08-28-2004, 09:18 PM
Dave Wrote:Ooze,
For some reason, there is a space of time missing here with the peshitta though. There seems to be nothing earlier than around 4th century. Everyone that was associated with 1st century history and documeted it for us, mentions nothing about it. People here have explained it as the text was hidden from the west at that time, yet there is nothing of the peshitta text dated prior to around the 3rd or 4th century in the areas that it was supposedly prominent.
Well its one of those things that just because you don't see soemthing doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.
I actually think LAmsa did a really good job in talking about the difference on perserving documents between east and west.
In regards to a whole range of issues. Wether you consider people living in the Parthian emperire and beyond, suffered from pesecution from the time of Constantine till now. In which case manuscripts were destroyed and hard to perseve etc. So in this case its a apples and oranges kind of thing. Where it simplu is much harder to find those ancient manuscripts. Not to mention the affects of recent persecution. So for instance as he relates during the World war I, when the Armenian and Syrian genocides were going on. They had at least one really good ancient manuscript. The East syrians lost it while they were trying to cross one of the large rivers like Tigris or euphrates as they were attenping to evade the Turks.
Anyway while you have things in the West like Rome being sacked a few times etc. overall the west is just much more conducive to perserving antiquities. Overall a more stable place.
Not to mention he did have a good point in regards to another issue. Like how people treat original works, once a work is translated. Typically most people put aside the original,a nd it soon becomes forgotten even lost.
Anyway in the East, really the scribal tradition is what kept the Peshitta alive. Much like the scribal tradion of Judaism. Infact the scribal tradition may have been another reason for the difficulty of finding very early manuscripts. So he relates they had a tradition of burning damaged manuscripts, similar to the Way armeicans are supposed to dispose of the flag that is tattered. Anyway such a tradion would automatically make it extremely difficult to retain a really old work.
And this is kind of where the language studies come in. Because if the peshitta/peshitto really was a much more recent work it would be very difficult to have such agreement between the texts etc.
So really this isa kind of apples and organges issues. I think when you judge the peshitta you have to also do so on the basis of the people who perserved it. And they are indeed a very ancient people, with many many similarities in customs etc. to the Jews of the past. So I would tend to see the people of the east themselves as a kind of a living "archeological find". Not to mention there are other things as well. Like Aramaic grave stones and other artificats scattered acrossed asia etc.
so if you take into account that 1) Jesus and the apostles spoke Aramaic, 2) Aramaic speaking and wriitgn jews were scattered across asia and 3) their are indeed aramaic scriptures that seem very different that the ones in the west.
IT should be very reasonable to conclude a reasonable good probability that these infact are the origianl and the others are translations. And that is especially emphasized with all the work that people fromt his web site have done. Which shows how very ancient copies of the Greek text disagree in some very striking ways.