Vinnie

"""""Hi Vinnie, have you ever read the sayings of Jesus in Aramaic?""""""

Meier calls this a dubious criteria and offers a discussion of the issue on pp. 178-181 of v. 1 of a Marginal Jew. The riterion of Traces of Aramaic. I recommend browsing his comments on this issue. There are serious methodological flaws with the historical approach you outlined (e.g. it being circular and assuming Jesus had a monopoly on this practice). Also noted by Meier is that we are poorly informed about what 1st century Palestinian Aramaic poetry looked like.

What I argued is evidenced by the text themselves. My treatment on divorce and the Lord supper in my paper linked above. The "sayings" have very significant differences and the divorce saying is simply the best attested saying we have. The Lord's supepr saying has decent attestation as well. A detailed and comparitive study of Jesus' sayings show that the context and wording was not precisely known or memorized. Jesus left people, not parrots. Thinkers, not memorizers. Preachers, not tape-recorders.

Vinnie

rlogan

that is interesting, judge.

Is there some literature on this?

I don't speak Aramaic.

Vinnie

Joachim Jeremias and his disciples.

This criteria is dubious for the reasons I cited and others that I referenced in Meier's work. Even E.P. Sanders rejects this argument (Studying the Synoptic Gospels, p. 333.

Arimaisms could have entered at any point in a sayings transmission. Jesus wasn't the only one whop spoke arimaic. So too did early Christians and his followers.

As Sanders notes, "Christianity also spread tp aeas where Syriac--a language very close to Arimaic--was spoken"

Also Sander's writes: "Aramaisms may simply be 'Semitisms', and 'Semitisms' in turn may be 'Septuagintisms'. They also might be 'Latinisms' or 'vulgarisms'.

This fails just as does the argument from "poor greek" being signs of ancient mateial.

Maybe I should make a section in my methodology paper outlining this and other "dubious criteria"???

Vinne