There is a minority of people within the broad Christian spectrum who argue that the New Testament was not just inspired by the Holy Spirit, but that the Greek underlying the New Testament was a new dialect of Greek (“Holy Spirit Greek,” if you will, distinct to “Koine Greek”). Interestingly, a “super exalted” view of Hebrew also existed among some Christians. Michael Massing wrote the following about Johannes Reuchlin (1455-1522):
Almost single-handedly, Johannes Reuchlin helped usher in the new era of Hebraic studies in Christian Europe. At a time when scholars saw Hebrew as alien and subversive, and few wanted anything to do with it, Reuchlin extolled it as holding the key to ancient truths. Hebrew, he declared, is simple, pure, sacred, concise, and eternal. It was the language that man used to communicate with the angels and that had been spoken on earth before the chaos of Babel. When reading it, Reuchlin wrote, he seemed to see God himself speaking. “We Latin people drink from the morass, the Greeks drink from the brooks, the Jews drink from the wells.” (Michael Massing, Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind [New York: Harper, 2018], 176, emphasis added)
While reading the above passage today, I was reminded of a very interesting book I read a few years ago:
Shalom L. Goldman, God's Sacred Tongue: Hebrew and the American Imagination (University of North Carolina Press, 2004)
Latter-day Saints will find this book to be of interest as there is a chapter discussing Joshua Seixas and the early LDS interaction with (Sephardic) Hebrew.
