much Scripture was

from a Semitic (Hebrew) original. To confirm this discovery, I went to
the Jewish bookstores in Los Angeles. I bought many books, and to my
astonishment I found that almost everything in the New Testament had a
parallel in the Old Testament or in other Jewish sources corresponding to
or pre-dating the time of Jesus.

The daily use of the Old Testament was a principal concern of the
writers of the New Testament; for what was there but the Old Testament
as well as other oral and written works and commentaries. Throughout
the New Testament the writers were basically arranging and commenting
on common Jewish knowledge and the Law of God, both oral and
written.
One fact I might stress is that the students of the Old Testament do not
necessarily need to have the New Testament to know God, because
under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit they can draw from the Old
Testament and other Jewish sources and come to know the fulfillment of
Scripture the same way that the writers of the New Testament did. But
the reverse is not true.

Once a person has discovered that Yeshua is the fulfillment, he or she is

then ready to learn the complete meaning of that fulfillment. Again, we
do not necessarily need the New Testament to come to this
understanding. From the Old Testament, we could almost completely
compile another New Testament, minus historical events. The New
Testament does give us information from the Old Testament and other
Jewish sources, as well as historical facts and the cultural setting of the
time. However, from the New Testament alone, we cannot reassemble
the Old Testament, but can only guess as to its content.

We need to go back a few centuries to the translating of the Old

Testament into Greek. This translation is called the Septuagint (the
"seventy") and was written around 284-247 B.C. in Alexandria, Egypt
by, according to popular tradition, seventy Jewish elders.

By 331 B.C., there were Jews all over the Middle East, and Greek was
the common spoken language on many of the trading routes. Greek was
also the language spoken by the majority of people in the synagogues
outside of Israel, making it extremely difficult to read the Hebrew
Scriptures to Greek-speaking people. This created a need to translate the
Hebrew into Greek.

Hebrew is a pictorial, realistic language and does not have the concept of
"past, present, and future," but has a verb construction called "vav
conversive." To quote from a textbook called Contemporary Hebrew,
"some of the outstanding features of biblical Hebrew is the use of vav
conversive with verbs. When the conjunction 'and' (vav) is prefixed to
the past (perfect) tense, it changes its meaning to future (imperfect).
When the vav is prefixed to the future (imperfect), it changes its meaning
to the past (perfect)."

The Hebrew thought imparted is that God spoke everything in the

beginning and it is either completed or being completed. The Greek
thought is just the opposite, which presents us with our first problem.
In Greek, we have a tense of verbs called aorist, meaning nondefined.
Some non-Greeks using Seminar Greek will tell you that this is past
tense, but it is not. It derives its tense from Hebrew thought. Aorist tense
comes from the past and is current in the present (whenever it is read-
that is, the present), and in the future it will still be current. This first
problem of tenses was solved by writing most of the Hebrew in aorist
tense, thereby retaining its Hebrew thought.
.
The second problem was the fact that Hebrew is pictorial and realistic,
while Greek is analytical and scientific. There was no simple way around
this. The next step required the elders who were extremely qualified in
Hebrew and Greek, and in the cultures of both peoples, as well as the
Scriptures, to become very creative with classical Greek. They combined
additional letters and sometimes even other words to allow the Greek to
create the same pictures. When this was accomplished, the people of all
lands could read the Scriptures with the Hebrew context and meaning
retained.

The third problem was the fact that Hebrew was created around a
monotheistic God and Greek around pantheism. This was resolved in
the fact that Greek, as well as Hebrew, can have words that are plural
with a singular result, such as Elohim in Hebrew and Pneumati in
Greek.

When the wandering rabbi of Jesus' day taught, his disciples would
transcribe his sayings and his quotes from Scripture, as well as any
teaching that he did, in the form of Haggadah and Halachah (parables
and laws). This was probably the case with Jesus as well. The disciples
were his chief learners who, in turn, were to make learners out of future
generations in keeping with Hebrew customs of passing instruction from
generation to generation as with Hillel, Akiva, and Rambam.

The big difference between Judea and Alexandria is that, in Judea,

Hebrew was not a dormant language in biblical studies. In fact, it was a
living language of conversation and study. So as Jesus' disciples wrote
down what he said, it was in Hebrew with pure Hebrew thought-the
language of the Old Testament.

In summation, since the New Testament is Greek written to convey

Hebrew ideas, why stop at the Greek when we have the root benchmark
which is Hebrew. The New Testament is a briefing of the Jewish
traditional works of Mishnah, Haggadah, Halachah, Talmud, and
Midrash, inspired by God from the common people, translated and
transliterated into Greek, the language of all Anglo-European thought
and concepts.

The main purpose of this article is to show that what is written in the
New Testament is actually pulled from the Old Testament and other
Jewish writings with the exception of some historical events. The Old
Testament and other Jewish writings, being pure Hebrew and Aramaic,
have stood the tests of time and languages. For even today, the Hebrew
language is almost exactly the same as the Hebrew of Jesus' day and
before. The proof of this is to be found in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Therefore, should we not approach our studies of the New Testament by
returning to the original concepts stemming from Hebrew words,
thoughts, and traditions of Jesus' day?

Unfortunately, the English Bible is not nearly as carefully or prayerfully

translated as we have been led to believe. Until we go back to the
benchmark works and understand them as God intended, we will remain
in division and denomination. God gave Adam the earth in perfect order
and Adam allowed it to become a mess. God gave us the divinely
inspired Scriptures in the language he selected to communicate his word
and will, and in our translations we have created confusion.

God is not the author of confusion. He is the author and finisher of our
faith. He made us to be free will agents of whatever he gives us, and it is
up to each one of us to study to show ourselves approved before him
because we know how to correctly interpret and understand his word.

Yavo Digest Vol. 1, No. 3, 1987