10-19-2003, 02:14 AM
Dear Darrell,
You make certain claims about the Peshitta, Old Syriac and Aramaic Primacy in a book of yours.
If you stand by your statements regarding the Peshitta, then I would like to challenge you to a debate on my forum - just the two of us. I believe I can demonstrate otherwise, and can demonstrate that the statements you made are false.
The only term I have is that the debate be limited to the above topic. Anything else, I am not interested in.
Game?
Regards,
Paul Younan
You make certain claims about the Peshitta, Old Syriac and Aramaic Primacy in a book of yours.
Darrell Conder Wrote:The Original Aramaic
As previously mentioned most scholars agree that the language of Jesus and his disciples was Aramaic. This is a fact that has given rise to the claim that the earliest Gospels were therefore written in Aramaic.
Although this argument seems logical, the Gospels, as just noted, do not bear this fact out. The editors of The Complete Gospels, after first mentioning that most of the quotations or allusions to the Old Testament found in the New depend upon the Septuagint, explain that "The frequent word-for-word agreements between Matthew and Luke are impossible to account for if both were independently translating from Aramaic." (39) In other words, the New Testament used by the Christian Church was originally written in Greek.
However, there is a New Testament translation that has been promoted by many as the only reliable text because it is allegedly translated from the "original Aramaic writings" of Jesus' apostles. The translation is known as the Peshitta (reproduced in the Lamsa translation) and purports to have been copied, century after century, from the original Aramaic manuscripts???which are conveniently missing. As to that last assertion history tells us that the earliest version of what is called the Peshitta was known as the Old Syriac, which dates only from ca. 160 AD and survives only in quotes in other writings.
Later surviving manuscripts are the Curetonianus and Sinaiticus, but scholars point out that these translations are really of little value because they were made from an early Greek text with many "Western features." To throw a further "wrench into the works" the Greek text in question was itself revised "on the basis of an early form of the Koine, or Byzantine Greek Text; this revision, eventually called the Peshitta, emerged ca. 400 A.D. to become the standard New Testament of the Syriac Churches." (40) In other words the "original" manuscripts of the Peshitta dates only from the fifth century and was not from the "original Aramaic" of the first century apostles, but from fifth century Byzantine Greek texts.
To completely understand the composition of the Peshitta let's look a little closer at its pre-history, meaning the works that were an essential influence. They include a "harmony of the Gospels" called the Diatessaron. According to the church father Eusebius the compiler of the Diatessaron was a man named Tatian a native of Mesopotamia and a disciple of Justin Martyr, meaning that he received his Christian education and training via the Church of Rome. In fact, Tatian is said to have originally composed the Diatessaron in Latin. (41)
Biblical historians also tell us that this Tatian changed the text of the Gospels during his translation work to support his extreme hostility to sex. Still, it was widely accepted in the Eastern Christian Churches where it made a serious impact on Christian scholarship. (42)
In ca. 200 AD four different Gospels were translated into the Syriac New Testament. Two manuscripts of the 4th-5th century survive, which were mentioned above: The Sinai Palimpsest and Cureton's ms. of the early 5th century. We read the following in The Encyclopedia Britannica: "The mss. differ considerably in reading, and each has certainly been influenced by the Diatessaron [of Tatian], so that in Syriac-speaking lands about A.D. 400 the Gospel was extant as a Harmony and as 'separated Gospels,'. . . the single copies having many discordant readings, just as had been the case in Latin before Jerome. To remedy this, Rabbula, bishop of Edessa from 411 to 435, prepared a revised edition of the 'Separated Gospels,' freely correcting the text from Greek mss. such as were then current at Antioch: this edition he established by authority and suppressed the Diatessaron with such success that no Syriac copy of the Diatessaron survives, and of the unrevised version only Syr. S and C. Rabbula's revision is now used by both the great divisions of the Syriac-speaking Church: to distinguish it from the elaborate later revision of the (Jacobite) Old and New Testament it is usually called Peshitta, i.e. the simple version . . . The Peshitta has only the value of a post-Nicene revision." (43)
In summation the so-called Peshitta is nothing more than its sister translations and that is a book with a jumbled history produced by the wiles of self-seeking men. It is a history that doesn't lend itself to the "infallibility of the bible" argument!
If you stand by your statements regarding the Peshitta, then I would like to challenge you to a debate on my forum - just the two of us. I believe I can demonstrate otherwise, and can demonstrate that the statements you made are false.
The only term I have is that the debate be limited to the above topic. Anything else, I am not interested in.
Game?
Regards,
Paul Younan
+Shamasha Paul bar-Shimun de'Beth-Younan