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Victor Alexander's 'Disciples New Testament'
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Shlama Akhi Albion and Akhi Lars:
Just a few thoughts. Western Christianity is dominated by Greek thought. It's unavoidable because the Protestant Reformation received from the Catholic Church the Greek New Testament, to the exclusion of the Peshitta. Virtually all of Western of the New Testament scholarship is biased towards the 27 book Greek New Testament Canon, which primarily uses the Textus Receptus. In modern times this bias includes data from the Majority text and Alexandrian manuscripts. Also, the Messianic Jewish Movement (formerly called Hebrew Christianity), of which I have been a part for over 35 years, has not ventured into an Aramaic juxtaposition of the New Testament. The Hebrew T"NK is well represented as is the Greek New Testament. Curiously, the traditional Jewish Prayer Book (Siddur) still couples the original Hebrew/Aramaic "davar/pesher", or "quote and interpretation", retaining the languages that have been used together since the Great Synagogue, when the Jews returned to the LAND from exile in Babylon.
Our LORD Yeshua Meshikha spoke Aramaic, in the LAND, as did all of his talmidim and also all of the community services in various parts of the LAND and Beit Naharain, Adiabene and beyond.
In the West Greek and Latin have dominated through the expansion of the Roman Empire and then the Roman Catholic Church. Today modern English is the language that has been chosen for all air traffic communications throughout the world. This demonstrates the predominance of English, as the de-facto language of communication around the globe. ESL (English as a Second Language) courses are quite popular, in modern times throughout the world.
Might I digress for a moment. It is the deep desire of many English speaking, Aramaic and Peshitta New Testament Primacists to read the Aramaic to English Peshitta New Testament, rather than any Greek to English translation. This challenging task has been done a few times since John Wesley Etheridge's English translation of the Peshitta/Peshitto in 1856. Etheridge's translation is the one that I chose to accompany, line for line, the Khabouris Peshitta text which I transcribed and compiled in 2005. The Khabouris Codex is recognised by many Peshitta Primacists to represent verbatim, the ancient "Apostolic autograph" of the New Testament, before the writing of the Western Five (Second Peter, II John, Third John, Jude and Revelation).
That to say this. The translation into English, of any qualified Assyrian Christian that is fluent in Aramaic, including that of George Lamsa and Victor Alexander is held in high regard because Aramaic is their mother tongue. This doesn't mean that each and every word and phrase of translation will be the precise equivalent of expression chosen by all English speaking Aramaic Primacists. That's impossible because of the plethora of English synonyms and parts of speech to chose from. Greek/English cannot fully express the nuances of Hebrew/Aramaic precisely. They do not share the same roots. Greek didn't appear as a written form till the 7th Century B.C. It's predecessor "Linear B" died out some 400 years prior so Greek stands alone as an independent witness, while hebrew and Aramaic share the same roots. It is these unavoidable differences between the groups of language expressions that is the source of our continuing desire to bridge the gap with one perfect and seamless weld, impossible as that is.
So yes Lars and Albion, if Victor Alexander's translation can be freely obtained and presented on <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.dukhrana.com">http://www.dukhrana.com</a><!-- m --> as a comparative tool it will be well received as such. Also, I'm glad that there is a healthy awareness of the dangers of "New Thought and New Age", as opposed to the more traditional/orthodox representation of the New Testament text received and translated by the vast majority of Western Catholic, Protestant and CoE Churches.

Shlama,
SP Silver
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Re: Victor Alexander's 'Disciples New Testament' - by SP Silver - 12-16-2007, 06:32 PM

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