sojourner
Annoyingly Progressive Since 2006
No. There is no conspiracy theory, fun as it might be to believe in that and play with it.
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Why the NT was written in Aramaic and Greek
- Thread starter FearGod
- Start date
sojourner
Annoyingly Progressive Since 2006
Oh, for the love of frickin' God!
There are no "originals" -- probably never were in the form we have them now.
Caladan
Agnostic Pantheist
Hey... just because we haven't found the holy grail doesn't mean the tale of Arthur is false! It will surface eventually! Or end up in a warehouse of one of Southern France's Direction régionale des Affaires Culturelles. That or until a professional team of British archaeologists bulldoze Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland in order to retrieve it from its long slumber beneath its soil!Oh, for the love of frickin' God!
There are no "originals" -- probably never were in the form we have them now.
Oh, for the love of frickin' God!
There are no "originals" -- probably never were in the form we have them now.
So why would you claim to have knowledge of their original form? How do you know they're "probably" not in the form we have them now when our experiences with Bible manuscripts does not indicate alterations in text in any substantial manner?
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outhouse
Atheistically
All 4 gospels are compilations. How does that fit with your view?
sojourner
Annoyingly Progressive Since 2006
Because we know things about the cultures out of which the stories arose. Because there are clues in the way the texts are constructed.
I beg to differ. We have all sorts of clues of all sorts of editing in the biblical texts.
Jesus was known to preach in Aramaic? How so?
FearGod
Freedom Of Mind
It was his native language.
Eashoa Msheekha (Jesus the Messiah) spoke Aramaic. Of course, this was two thousand years ago, the language has evolved and today it is like old English; it sounds very different. I call it Ancient Aramaic. The Ancient Church of the East, that emerged out of Jerusalem at the end of the Apostolic Age, referred to it as Leeshana Ateeqah or the "old tongue."
Reference : Aramaic Bible, Disciples New Testament, Genesis, Exodus, Jonah, Daniel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Zechariah, Malachi.
Aramaic Song
[youtube]NkgwcDB5Lb0[/youtube]
CHRIST IS BORN (Christmas Carol sung in Aramaic: the language of Christ) - YouTube
gnostic
The Lost One
steeltoes said:
By Jesus' time, Hebrew was no longer use in day-to-day affair. It was no longer spoken in public.
Aramaic had become standard language for the Jews in Galilee and in Judaea. And Koine Greek was also more widely spoken in the levant than Hebrew.
Only the selected few, could speak, read or write in Hebrew, like the temple priests, scribes or scholars, and possibly few of the rich.
The language of trade at the time, were either Aramaic or Greek.
Had Jesus preached in public in both Galilee and Judaea, in which the majority of his audience were poor, lower class or middle class, how many of them would have understood Jesus had spoken in Hebrew?
Among other reasons, Aramaic transliterations in the Greek gospels (from single lexemes such "rabbi" and "amen" to phrases like "talitha koum) as well as other Semitic influences apparent in the text (such as the phrase "son of man").
A very important line of evidence (for a number of reasons) is the portions of Matthew and Luke not found in Mark widely believed to be from a common source called Q. Greek word order is very free, in part because things that English communicates using word order Greek indicates using morphology (word form).
Greek can make sentences like "I came home yesterday from the house of my friend long after sunset" be "yesterday from the house of friend my home came" and have it make sense by changing the form of the words in ways that allow the word order to change.
So when we find lines in Matthew and Luke that are not in Mark yet very similar, it means more than if we found similar lines in English, because they could use the exact same words to express the same thing and we could still find lines that looked completely different.
This is one of the main reasons to suppose a source Q (although by no means the only reason). However, some lines from Q are very similar in Matthew and Luke with the exception of a single word. What's of value is that when this happens, we find that there is an Aramaic word that both the word found in Luke as well as that in Matthew "mean" (i.e., either word could be used to translate the single Aramaic word).
Q has been analyzed to death especially since Holtzman's 1860s work. More recently, analyses by Kloppenborg and others (including analyses that it didn't exist, such Goodacre's The Synoptic Problem and rejoinders to such challenges like vol. 2 of Burkett's Rethinking the Gospel Sources: The Unity and Plurality of Q). The most thorough examination of it from an Aramaic perspective is Casey's An Aramaic Approach to Q- Sources for the Gospels of Matthew and Luke (SNTS monograph series vol. 122).
What's nice about looking at Q from an Aramaic perspective is that we need not even accept it exists. The other "solutions" to the synoptic problem wouldn't still leave us with the same Aramaicisms we find in the shared material in Matthew and Luke.
