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Back Breaker
#4
Shlama Bar Khela,

Any four year old can ask difficult questions. It takes great intelligence to answer them. You have thus far asked questions and provided objections, but I see you really have no definite answers which you can substantiate, other than to quote "scholars" who seem to provide much in the way of objections and few answers, and most of whom quote other "scholars".

Paul has provided much evidence from Aphraates that the Peshitta existed in the early 4th century (AD 325) exactly as we have it today ,by the many word for word quotations Aphraates provides from The Peshitta NT which do not agree with the OS.
The Khabouris ms. is an 11th century ms. that contains an inscription describing the manuscript from which it was copied , placing it at AD 360 or earlier. This ms. is the same text used today and at all times since the 5th century by The Church of The East.
I have a copy of it and have collated it in Matthew 1-3 thus far against the Western Peshitta. There is only one difference, and that a very minor orthographical one: the spelling of "Israel". No substantial variant exists.
That is 99.8% word agreement at the very least, considering the Israel spelling is used twice in the portion I have thus far collated of the 763 words in the text. Letter agreement is 99.9% (-4 out of 2678 letters).
And this is an Eastern text compared against the Western Peshitta !

The matter of ms. agreement should not be sneezed at. It is evidence in itself that the scribes of that tradition believed the text they were copying was the original New Testament text and the word of God. I see no evidence to support your quotations to the contrary. The early church did receive the original gospels and epistles , "not as the word of men, but as the word of God." 1Thess. 2:13
2Co 2:17 For we are not as many, which corrupt the word of God: but as of sincerity, but as of God, in the sight of God speak we in Christ.
2Co 4:2 But have renounced the hidden things of dishonesty, not walking in craftiness, nor handling the word of God deceitfully; but by manifestation of the truth commending ourselves to every man???s conscience in the sight of God.
The early Christian revered every writing which was read publicly in the churches as the word of God. He would not be likely to possess a copy. Those who first copied it would have been professional Jewish-Christian scribes trained and committed to preserve the written text in its original form according to the rules of the Hebrew scribes. We know how careful and particular they were. The Peshitta text is the only NT text with a Massorah ("fence") tradition like the OT Massorah. Pusey and Gwilliams critical edition of The Peshitta has all the NT Massorah notes in it. His collation of 42 mss. is the only text available on the internet as an electronic edition. He wrote in 1901: "The Peshitta text of the Gospels (all that had been collated at that time) was not corrupted in later times.Whatever variations it exhibits from the Greek date from a most remote antiquity."

The variations among Greek mss. and other mss. betray a
less reverent attitude than that of the Jewish and Aramaen scribes. The Greeks obviously did not have a conviction that the words and the very letters they were copying were sacred. Their actions betray their beliefs and attitudes, not as those who were the guardians of the original words of Heaven, but as copyists and editors of something of a lesser value.
Perhaps they knew they were copying a translation. Their actions and the results thereof are certainly consistent with that notion, and with the tradition of The LXX, which is also a translation, exhibiting different text types and many variations among mss. like Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, both of which are complete versions of The LXX and The Greek NT.
What other NT tradition displays the kind of agreement and precision The Peshitta demonstrates among its hundreds of mss. separated by a 1100 years from AD 464 to 1555 ?

I personally believe the Greek NT was a decoy and a fence around the secret Peshitta original of the first century. The early Christians would not risk the destruction of their most precious treasure and inheritance by their enemies.
They concealed the original Aramaic covenant and advertized the Greek text so well that even the Western churches eventually forgot the original text. The Eastern Church never did forget and was its guardian.

What evidence ? I have found that the Greek NT disguised the language of the original gospels as Greek by sytematically changing the Aramaic words, "Aramith" & "Aramaia" (Aramaic & Aramaean) into "Ellhn" (Greek) and "Ethnos" (Gentile).
This occurs 21 out of 22 times throughout The NT. The only place where "Aramaia" is not changed to "Greek" is in Luke 4:27 which refers to "Naaman the Syrian". Clearly Naaman would not betray the truth of the Aramaic original.

