Back Breaker

[Paul Younan]

Akhi

Firstly, there are no original Qurans that have a signature, either. And the oldest manuscripts of the Peshitta NT predate the earliest Quran manuscripts by at least 200 years. What's your excuse? Can't even preserve a 7th-century Quran? We have several 5th century Peshittas.......so what's your excuse?

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These are four Qu'ranic manuscripts dating back to the 1st century hijra. There is (of course) jot-by-jot accuracy in comparison to the copies of the Qu'ran on shelves today. Not 99 percent. Not 98.6752. 100.

Those aren't complete manuscripts, Akhi. For instance, the first link contains only Surah al-`Imran 45 to 54 and part of 55. So we don't know whether or not the number is 100, or 97%

If I were to use your tactics you tried to pull recently on another thread, I would claim that the rest is missing because I felt that Othman, Abu Bakr or someone else tampered with the other 99.9% of the Quran that is mysteriously missing from this tiny little fragment and somebody ripped out the pages so as not to be embarrased.

I would claim, like you did, that the Muslims had their "own little secret council of Ephesus" and edited the book.....and, of course, I would dare you to prove me wrong.

See, I don't work that way. You tell me this is 100% the same as other Qurans....and you tell me it's a signatured copy. However, I see no signature from Mohammad (not that he could write, anyway), nor can it be proven that the rest of it would have agreed "100%" with modern printed copies.

Moreover, there are six year old children in Arabia who can recite the Qu'ran backwards in its entirety.

Name a priest who has memorized the Peshitta.

This is itself irrelevant to the discussion, as we were discussing the structure of the text.

There are Mandeans in southern Iraq who have memorized the Ginza Rabba (their Aramaic holy writings) and there are Zoroastrians in Iran who have memorized their holy writings. I don't get your point, or the relevance to our discussion.

Islam is the only religion which places so much emphasis on memorization. That's because they were a bunch of illiterate uneducated barbarians. They had to memorize everything. Memorization is a skill at a personal level, and not everyone can do it.

And people's memory of the same event or text can be different. That's why Uthman had to "standardize" the disparate copies of the Quran, and suppressed the ones which difference in reading to his "authorized version."

There are people of all religions who have memorized their texts. The mnemotechnic poetry of the Vedas come to mind in particular. Those people were famous and had excellent techniques to memorize long epics, as happened in several other cultural milieus.

In any case, written texts are far superior to oral transmission. Otherwise, we might as well get rid of all books, after memorizing them of course, since they are unnecessary. Written texts create records which can be examined, whereas only silent arguments can be obtained from the history of oral transmission...we simply have no way to substantiate your claim.

This line of reasoning is silly....really.

The method of transmitting the Qur'an from one generation to the next by having the young memorise the oral recitation of their elders had mitigated somewhat from the beginning the worst perils of relying solely on written records . . " .John Burton, An Introduction To The Hadith, 1994, Edinburgh University Press, p. 27.

That's a bunch of doo-doo. "Mitigated somewhat?" C'MON. If you leave no written record, there is no way to verify either way. It's the pigs flying on Mars scenario again....."well, gee, we didn't leave a written record.....but PROVE that our text wasn't altered!"

Those Arabs must have outsmarted the Church.

Those Arabs couldn't outsmart themselves, a far easier task.

He composed the Damkhaltey in 173 CE. He was excommunicated by the Western Church one year later. In Mesopotamia did he form his Gnostic sect called Encratites. Therefore, you cannot quite separate the sane Tatian from the heretic.

He died around 180 AD, Akhi. He founded the sect of the Encratites in 172 AD. He was a student of Justin Martyr in Rome from 150-165 AD, during which time he composed the Damkhaltey in his native Aramaic. He composed the Damkhaltey before he became a heretic in 172 AD, and before he died in 180 AD.

In fact, in his "Address to the Greeks" he was still Orthodox. We can tells this because he clearly believed in Christ???s incarnation (Address 21), His suffering (Address 15) and bodily resurrection (Address 13).

At some point later, he became a heretic. So? His harmonization of the Peshitta Gospels took place long before that.

I noticed you did not comment on the Logos interpolation.

"The Diatessaron was composed at a time when the notion of canonical Gospels was so young that the composer of the Diatessaron felt free to introduce material not found elsewhere in what we now call canonical Gospels: Matthew 4:4 and Mark 1:6, for example, talk of John the Baptist having lived off 'locusts and wild honey,' which is unusual to an ascetic since locust is a non-vegetarian diet. Tatian felt free to resolve the problem by modifying the text. He substituted 'locusts' with 'milk of the mountains,' the food of the promised land which is mentioned in the Old Testament (Deuteronomy 6.3)."

