Below is a response to the question posed by Estelle at BSA. An answer to the question was posted by scholar Robyn Faith Walsh on 2/3/2025 that is inserted below.
Hi, Estelle! There are a few reasons to support the idea that the gospels were first written in Greek, although I’ll grant you that this is debated in some cases!
Something to keep in mind is that the majority of our evidence from this period suggests that when people received any schooling, it was in Greek. Take Paul the apostle, for example: he is a Jewish Pharisee who is educated in Greek and knows things like Homer and the philosophers, along with the Greek Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible). This is the language most people learned outside of Rome for communication/education. So by default, Greek makes good sense. Anyone who was literate enough to write something like a gospel, probably went to school (paideia) in Greek.
Another big reason is that the gospel writers quote the Septuagint. This is usually announced in the text when a character says “as it is written” or the like. The subsequent quote is often a direct quote or paraphrase of the Septuagint (e.g., Genesis or Isaiah).
The gospel authors also tend to use a lot of technical vocabulary that you also find among Greek philosophers. Mark is a good example of this. The way he talks about what we translate as “spirit,” “power,” “demons,” and many other examples uses specific Greek words and meanings that we find in Aristotle, Plato, and the Stoics.
On the counter side, let me give you one example of a theory that is out there that relates to your question about whether they could have been translated from Hebrew/Aramaic. Some argue that the Greek in the Gospel of Mark has some quirkiness to it that suggests the author maybe knows Hebrew (e.g., some of the sentence structures are in an order that seems like something you might find in Hebrew) and there is some quoting of Aramaic (e.g., Mark 5:41 being an obvious example). If you look up something like “Mark + Semitisms” you’ll see lots of theories out there. Couple this with Mark’s relatively simple Greek, and you can see why the idea of a translation has some support.
But on the whole, since our manuscripts only support that they were in Greek, and the probability supports that reality, that is our default in the field.
