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Why the NT was written in Aramaic and Greek
- Thread starter FearGod
- Start date
godnotgod
Thou art That
Its because your lacking the education on the subject at hand.
I gave you the information you need to educate yourself as to the real facts about the Pe****ta, but you choose to opt for the mainline Pablum just like the 99% Greek NT sheep do.
baaaaahhhhh....baaaaahhhh....
Now if I am 'lacking the education', show me where Andrew Gabriel Roth is wrong.
He pegged it and you know it!
...and BECAUSE he pegged it, LOM decides to pick at what he thinks is a loose thread to make a big stink of nothing relevant to the issue.
Truth is, LOM hasn't near the knowledge of Aramaic that Roth does, so I put my marbles with Roth. LOM is just blowing hot air.
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outhouse
Atheistically
A fundy one sided view that doesn't represent the truth of the matter and Legion called you on it square.
To the point you cannot refute it with any credibility
godnotgod
Thou art That
I read the missing content; did you? It is irrelevant to what Mr. Roth is trying to get across. If Mr. Roth was lying, he would not have indicated that some text was missing. C'mon. Use your head. Mr. Roth has a published Aramaic NT under his belt. Do you think he would sacrifice his credibility as a legit translator for some unimportant missing text in his essay?
All you can do is conveniently label Mr. Roth a fundie, but you cannot refute any point he has made in the piece I posted, can you, and neither can your idol.
I am not a theist, but I respect Mr. Roth's expose. LOM does not have the same level of expertise, though he thinks his is much more refined. It's not. It's just a cleverly applied tool of deception.
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gilligan8914
Member
(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?
Tatians diatessaron is available online now. Due to the fact that fragments of another harmony of the gospels, differing from Tatians, and written in old syriac have been found, it is not been proven that Tatians harmony was the one in use by the Syrian Church. They may have had an older version that could have been an original writing. Muhammad speaks of only one gospel of the Christians, because he may not of known any other than the old Syriac version of the harmony. There is always the chance that the original gospel was only one account, but was broken up, added to and renamed much later.
Really? There's Swahili in the Greek NT the way there is Aramaic? Which words or phrases are actually Swahili the way there actually Aramaic words/phrases in the Greek NT?
And how would you go about determining the influence of one language on another given any text? That is, what is your basis for asserting "probably" rather "highly unlikely" or "almost certainly" or any other evaluation of the probability that methods you don't know used on texts you can't read to determine the influences of a language you don't know on these texts? Do you have some knowledge of linguistics that informs your opinion here? Is there any evidence you have at all for you assessment of what you assert to be "probable"?
So why did he leave a page out of his quote that contradicts what he says?
This is what Metzger actually said in part of what Roth left out:
"It appears that, besides Rabbula, other leaders in the Syrian Church also had a share in producing the Pe****ta."
Now, as Roth claims "That it was not Rabbula has been proved by Voobus' researches", the cuts out a page of the ways in which Rabbula and others had a hand in producing the Pe****ta and follows this by the possible Greek manuscript traditions behind the Pe****ta, how is Roth not a dishonestly, deliberately, and obviously distorting the truth and misrepresenting Metzger (impugning his name in the process)? Metzger states clearly in the page that Roth cuts out of his quotation that the Pe****ta post-dates Rabbula and that Rabbula did have a hand in producing it, just that he clearly wasn't the sole producer. Roth, however, makes it appear as if Metzger simply denies Rabulla was behind the text, glosses over an entire page of the ways in which Metzger absolutely does not say this, and then stops just before Metzger starts talking about the Greek behind the Pe****ta. All of this is designed to mislead the reader into thinking Metzger says something he does not. It's dishonest, manipulative lying typical of Roth.
What does Metzger say in the portion that Roth cuts out? What does he say in the page following where Roth ends his quote?