According to the Steinsalz Talmud, Hebrew was the spoken language of Judea throughout the Roman period.
Aramaic was spoken in its dialects in the lands around Judea.
If this were true, you would restrict your study of Christianity to the Jewish culture and the Old Testament, which were the only influences on Jesus and his disciples.
If you fail in this regard, you can't read the clues you speak of.
The absence of original manuscripts leaves us ignorant of their original forms. We therefore can only extrapolate based on what we have, and the only reasonable assumption is that we have copies of the originals as written. We have no basis to claim otherwise in the absence of evidence.
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When Peter entered the courtyard of the High Priest during Jesus' trial, he was accused of being "with Jesus" based on the way he spoke.
godnotgod
Thou art That
OK. Let us play: (or has that already occurred?):
What is the true historical relationship between the Pe****ta, Old Syriac manuscripts and the Diatessaron?
Moving on, one of the most egregious falsehoods about the Pe****ta text was that it was the product of an Edessan Bishop named Rabulla, in the early part of the fifth century. Basically the lie is outlined in this
manner:
> In the middle of the second century, a man named Tatian combined the four Gospels into one work, the
original of which was probably in Aramaic. He called it "the Diatessaron".
> Over the next 250 years, this combined work gained great popularity. Paper was scarce and a
Lectionary of one unified account was a great boon to poor and struggling assemblies in the Middle
East.
> Then, a Bishop named Rabulla came along and suppressed what he thought was the work of a heretic.
Determined to have a more acceptable version of the New Testament to take its place, Rabulla is said
to have crafted the Pe****ta, as we know it today.
The scholar who came up with this idea, Dr. F. Crawford Burkitt, admitted that it was only a guess.
However, many uninformed people have passed down Burkitt's guess as a kind of sacred cow of western
scholarship. The fact is, it is not, and the history of the matter will certainly bear Burkitt's speculation out to be a horrible lie.
These are the facts:
> The Edessan group was separated from the Church of the East, and in fact was part of a rival assembly
known as the Syrian Orthodox Church.
> Rabulla, as a Bishop in the Syrian Orthodox Church, was called "the heretic of Edessa" and "the devil"
by the Church of the East because he was a Monophysite, which meant he only saw divine aspects to
Messiah.
Therefore, there is no way that the Church of the East would accept any writing from Rabulla and call it
original Scripture! The history in fact shows the opposite to be the case. The Church of the East resisted all efforts by the West to change their text, even to the point of death, and was ostracized by the Byzantines for their stubborn refusal to give up their ancient Semitic traditions and textual readings.
So, when the Syrian Orthodox Church made their first revision to the Pe****ta, the Church of the East
rejected it. Then a second revision was done, and the same thing happened. So now, we are supposed to
believe they just decided to accept the work of a hated enemy and call it straight from the pens of the
apostles?
As a result, these two groups actually made sure that they spoke with a different accent, and even
manufactured different Aramaic scripts, so no one would confuse which text came from where. The
scholars, who then came in the 19th century to places like Urmia, could not tell the difference between
eastern originals and western revisions because they only saw the latter and adopted its structure in their
scholarship! They then began spinning wild stories in total ignorance of the history of the matter, and this is one of them.
Let me say this clearly. There is about as much chance of the Church of the East accepting a Pe****ta from
Rabulla as there is the Orthodox Beit Din in Jerusalem embracing a Tanakh authored by Adolph Hitler.
That is exactly how preposterous the idea is.
However, Rabulla was very much involved in the production of another Aramaic work, and this
"contribution" has created confusion in the West ever since. A colleague of Rabulla, who authored an
extensive biography of him shortly after his death, wrote:
"By the wisdom of God that was in him he translated the New Testament from Greek into Syriac
because of its variations, exactly as it was." (Rabul episcopi Edesseni, Baleei, aliorumque opera
selecta, Oxford 1865, ed. J. J. Overbeck)
At this point then, history takes over. Having made what he viewed as a definitive translation, Rabulla's
next step was to purge all other variants from his domain, as he relates himself here:
"The presbyters and deacons shall see to it that in all the churches a copy of the Evangelion de
Mepharreshe shall be available and read". (Th. Zahn, Forschungen zur Geschichte des
neutestamentlichen Kanons, i. (1881), p. 105.)
And so, what Rabulla really did was suppress the work of Tatian, which is why no complete copy of the
Damkhalty (Aramaic for Diatessaron) survives. Rabulla gathered up the copies that had been in
widespread use for about 250 years, made a huge bonfire, and burned them.
