rival conjecture of "aphraates readings"

[Kara]

Shlama,

the significance of the poetic nature of the Peshitta is largely due to the immense lack of such in the Greek. that is why the discussion is so important on this site of the poetry in the Peshitta. true, any text can be poetic. that is not the point. rather, the idea that is here scoffed at is that of a text that has scant little poetic nature to it becoming sophisticatedly poetic when translated into a language with a completely different grammatical structure. yet the Greek primacists want us to believe this just happens to be the case with the Peshitta. it is like shooting a paintball at a wall and producing the Mona Lisa. not gonna happen!

so what a sophisticated poetic structure / nature in ANY text so powerfully proves is that the text you are dealing with is the text in it's original language composition. it would not be surprising to find a poetic nature to the Qu'ran when it is in Arabic. not having read the Qu'ran, i can only assume that any translation of it is going to be missing that particular quality. as you are familiar with it, would my assumption be right?

Chayim b'Moshiach,
Jeremy[/quote]


Peace and Blessings,

I understand your point, Jeremy. First, due to my investigations (Aramaic Primacy I,II, III), there is ample evidence showing that the NT is a heterogeneous text---part of it is genuine Greek and other parts are genuine Aramaic. As for the parts that are genuinely Aramaic, for instance, the Syriac textual tradition (Old Syriac, Peshitta) of the Gospels has West Aramaic loanwords, mostly located in Jesus' sayings:

'b'
'rn'
bhyr'
hy'
twr'
ywm
lyt+separate personal pronoun as a negative copula
ns'/nys'
'qs
'r'wt'
slh
t'brynh
slyh'
'rmy'
gnt 'dn
tklt'

With this evidence, we can conclude that Nazarenes must have evangelized the Syriac-speaking Church in its infancy, bringing an early collection of Jesus' sayings (or attributed to him) with them. In light of this, I absolutely support the notion that one party of Christians, the Nazarenes, originally wrote down his sayings in Aramaic, perhaps in talmudic-style. At the same time, I believe another party wrote them in genuine Greek. This conjecture is supported by Morton Smith's analysis of 1st century Palestine:

The neglect of Syriac, which has already been mentioned, has resulted in a generally false picture of the history of Christianity, as moving exclusively to the West, from Aramaic-speaking Palestine to the Greek- speaking cities of the Mediterranean coast. This picture is false. At least as much Greek as Aramaic was spoken in Palestine, and the religion also spread to the East, through Aramaic-speaking territory. Therefore the movement was not from Aramaic to Greek, but both languages were represented in both the primitive and the secondary stages of the religion's development. Therefore the use of one or another in a document indicates nothing as to the document's date

Oh and did you listen to Ch. 55 (ar-Rahman)?