09-09-2008, 05:47 AM
Quote:My question is, even with all the Greek flaws, what serious impacts does all this have on our faith? ie, yes Albion, understanding the humour is very interesting, but does it impact the Creed or how we do church in any *substantial* way. ie what is the payoff for a major change.
Hi Fr. John:
The huge payoff is knowing and teaching the truth. There just is no confidence in the Greek New Testament. The various denominations of western Protestant Christianity have fragmented over various doctrinal issues. This fragmentation is partly caused by the different interpretations of the plethora of Greek texts. Amazingly the Textus Receptus, from which the King James Version was translated is a collation of twelve different Greek manuscripts which have been averaged. So what confidence is there in a collage of texts. Where is the extant original.
That to say this. Any discrepancy with the authenticity of the Peshitta New Testament is unfounded. It is fact that synonyms are the result of various independent translations from an original text. Yes, the Peshitta is 22 books rather than the western 27 book canon, but the text has been unaltered since the first century. Quite simply, the variations between Peshitta manuscripts are very slight, contain no synonyms and only very small grammatical differences.That speaks volumes about the Truth of the original Gospel message and the Epistles of Paul. It seems today that Greek oriented scholarship cares less about the truth of God and more about defending individual denominational dogmas. With overwhelming evidence of NO single New Testament Greek text that carries the authority to be central to Protestant Christianity, is it any wonder that many fall away from the faith when hard questions are asked about the credibility of the New Testament. Where in Greek New Testament scholarship is the concensus of the original text. Yet, these various so-called Greek scholars continue to promote the Greek New Testament as the "autograph". This in spite of the fact that Jesus Christ spoke Aramaic fluently. Does this mean that we have nothing first hand from His WORDS? Of course not. We have the very autograph of His words, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, James and Peter, all in so-called "Palestinian" Aramaic.
It's not so much the examples of errors in the Greek text, though they are numerous and perplexing, but the overall confidence that Aramaic primacists have as to the TRUTH of the Word of God.
Shlama,
Stephen Silver
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