That is a good observation. The new covenant was not for just the apostles, nor just for the tribes of Israel; it was opened to all the nations of the world.
Seeing the tie to Isaiah, it may well be that “for many” was more inclusive that exclusive. In other words, instead of thinking that Jesus died for many as opposed to all, we see that Jesus died for many as opposed to dying for a few.
Which is kind of what I posted previously in this thread.
It’s my (limited) understanding of the Hebrew language that there are actually very few words. As such it was usual to introduce idioms and exaggerations to convey meaning. I’m not sure how Aramaic compares to Hebrew as far as the number of words available but it seems that usage may have been similar. It’s my understanding that Hebrew seems to have been lacking in the means to rank similar items. We say “good”, “better”, and “best”. In Hebrew and Aramaic they might just say this is good and those are not good (or bad) when the “not good” items were actually pretty nice.
I have also been under the impression that Jesus meant something idiomatic along the lines of “the many” or “*the *multitude”. In other words, “many” is in contrast to “few” or “some” and not in contrast to “all”.
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