Reply #39: I say this.

[kwassa]

The Dead Sea Scrolls were written in Aramaic. What does this have to do with the writing of the Gospels?

Nothing, as far as there was no connection between Essenes and Christians.

"As Mr. Wiggles says in another post in this thread, Judaean Jews would have used the Torah as a source, so clearly the authors of the Gospels were not Judaean Jews."

Says who? Sounds like supposition from Mr. Wiggles, with no proof to back it up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Septuagint#Jewish_use

Jewish use

By the 3rd century BCE, Jewry was situated primarily within the Hellenistic world. Outside of Judea, many Jews may have needed synagogue readings or texts for religious study to be interpreted into Greek, producing a need for the LXX. Alexandria held the greatest diaspora Jewish community of the age and was also a great center of Greek letters. Alexandria is thus likely the site of LXX authorship, a notion supported by the legend of Ptolemy and the 72 scholars. The Septuagint enjoyed widespread use in the Hellenistic Jewish diaspora and even in Jerusalem, which had become a rather cosmopolitan (and therefore Greek-speaking) town. Both Philo and Josephus show a reliance on the Septuagint in their citations of Jewish scripture.


http://orvillejenkins.com/reviews/heathorthodox.html

Greek the Jewish Language

Heath paints the cultural and linguistic scenario which shows that Greek had become the de facto language of the Jews, even in Palestine, though Aramaic remained the common currency of much social exchange. Greek became the language of commerce and political administration well before the Romans came into that part of the world, and continued even more strongly under the Roman use of Greek as the common language of Empire.

(jump)

Heath reviews the evidence that indicates that these Greek versions of the ancient scrolls, still circulating in various Hebrew versions, came to be the common form of Tanakh (what the Christians came to call the Old Testament) used even in Judea, Galilee and other eastern areas of the Jewish people. Aramaic continued to be the common language in Judea more that in Galilee, apparently, from various other sources.

The Earth Shifts
But Greek replaced the Hebrew as the working form of the Hebrew Scriptures. Various sources indicate that a common practice in the synagogues in Jesus' time seems to be to read the scripture selection in Greek, then discuss it in Aramaic. Often the memorized scriptures would still be in the Hebrew, but Hebrew was no longer a viable working language.

(jump)

Greek Old Testament
...the real contribution Heath makes, as a scholar who has spent his life studying, clarifying, and teaching the Old Testament, from Hebrew and Greek, is to set forth the role of the LXX (Septuagint) for the new messianic sect of the Christians. It is strongly evidenced that the LXX was the version of the Hebrew scriptures used by the Christians. Direct quotes as well as similarities in vocabulary and sentence structure in even the rough paraphrases occur all through the New Testament writings.

http://members.aol.com/Wisdomway/deadseascrolls.htm
on the Dead Sea Scrolls

The scrolls at Qumran, however, because they were written before any of these events occurred, give us an unbiased picture of the original state of Jewish scripture at the time of Jesus Christ.

They show us, for instance, that there was not just one rescension of the Hebrew scripture being used at the time of Christ -- there were dozens; and they show us that the Greek (Septuagint) Old Testament was used extensively in Judea, and without the onus that it later received from the Rabbinical scholars.