Hebrew, a datum in a foreign language and a different culture. Between us today and the men of the Bible, and between the men of the New Testament and those of the Old, there was a problem therefore not only of translation but of transculturation. We have to consider therefore a linguistic gap between a Semitic language, an Indo-European (Greek), and our own modern language (which might be Chinese or a Bantu language); and the corresponding cultural gaps between the Ancient Near East, the Roman Empire