(continued next post below)
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godnotgod
Thou art That
(continued from above)
But let us now shift our focus from history and into linguistics for just a moment. This term, evangelion de mepharreshe, combines both Aramaic and Greek words into a single phrase meaning "separated Gospels".
As such, Rabulla is clearly trying to contrast his translation work of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John with
that of the Diatessaron, which has combined the four into one literary work. So, he eliminated as many
copies of the Diatessaron as he could get his hands on, and substituted his own translation instead. Then,
all these centuries later, western scholars enter the equation and claim, without any evidence, that the
evangelion de mepharreshe must be the Pe****ta text.
The fact is though that western scholarship has completely rejected the Burkitt Hypothesis in spite of the
fact that sources like the Encyclopedia Britannica continue to spout this theory as if it were genuine history. For example, with respect to Burkitt, Arthur Voobus wrote:
"This kind of reconstruction of textual history is pure fiction without a shred of evidence to
support it" (Early Versions of the New Testament, Estonian Theological Society, 1954, see pp. 90-
97)
Voobus in fact goes on to argue that Rabulla never even used the Pe****ta at all!36 Furthermore, even Dr.
Bruce Metzger, who may be the world's foremost Greek New Testament Primacist, agrees with Voobus and
rejects Burkitt:
The question who it was that produced the Pe****ta version of the New Testament will perhaps
never be answered. That it was not Rabbula has been proved by Voobus' researches...In any case,
however, in view of the adoption of the same version of the Scriptures by both the Eastern
(Nestorian) and Western (Jacobite) branches of Syrian Christendom, we must conclude that it had
attained a considerable degree of status before the division of the Syrian Church in AD 431.
(Bruce M. Metzger, The Early Versions of the New Testament (New York: Claredon, 1977), p.
36).
I could not have said this better myself. Since the Eastern and Western Aramaic groups hated each other
with a passion, once again we see that one faction would never accept the Scripture of the other. On the
other hand, we have the writings of Mar Aphrahat, a fourth century Syrian saint, who quotes exclusively
from the Pe****ta against both Old Syriac manuscripts.37 But perhaps the most damning piece of evidence
as to what Rabulla really did is contained in a place that nobody in western scholarship seems to have
expected:
"Shlam Evangelion de Mepharreshe"
"Here ends the Evangelion de Mepharreshe"
So here, finally, we find an ancient inscription on a document that actually claims to be Rabulla's
evangelion de mepharreshe. Guess what though? This is not the Pe****ta text at all, but a line written by
none other than the Old Syriac scribe at the end of that manuscripts' version of John's Gospel! What's
more, the exact same title of evangelion de mepharrreshe also appears at the very beginning of the Gospel
of Matthew as well! That's two references to the unique title that Rabulla himself coined, whereas all other manuscripts have this term exactly zero times. Surely then if the Old Syriac proponents could find even one reference to this work of Rabulla's on any Pe****ta document, they would hail it as a smoking gun that Pe****ta was revised. How inconvenient then that reverse has been found!
Therefore, Old Syriac must be Rabulla's evangelion de mepharreshe and, as Paul Younan points out, that
piece of evidence makes a number of other obscure factors finally make sense:
"This is the reason why the Old Syriac38 was not used by the Church of the East, and why it
eventually fell out of use in every other Church of the Middle East (including Rabbula's own
Syriac Orthodox Church, which eventually reverted back to the Pe****ta) - only [for Old Syriac] to
find it's way to a dusty shelf in a Greek Orthodox monastery of Egypt."
And so, once we see the truth of the matter, it becomes clear the Pe****ta could not have been a revision
from the Old Syriac manuscripts. In fact, if anything, the Old Syriac manuscripts were an attempt to
replace liturgically both the Pe****ta and the work of Tatian. Furthermore, the dates of both manuscripts fit the time in which we know Rabulla did his dirty work very well.
To conclude then, let's just call a spade a spade here. This is just "white man's burden" junk all over again. It's the same kind of logic that made archaeologists in the 19th century assume that everyone except the natives of Zimbabwe built a huge wall in their land. No, better it be Phoenicians, Egyptians, Mayans or
even Atlanteans, rather than a race they deemed inferior to themselves. And if Burkitt and those who
continue to spout his theories uncritically ruffle a few Semites feathers by spreading lies and ignoring
traditions and history, it certainly is not a problem that affects them in the comfort of sitting rooms in New York and London.
*****
Andrew Gabriel Roth,
Aramaic Scholar
excerpted from:
http://aramaicnttruth.org/downloads/LEARNING THE BASICS.pdf
Also, see here for images of original documents:
Does the Pe****ta stem from the Old Syriac?
