rlogan

Yuri & Judge - sorry for mixing you up. Thank you both for answering.

So I have a further question. When would the first Aramaic gospel have been written? Is this something the Eastern Orthodoxy makes any assertion about?

judge

Yes the Church of the East does (I'm not sure this is the same thing as Eastern Orthodoxy).

"With reference to....the originality of the Peshitta text, as the Patriarch and Head of the Holy Apostolic and Catholic Church of the East, we wish to state, that the Church of the East received the scriptures from the hands of the blessed Apostles themselves in the Aramaic original, the language spoken by our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, and that the Peshitta is the text of the Church of the East which has come down from the Biblical times without any change or revision."

Mar Eshai Shimun

by Grace, Catholicos Patriarch of the East

April 5, 1957

This is from here......
http://www.peshitta.org/initial/peshitta.html

I have made enquiries with a member of the Church of the East about the history of this claim.
It seems that they had always taken the above to be true and perhaps even find it a bit strange that we westeners might think that the NT was written in Greek. Although this Church was by some reports tha largest on earth in the 12th or 13th century in modern times it has been small and more isolated from western expressions of the faith, probably due to thier tendenct not to proselitise.

Their liturgy (which uses the peshitta) is believed to be the oldest in existence.

"Separated from the rest of Christendom by their extreme isolation, the Nestorians (sic) have preserved many of the traditions of the early church which have either disappeared altogether elsewhere or else survived only in the most unrecognizable forms. Their legends are fragments of fossilized early Christian folklore, while the Eucharistic rite (liturgy), the Anaphora of the Apostles Addai and Mari, is the oldest Christian liturgy in use anywhere in the world." (William Dalrymple, From the Holy Mountain: A Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East., New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1997, pg. 141


One indication of ot's age is that it lacks the Words of the Institution (this is My body....) the words of the Institution are present in all other liturgies by the end of the second century

spin

One simply doesn't know enough about the various substrata under non-standard Greek formations. This sort of conjectural reconstruction has little solid value other than to show the erudition of the would-be reconstructors.

Diachronic linguistics through trasnlation interfaces is somewhat difficult, if you don't mind the understatement.


spin

judge

Another quite interesting difference is in the undrstanding of the trinity.
The COE speaks of three qnoma not three persons.
There is no equivalent english word for qnoma but it does not mean person.

Amaleq13

Does the absence of an equivalent English word mean we don't know have any clue what it meant?

Also, since I've got your attention, I'll ask you a question I asked Yuri but he either missed it or got too busy to address it or thought it wasn't worth answering.

Do Aramaic originals have any relevance to questions of dating, authorship, or textual relationships (i.e. priority)?

Yuri Kuchinsky

In my view, the Aramaic priority theories don't really provide us with any magic answers at this time. Besides, there's more than one Aramaic priority theory, so they need to be sorted out first.

In my experience, the Old Syriac gospels are generally more authentic than any Greek text. But even the OS gospels are clearly not the "originals" IMHO.

You don't have to accept that all 4 gospels were originally written in Aramaic in order to hold (as I do) that the OS gospels are overall more authentic. For example, Jn may well have been written originally in Greek, but the OS John can still be preserving a text that happens to stand closer to that original Greek Jn.

All the best,

Yuri.

judge

No we know what it means. It is alittle hard to define exactly (for me anyway) it is an abstract term.
Here si a couple of discussions on itfrom peshita.org.
You can find more if you use the search platform in the archives in the links section.

http://www.peshitta.org/forums/forumid6/939.html

http://www.peshitta.org/forums/forumid6/927.html

Quote:

Also, since I've got your attention, I'll ask you a question I asked Yuri but he either missed it or got too busy to address it or thought it wasn't worth answering. Do Aramaic originals have any relevance to questions of dating, authorship, or textual relationships (i.e. priority)?

No one has studied the subject thouroughly WRT to peshitta.
Western textual critics have for the most part just assumed that the books were forst written in greek.

judge

Hi yuri, hope you are well
ou may be interested there is a new thread at peshitta suggesting that the Old Syriac are in fact Rabbula's translation from the greek back to Syriac. Have you heard this theory previously?

Amaleq13

Anything approaching a consensus?

As I sort of implied earlier, I'm really not familiar with this issue. That bothers me, actually, because I consider myself fairly well read on NT scholarship and this is the first I've heard of Aramaic originals. It certainly doesn't appear to be common knowledge among some of the more knowledgeable Christians I know, either.

Is there anything that might qualify as Papias' reference to Matthew?

Quote:

You don't have to accept that all 4 gospels were originally written in Aramaic in order to hold (as I do) that the OS gospels are overall more authentic. For example, Jn may well have been written originally in Greek, but the OS John can still be preserving a text that happens to stand closer to that original Greek Jn.

I guess I've got some reading to do. Thanks for the information.

Amaleq13

Judge,


Thanks for the links. I see what you mean about the concept being difficult to describe.