The Age of the Peshitta

[Paul Younan]

'It is submitted,---FIRST, that there is ground for belief that this text has been so correctly copied, that it has come down to us WITHOUT MATERIAL CHANGE FROM THE FIRST CENTURY. As Dr. Scrivener says, "The Syriac was cited by Melito as early as A.D. 170," and history leaves "no room to doubt what that version was." It was the Peshito.' -William Norton, A Translation, in English Daily Used, of the Peshito-Syriac Text, and of the Received Greek Text, of Hebrews, James, 1 Peter, and 1 John: With An Introduction On the Peshito-Syriac Text, and the Revised Greek Text of 1881, page CCXXIII (220)

The difference between any two Aramaic dialects of any geographic area during that time period is like the distance of the crack between two slabs of concrete on a sidewalk.

The distance between any of the Aramaic dialects of that time, and any dialect of Greek, is like the gulf from one end of the Grand Canyon to the other.

"Scholars" today have no issue with straining at the gnat (the laughingly simple differences in Aramaic dialects), but have no problem swallowing a camel (that the Greek is somehow superior to *any* dialect of Aramaic.)

The GNT was the perfect vehicle, we are told, because the particular dialect was the most widely spoken Greek dialect.

But the ANT isn't afforded the same logic - it needn't be written in the most widely spoken Aramaic dialect, in order to reach the most people. No, that's a ridiculous suggestion.

These "Scholars" would rather that the NT was written in such a foreign language, a language so far from Aramaic that it might as well be Japanese ... Instead of fathoming the possibility that the apostles might just have written the third-person masculine imperfect verb with a Nun, rather than a Yodh - if for nothing else, for the sake of the millions of Aramaic speaking Jewish and Gentile souls to the east just waiting to be evangelized. One letter is much, much worse than - Greek.

Oh, and if they had written it originally with a Yodh, instead of a Nun, then of course that would render it next to impossible for "Syriac" speakers to understand it. Those Syriac speakers were obviously not smart enough, unlike our modern scholars, to understand what the apostles were trying to say. They must've been idiots - unread and uneducated barbarians. Unlike the Greeks.

I wish I was being sarcastic, but this is the hubris we have to deal with. <!-- s --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/sad.gif" alt="" title="Sad" /><!-- s -->

+Shamasha