But let us now shift our focus from history and into linguistics for just a moment. This term, evangelion de mepharreshe, combines both Aramaic and Greek words into a single phrase meaning "separated Gospels".
As such, Rabulla is clearly trying to contrast his translation work of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John with
that of the Diatessaron, which has combined the four into one literary work. So, he eliminated as many
copies of the Diatessaron as he could get his hands on, and substituted his own translation instead. Then,
all these centuries later, western scholars enter the equation and claim, without any evidence, that the
evangelion de mepharreshe must be the Pe****ta text.
The fact is though that western scholarship has completely rejected the Burkitt Hypothesis in spite of the
fact that sources like the Encyclopedia Britannica continue to spout this theory as if it were genuine history. For example, with respect to Burkitt, Arthur Voobus wrote:
"This kind of reconstruction of textual history is pure fiction without a shred of evidence to
support it" (Early Versions of the New Testament, Estonian Theological Society, 1954, see pp. 90-
97)
Voobus in fact goes on to argue that Rabulla never even used the Pe****ta at all!36 Furthermore, even Dr.
Bruce Metzger, who may be the world's foremost Greek New Testament Primacist, agrees with Voobus and
rejects Burkitt:
The question who it was that produced the Pe****ta version of the New Testament will perhaps
never be answered. That it was not Rabbula has been proved by Voobus' researches...In any case,
however, in view of the adoption of the same version of the Scriptures by both the Eastern
(Nestorian) and Western (Jacobite) branches of Syrian Christendom, we must conclude that it had
attained a considerable degree of status before the division of the Syrian Church in AD 431.
(Bruce M. Metzger, The Early Versions of the New Testament (New York: Claredon, 1977), p.
36).
I could not have said this better myself. Since the Eastern and Western Aramaic groups hated each other
with a passion, once again we see that one faction would never accept the Scripture of the other. On the
other hand, we have the writings of Mar Aphrahat, a fourth century Syrian saint, who quotes exclusively
from the Pe****ta against both Old Syriac manuscripts.37 But perhaps the most damning piece of evidence
as to what Rabulla really did is contained in a place that nobody in western scholarship seems to have
expected:
"Shlam Evangelion de Mepharreshe"
"Here ends the Evangelion de Mepharreshe"
So here, finally, we find an ancient inscription on a document that actually claims to be Rabulla's
evangelion de mepharreshe. Guess what though? This is not the Pe****ta text at all, but a line written by
none other than the Old Syriac scribe at the end of that manuscripts' version of John's Gospel! What's
more, the exact same title of evangelion de mepharrreshe also appears at the very beginning of the Gospel
of Matthew as well! That's two references to the unique title that Rabulla himself coined, whereas all other manuscripts have this term exactly zero times. Surely then if the Old Syriac proponents could find even one reference to this work of Rabulla's on any Pe****ta document, they would hail it as a smoking gun that Pe****ta was revised. How inconvenient then that reverse has been found!
Therefore, Old Syriac must be Rabulla's evangelion de mepharreshe and, as Paul Younan points out, that
piece of evidence makes a number of other obscure factors finally make sense:
"This is the reason why the Old Syriac38 was not used by the Church of the East, and why it
eventually fell out of use in every other Church of the Middle East (including Rabbula's own
Syriac Orthodox Church, which eventually reverted back to the Pe****ta) - only [for Old Syriac] to
find it's way to a dusty shelf in a Greek Orthodox monastery of Egypt."
And so, once we see the truth of the matter, it becomes clear the Pe****ta could not have been a revision
from the Old Syriac manuscripts. In fact, if anything, the Old Syriac manuscripts were an attempt to
replace liturgically both the Pe****ta and the work of Tatian. Furthermore, the dates of both manuscripts fit the time in which we know Rabulla did his dirty work very well.
To conclude then, let's just call a spade a spade here. This is just "white man's burden" junk all over again. It's the same kind of logic that made archaeologists in the 19th century assume that everyone except the natives of Zimbabwe built a huge wall in their land. No, better it be Phoenicians, Egyptians, Mayans or
even Atlanteans, rather than a race they deemed inferior to themselves. And if Burkitt and those who
continue to spout his theories uncritically ruffle a few Semites feathers by spreading lies and ignoring
traditions and history, it certainly is not a problem that affects them in the comfort of sitting rooms in New York and London.