That "minor point" is that Metzger clearly states the Pe****ta was produced after Rabulla. Voobus, his other champion, dates the Pe****ta to the end of the 5th century at the earliest. So not only do we find that your source is a dishonest, lying manipulative one, but that the sources he misrepresents dismiss the entirety of what he asserts and they do so in the very sources he quotes from.
FearGod
Freedom Of Mind
A tiny Syrian town still speaks the language of Jesus.
[youtube]Iy38UQ9EQ6o[/youtube]
Aramaic - Syria - YouTube
[youtube]Iy38UQ9EQ6o[/youtube]
Aramaic - Syria - YouTube
That's like saying you speak the language of Beowulf.
A few token Aramaic words tossed in, an inference or two, and next thing we know we have the proven evidence for the historical Jesus preaching in Aramaic. If Freke and Gandy were instead trying to prove Jesus' historicity we could suspect this is what they would come up with, I mean after all, when trying to fit the facts who gets the prize, the mythicists or the Jesus historians? So far it appears to be a toss up.
Actually not token words (although one fairly insignificant phrase). Christian audiences didn't read Aramaic and didn't care about Aramaic. That's why we have nonsensical Greek phrases that are clearly Semitic in addition to words that the authors couldn't avoid because the involved how God was addressed by Jesus ("abba") and how Jesus was addressed ("rabbi") among other things. In general, the authors did whatever they could to make the tradition more Greek, including the use of the Greek version of the Hebrew scriptures.
What on earth could "a few token Aramaic words" possibly do that there would by any impetus to add them?
If we had no Aramaic transliterations in the NT, we'd still have evidence for the historical Jesus preaching in Aramaic. Thousands of epigraphic inscriptions, official documents, onomastic inscriptions, even graffiti to determine what languages were spoken and were (and by whom) and you think that it would've made the slightest difference to anybody that Jesus preached in Aramaic rather than Greek or Hebrew or even Latin? The Aramaic in the NT presented a problem for Christians speaking Semitic languages, because they the Syriac gospels couldn't translate "son of man" into the natural Semitic basis as it had become titular. Likewise for instances in in which we find transliterations followed by Greek translations, which rendered awkward in the extreme Syriac (later Aramaic) translations which had to cope with the fact that they were "translating" what they had just said.
Then they'd do things like say that the word for "stable" in Greek means "cave" when the actual Greek word they refer to doesn't exist, let alone exist in the NT. And they'd make claims about how documents that dated hundreds of years after Augustus Caesar died proved that he was really a fictional copy of Jesus invented by the Romans.
Fit what? We don't need the NT to determine the languages spoken in and around Galilee at that time. In fact, epigraphic and similar archaeological evidence has replaced older views in which it was believed based on then available evidence that
1) The Greek of the NT was unique
2) Hebrew had completely died out
However, as that "then available evidence" didn't consist of much apart from the NT and we now have thousands and thousands of different types of attestations to the use of dialects and languages in locales such as Galilee, we know the distribution of language use independently of the NT.
Aramaic tied Jesus to Jewish roots in ways that made proselytizing difficult. That's why the earliest knowledge of any canon we have rejects the entirety of Jewish scripture and involves a theology/cosmology in which the Jewish god is equated with Satan. Aramaic during that period was everywhere in flux and the lingua franca was everywhere (at least in the Eastern Roman Empire) Greek. Had Jesus been fluent in Greek he'd have attracted more followers (and had he espoused the views Freke and Gandy purport, he'd be accepted as a pagan philosopher).
As there are no "Jesus historians" the toss up is between the various classicists, Romanists, Jewish studies experts, Near-Eastern specialists, Archaeologists, Biblical studies experts, etc., and a lot of internet amateurs. Every historical, scientific, or otherwise academic question is a toss-up when one is virtually completely ignorant of the subject.
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The Aramaic couldn't simply be a technique of archaism, after all, this is the quest for an historical Jesus. Jesus was to be born in Bethlehem, now 2000 years later the Jesus historians would have us ignore the Greek so as to have the truly ol' real Jesus speak Aramaic. Any guesses as to what language Paul spoke?
sojourner
Annoyingly Progressive Since 2006
Not so, because Gentile culture was extremely influential -- especially Roman.
