Yuri Kuchinsky

Dear friends,

For the first time, the Aramaic Gospel of Matthew is now available on the Net in English translation.

I have now scanned and transcribed for the WWW Dr. Burkitt's 1904 translation of this Aramaic text, that is based on ancient Old Syriac Aramaic manuscripts (4th century).

When Burkitt's edition was first published, it attracted considerable attention among biblical scholars. After all, its language is pretty close to what the Historical Jesus spoke, and the manuscripts, themselves, are as early as our best Greek-language gospel manuscripts. But then, the whole thing seems to have gradually fallen into some sort of a memory hole... No second edition had ever appeared and, at this time, this text is basically unknown to your average biblical professional.

Why and how this had occurred is a big subject in itself. But, in my view, the main factor has been an evident preference on the part of our biblical professionals for the Greek text of the gospels.

If one begins with the Greek text, it's quite likely that one will end up with a Greek Jesus. Because, in this Aramaic Matthew, Jesus is often seen as considerably more Jewish, and fitting more comfortably in his Jewish milieu. The differences may seem very subtle sometimes, and yet there are certainly many big differences there between this Aramaic text, and the canonical Greek text of Matthew -- whether Byzantine or Alexandrian. Almost every verse is different in some way.

Dr. Burkitt's translation is a very literal, word-for-word translation from the Aramaic; he tried to convey even the smallest grammatical nuances of the Aramaic text. So, because of this, this English translation is quite good for close study and comparison with the canonical versions, although it may not read as smoothly as the usual recent English translations.

The text was difficult to transcribe, because of its unusual layout (with many notes and close marginal notations), and because the verses are not numbered within the text, itself. (The verse numbers were all printed in the margins, so basically the whole thing had to be reformatted by hand.) There may still be a few scanning glitches here and there. (For example, "he" might appear as "be", or "day" as "clay".) But these small errors will eventually be ironed out.

So I hope that this electronic edition of the ancient Aramaic Matthew will prove useful for amateurs and professionals alike. The text is divided in 4 parts, and can be accessed from here,

Ancient Aramaic Texts,
http://www.trends.ca/~yuku/bbl/aramaic.htm

A lot more background about the ancient Hebrew and Aramaic textual tradition of the gospels can be found on the rest of my webpage.

All the best,

Yuri.

judge

Hi again Yuri...hope you are well!
I just checked out your website

I have a question on the following article..
http://www.trends.ca/~yuku/bbl/strpair.htm

The article states

"Let's suppose that two very obscure manuscripts, one from medieval England, and another one from ancient Syria, agree with each other on a passage."

What is the evidence that the curetonian manuscript is really from ancient Syria?

All the best.......judge

Yuri Kuchinsky

Hi, judge,

And why do you think it's not from Syria? After all, its language is Syriac...

So where do you think it's from?

Yuri.