Well, Paul, partly they are correct. Greek is used more extentively throughout the Christian Scripture, and those Hebrew Scripture used by the early Christians was the Septuagint, which was a popular, greek translation of the Hebrew. It’s not really know how much of the Christian scriptures was actually written in Aramaic - some source material, no doubt, but, by and large, the main corpus was in greek - there are many articles to be found with the help of Mr Google
The word ‘church’ is an English word, derived from old german, gleamed from a greek word to mean, as far as I can recall, so happy to be corrcted, ‘of the Lord’s’. So, your friends are right in that respects. The word used (over 100 times) in the Christian writings is ’ ekklesia’ a greek word meaning an assembly, an gathering, a people called together (again, bit rusty).
The Latin word used by the Catholic Church is Ecclesia, which is a transliteration of the greek ekklesia. Consequentially, when the Church refers to itself, in documents & letters, etc., it is using the term found throughout the Christian writings. It is only in the translation to English that ‘church’ creeps in, possibly of a longer phase such as ’ assembly of the Lord’s’, which, because we English are lazy with our words, shortened simply to ‘of the Lords’, which became understood as we have it today.
In short, your friends are correct, but irrelevant!
BTW - I’m typing this in Sparkbrook - where are you?