Not quite true. Since we know that the culture out of which the gospels arose was an oral culture, we can surmise that the sources of the written gospels were originally oral stories.
From the language in Q, we can make a pretty safe guess that these quotes were Galilean in origin, and were possibly originally told in Aramaic. Yet, Matt. and Lk. wrote them in Greek (this would require translation). Did you really think that what we have in written form is what we've always had?!
sojourner
Annoyingly Progressive Since 2006
Gee, I'm sorry you went to all that trouble. But this has nothing to do with the gospels. The Peschitta NT was translated from Greek. the earliest texts are circa 5th century, which is a full 400 years following the inception of the sources for the gospels, and fully 300 years following the dates of authorship of the synoptics.(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?
sojourner
Annoyingly Progressive Since 2006
There's a pretty good reason why "99%" of Greek NT scholars believe as they do. It's called "responsible scholarship."I gave you the information you need to educate yourself as to the real facts about the Pe****ta, but you choose to opt for the mainline Pablum just like the 99% Greek NT sheep do.
baaaaahhhhh....baaaaahhhh....
Now if I am 'lacking the education', show me where Andrew Gabriel Roth is wrong.
He pegged it and you know it!
...and BECAUSE he pegged it, LOM decides to pick at what he thinks is a loose thread to make a big stink of nothing relevant to the issue.
Truth is, LOM hasn't near the knowledge of Aramaic that Roth does, so I put my marbles with Roth. LOM is just blowing hot air.
outhouse
Atheistically
Sorry brother need to know which scholarship your pulling this from. Even a wiki link would do, but I need a source here.
There is no such thing. What does exist is the opposite process- archaic elements being lost over time and usually quickly. This is an oral culture. The written word wasn't generally preferred, and even the "people of the book" were using an "oral torah" that came to define Judaism through the transition to Rabbinic Judaism. Yet although we find elements in the Talmudim that trace back in some sense to the 1st century or earlier, devastating critiques of a once popular practice of trusting these (particularly by Neusner) because of the ways they had been altered to remove archaisms or otherwise "modernize" elements of the tradition.
This was cross-cultural and cross-linguistic. What is sometimes called Homeric Greek (or Epic Greek) is really not a dialect at all. The tradition is so old elements pre-date our Linear B texts. Yet we don't just find the removal of archaisms, we actually find places where the meter doesn't work because the digamma (a Greek letter for a consonant that ceased to exist by the time the Epics were written) didn't exist so the sound it represented that the meter required was lacking.
Our knowledge of schools of thought, from the Pythagoreans to the gnostics, are known almost entirely from others, often long after those like Pythagoras, Salon, Jesus, Rabbi Hillel, The Teacher of Righteousness, etc. lived (and by long I mean centuries).
The early Christians were missionaries and proselytizers in an Empire where Greek was the common language and many Jews didn't speak Hebrew or Aramaic. The transmission of texts was unique for a unique situation. The typical methods used by ancient philosophical schools, religious cults, religious schools, and even administrative officials was to rely on recognized authorities of oral traditions not only to be consulted about them but to transmit them.
That's why we don't have we have to wait over half a millennium for a biography of Pythagoras, rather than texts written by early followers. For Hillel, a founder of Rabbinic Judaism, we have to wait 2 centuries. Same for the Teacher of Righteousness, only we get a lot less. The reason that movements from Gaul to Egypt that centered around a figure did not leave writings is because the ancient world was an oral/aural world.
We know something of the orality of the Jesus tradition (even after the gospels were written, through e.g., Papias' remark), but early Christian communities were disparate and could not rely on such authorities the way that e.g., the early Rabbis or the Qumran community of the same period could. That's why Paul wrote letters and why his letters were copied and transmitted: early Christian communities were spread out and whatever "authorities" existed travelled to them only temporarily. So the gospels were needed, and while they are not unique in terms of genre (being a type of ancient biography), they are unique in terms of time, comprehensiveness, and textual attestation. We have thousands of manuscripts of the NT when the average for the best attested texts of antiquity is around 12.