"To the Jew first, and also to the Aramaean" in the book of Acts and in the epistles and similar pairings of the two groups occur about 18 times. They are reminders ,in The Peshitta, that the gospel message was first given to these two Semitic groups and proclaimed in the language that connected them - Aramaic.
The Greek NT unanimously obliterates this connection and all references to the Aramaen people and language as the gospel audience and language of the original gospel.
There is no linguistic equivalence between "Aramaean" and "Greek". There is no linguistic rationale for translating one of these with the other.
The LXX uses "Suros"- "Syrian" , in 86% of the 132 places where "Aram" & "Armi" occur in the Hebrew OT.
The Greek NT uses the word "Suros" only once out of the 22 places the Peshitta has the Aramaic terms, [font=Estrangelo (V1.1)] ty0mr0 , 0ymr0[/font] "Armaith", "Armia".
These disparate results in the NT reveal what I believe was
a cultural modification of the original Aramaean New Covenant in translating it into Greek and concealing it from the Roman empire and all who followed.
The Greek NT also seems to rely on The LXX for OT quotations, contrary to the Peshitta NT quotations.This is also an attempted disguise of the Semitic nature of the NT and its origins.
It seems there was an agenda to bury the Aramaean culture and roots of the NT in order to preserve it from the enemies of God and His word. At least, that is the most noble and reasonable explanation I can give for these strange phenomena and the proliferation of Greek mss. while the Peshitta mss. remained by far the most consistent and carefully copied and at the same time,the most obscure to the Western church, along with Aramaic, which have been neglected and forgotten by them for almost 2000 years.

PS : I have an article on the above "Aramaic to Greek" revision in the Greek NT at my web site : <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://dave.ultimasurf.com/">http://dave.ultimasurf.com/</a><!-- m -->

Dave B
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Messages In This Thread
Back Breaker - by bar_khela - 11-02-2004, 11:08 PM
[No subject] - by bar_khela - 11-03-2004, 05:44 PM
[No subject] - by ograabe - 11-03-2004, 11:58 PM
Early mss of Peshitta - by gbausc - 11-04-2004, 04:03 PM
[No subject] - by Paul Younan - 11-04-2004, 08:27 PM
Re: Early mss of Peshitta - by bar_khela - 11-04-2004, 09:16 PM
Re: Early mss of Peshitta - by Paul Younan - 11-04-2004, 09:44 PM
The Figure-Four - by bar_khela - 11-04-2004, 11:50 PM
[No subject] - by Paul Younan - 11-05-2004, 12:05 AM
[No subject] - by bar_khela - 11-05-2004, 02:43 AM
[No subject] - by Paul Younan - 11-05-2004, 04:34 AM
[No subject] - by bar_khela - 11-09-2004, 12:30 AM
[No subject] - by bar_khela - 11-10-2004, 12:07 AM
Koran Contradiction? - by Keith - 11-10-2004, 03:46 AM
[No subject] - by metal1633 - 11-10-2004, 04:13 AM
[No subject] - by peshitta_enthusiast - 11-10-2004, 05:15 AM
[No subject] - by peshitta_enthusiast - 11-10-2004, 05:18 AM
[No subject] - by Paul Younan - 11-10-2004, 03:57 PM
Plucking feathers - by bar_khela - 11-10-2004, 07:53 PM
[No subject] - by bar_khela - 11-11-2004, 03:20 PM
Deathblow - by bar_khela - 11-11-2004, 04:35 PM
[No subject] - by bar_khela - 11-11-2004, 07:17 PM
Re: Deathblow - by Keith - 11-12-2004, 02:17 AM
Re: Deathblow - by bar_khela - 11-16-2004, 01:16 AM
[No subject] - by Keith - 11-16-2004, 04:45 AM
[No subject] - by bar_khela - 11-16-2004, 08:27 PM
[No subject] - by Keith - 11-16-2004, 10:59 PM

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