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I didn't comment because these things are not in the Arabic version, the only translation we know of for sure was made directly from the original Aramaic.

I don't trust any other version, not the Latin, not the Armenian...for not only do they differ greatly from each other, but even among themselves. Many "harmonies" were made by people which are mistakenly attributed to Tatian's work....but in fact are not his work at all. Others, as in the case with the Armenian, are in a completely foreign language. Arabic is the descendant of Aramaic....whereas the Latin and Armenian languages are quite foreign.

The Greeks also "felt free" to revise, change, iron, soften, and polish their manuscripts. The East is equally guilty of alteration (especially the Syriac Orthodox Church).

....And the New Testament text continued to be a "living text" as long as it remained a manuscript tradition, even when the Byzantine church molded it to the procrustean bed of the standard and officially prescribed text. Even for later scribes, for example, the parallel passages of the Gospels were so familiar that they would adapt the text of one Gospel to that of another. They also felt themselves free to make corrections in the text, improving it by their own standard of correctness, whether grammatically, stylistically, or more substantively. This was all the more true of the early period, when the text had not been attained canonical status, especially in the earliest period when Christians considered themselves to be filled with the Spirit. As a consequence the text of the early period was many-faceted, and each manuscript had its own peculiar character"Aland & Aland, The Text Of The New Testament, p. 69.

As shown, the West is not the only side guilty of revision. I do not believe the Church of the East would have used the Diatessaron (a revision from hypothetical Gospels) for so long had they possessed the source Gospels. Hell, they won't even translate the Peshitta into English.

There are several false statements here on your part.

Again, you try the "pigs on Mars" approach and boldly declare something you have absolutely no evidence of.....to wit, that the CoE was guilty of revision. What revision?

Don't be silly. You really think Tatian is the only one in the world who had the four distinct Gospels? That nobody else in Assyria had a copy of what he had made his Damkhaltey from?

C'MON, Akhi.

The Arabic translation of ibn-Tayyib, translated in the 11th century AD directly from the Aramaic Damkhaltey of Tatian, reads exactly like a harmonized version of the word-for-word Peshitta Gospels. It's in the British Museum, if you ever want to go see it.

There's no way for me to verify that. Therefore, I cannot except it to be true.

You can promise to look into it. That you cannot accept something you cannot verify is a good trait to have, then why do you accept that the Quran is 100% accurate, and claim divine intervention for it....but then when it comes time where you are confronted with the evidence of an Aramaic NT that is also 100% accurate in all of its existing copies, that you reject it?

Is it because it flies in the fact of everything Islam has claimed about the NT? That Islam rightly criticizes the Greek transmission of these texts is a good thing. That it ignores, very conveniently by the way, the history and accuracy of the Aramaic side.......is very very sneaky.

And that's why the sudden reversal on your part, isn't it? That you can't have this Aramaic NT floating around without any tampering and with a pureness of textual transmission even more astounding than the Quran even....seeing that our oldest manuscript beats the Quran by at least 200 years.....and its the exact same as the ones that are printed today, because the ones that are printed today are these 5th-century manuscripts....only printed using modern equipment.

That's what scares you so, isn't it? That Islam's claim to being the only religion with an "uncorrupt" text is falling on its face now that the truth of the Aramaic NT comes out in the open and that Western Christians are re-discovering what fanatical Muslims like Tamerlane tried so desperately to obliterate.....the Aramaic NT and the Aramaic Church.

I get it now. <!-- satisfied: --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/satisfied.gif" alt="atisfied:" title="Satisfied" /><!-- satisfied: -->

Thirdly.....what use did the CoE have with a harmonized version, when it already had the distinct Gospels? They had no use of it - it was made by one man, it became popular for a while and then it died out. We didn't burn it in the 5th century, like Rabbula in the Western empire did, we kept it around for awhile - at least 600 years after it was burned everywhere else. It was alright. It was made from the Peshitta, after all. Why wouldn't it be alright?

Prove the Peshitta is the predecessor to the Damkhaltey. Open challenge.

OK - start by reading the "Diatesseron's Peshitta Pedigree" post in the Peshitta Primacy 101 forum, and then let me know what you want to be expounded.