The reason we know longer believe that the language of the NT was some special, unique form of Greek (that was, long ago, argued to be evidence that it was inspired by God) is because we have a massive collection of texts(particularly papyri) thanks to archaeology that we didn't hundreds of years ago. Most aren't Christian, but many hundreds are. Yet we do not find any examples of uses of "rabbi" or "abba" or other Aramaic terms or phrases in Christian or any other literature (other than those written in Hebrew or Aramaic, particularly Rabbinic Hebrew in which we obviously find "rabbi" a lot).
In fact, while Paul uses a Greek transliteration for the Aramaic word for "rock", none of the gospel authors do this (they use the Greek word for "rock"). And as for Semitic idioms like "son of man", these had ceased to retain the idiomatic Semitic sense by the time we find Syriac Aramaic translations of the Greek and had become titular, so they had to awkwardly translated.
There is no evidence of Aramaic influence on Hellenistic Greek in general. There is no evidence of Aramaic influence on the enormous amount of early Christian literature, from the massive tomes of the "church fathers" to the countless letters and other papyri remains written by Christians (even the Greek transliteration of YHWH dropped out of usage so completely we don't find it in texts but in epigraphy). What we do find is that by the time of Mark the process of removing Semitisms had already begun, and we find the removal of archaisms not your imagined "technique of archaism"
In the one case where we should find Semitisms (Semitic translations of the Greek), we find places where Semitic idioms have to be rendered differently in order to reflect the influence of the Greek (both linguistic and theological/Christological).
A number of "Jesus historians" (e.g., Michael Grant, Loveday Alexander, Donald Akenson, Richard Carrier, etc.) do not read Aramaic or Hebrew. Despite the tendency of some scholars (due in no small part to Bultmann and the form-critics) to try to render the underlying Aramaic of Greek words in general (rather than when we find a Semitic idiom or an actual Aramaic term or phrase), this practice came under attack by biblical scholars in numerous ways over the past several decades to so great an extent form-criticism was abandoned.
In fact, the question of Jesus' knowledge of Greek and the possibility that he repeated some of his teachings in Greek too has been recently suggested even as the focus on the capacity to "uncover" some Aramaic substratum died (although there is little support that Jesus knew enough Greek to teach it if he knew any, and virtually nobody supports the idea that any of what we have in Greek gospels comes from something Jesus said in Greek).
So no, "Jesus historians" are not doing this. They have been doing the opposite of this for the most part and increasingly so. However, when you find words that are in a language even many Jews did not speak in a Greek text that we do not find even in other Jewish authors who wrote in Greek, the only reason to suggest your invented some "technique of archaism" is that, as you do not read any scholarship about anything related to the entire period (or important tangential research areas such as linguistics, literacy, epigraphy, anthropology, archaeology, etc.), and cannot read the primary texts, you decide to critique the scholarship you don't read by suggesting explanations you cannot evaluate.
Try research. You might find learning about these subjects more rewarding than believing you can describe the issues with scholarship you don't read about a period you know nothing of with respect to technical matters such as literary techniques in languages you can't read.
godnotgod
Thou art That
I have lost track of the rest of the missing Metzger text you accuse Roth of deliberately omitting for purposes of deliberate deception. Would you mind posting it here in it's entirety?
sojourner
Annoyingly Progressive Since 2006
Directly from Brandon Scott. Here's a link to him:
http://http://www.westarinstitute.org/membership/westar-fellows/fellows-directory/bernard-brandon-scott/
outhouse
Atheistically
If Q existed it was probably written in Greek, and shows no transliterations.
I see where the Jesus Seminar holds the possible early parts if there were different parts, to Jesus himself.
BUt I find nothing that ties this to Aramaic, and ties to Jesus are speculative at best.