*****
Andrew Gabriel Roth,
Aramaic Scholar
excerpted from:
http://aramaicnttruth.org/downloads/LEARNING THE BASICS.pdf
Also, see here for images of original documents:
Does the Pe****ta stem from the Old Syriac?
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"from 300 B.C.E. to 70 C.E., Hebrew was no longer commonly spoken, having been replaced by Aramaic"
Schwartz, S. (1995). Language, power and identity in ancient Palestine. Past & present, (148), 3-47.
"Although the Jews spoke mainly Aramaic from about 400 BCE onwards, a form of Hebrew survived as a spoken and written language, primarily in the synagogues. This form of Hebrew had its own characteristic features which distinguished it from Biblical Hebrew. It was the language of the Mishnah."
Van der Merwe, C. H., Kroeze, J. H., & Naudé, J. A. (1999). A Biblical Hebrew Reference Grammar (vol. 3 of Biblical Languages). Sheffield Academic Press.
"Consequently, the colloquial character of Mishnaic Hebrew may reflect an earlier vernacular stage of the language. Indeed, most scholars now tend to view Mishnaic Hebrew as the vernacular of the Second Temple period, when biblical Hebrew is deemed to have become restricted to literary usage. Only in the second half of the second century ce, in the aftermath of the two Jewish revolts against Rome, did Mishnaic Hebrew virtually disappear as a vernacular. In the following centuries, Hebrew seems to have been used as a liturgical and academic language only."
&
"That Aramaic was widespread in Hellenistic and Roman Palestine seemed obvious to scholars even before the Qumran discoveries because of the Aramaic texts, quotations, loanwords, and names referred to above. In the Temple, Aramaic would have been used by the officials who oversaw the sacrifices and other offerings brought by the people. The Mishnah, admitting that certain administrative seals were written in Aramaic, quotes them in Hebrew (M. Sheq. 5:3). A list of words which were allegedly written on shofar chests begins in Aramaic but continues in Hebrew (cf. ibid. 6:5). The obvious translation of these words into Hebrew suggests that other portions in the Mishnah may also not have been formulated in Hebrew originally."
from Smelik, W. (2010). "The Languages of Roman Palestine" in C. Hezser (Ed.). The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Daily Life in Roman Palestine (pp. 122-142). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
"Biblical Hebrew (BH) and epigraphic Hebrew are umbrella terms used to describe a number of dialects and periods of the language from the Iron Age until the Hellenistic era."
Hackett, J. A. (2002). Hebrew (Biblical and Epigraphic). in J. Kaltner & S. L. McKenzie (Eds.) Beyond Babel: A Handbook for Biblical Hebrew and Related Languages (SBL's Resources for Biblical Study No. 42). Society of Biblical Literature.
As there was no "Old Testament" during Jesus' day, it can't very well have influenced. Recall that there seems to have been a fair amount of debate regarding the "oral Torah", whether the Sadducees (and, to they extent the represent yet are not equivalent to, the temple priesthood as well) believed in there were Jewish scriptures other than the 5 books of Moses.
It doesn't. We know it doesn't. We know it doesn't not simply through manuscript attestation and the development of the current level of sophistication in textual criticism, but also through the ways in which we have confirmed that these methods work thanks to new finds. It's true there are still textual critical issues, but that is a far cry from being left ignorant.
We've been over this. Those three dots (ellipses) are supposed to indicate some minor detail or details that are excluded for that reason. In this case, it cuts out an entire page. More importantly, its blatant lying, as it deliberately distorts what Metzger wrote. First, he only says that Rabbula was not wholly responsible (and he says this on page 59, not 60). On the next page (before that "In any case..." portion of your sources pathetically dishonest distortions), we find "It appears that, besides Rabbula, other leaders in the Syrian Church also had a share in producing the Pe****ta. The presence of a diversity of mannerisms and style in the Pe****ta Gospels and Apostolos suggests that the revision of the Old Syriac was not homogeneous, but the work of several hands".
When (on p. 60) we finally get to your sources "In any case..." (that neatly skips over what Metzger actually said in your sources deliberate misrepresentation to lie to his readers), it is almost immediately by a discussion of which Greek manuscript tradition(s) were used to construct the Pe****ta. Of course, as your source is a liar through and through, this is left out.
godnotgod
Thou art That
I disagree with your assessment. Gabriel Roth does not lie. It is you who twists everything, under the color of academic authority, to bend the truth to fit your teeth.
On top of that, you are making a minor point, which is not true in and of itself, in a ridiculous attempt to discredit the primary message of the highly respected Mr. Roth, and to divert attention away from the real issue here.
With as much effort one could probably show that Jesus preached in Swahili.