11-25-2003, 05:24 PM
Dear Paul,
I am a new subscriber to your Peshitta.org forum and have benefited immensely from your articles and from others on the Peshitta. I am a rather recent student of The Peshitta and Aramaic, of perhaps three years.
I am a Peshitta primacist who has studied The Greek NT and Textual Criticism for almost 30 years, having long believed the Majority Greek text is the most accurate and reliable Greek text. I now believe it is merely the best translation of the original Peshitta text .
I have been conducting a very telling and interesting experiment which bears directly on the inspiration and originality of The Peshitta as opposed to The Greek NT. It relates to the existence of coded information in The Bible. As you may know, There are claims of codes existing in The Hebrew Bible containing names of famous rabbis, their birth dates and dates of death, birth places, etc. Several books have been published since an original article appeared in The Journal of Statistical Science , Oct. 1994, by Witztum, Rosenburg, and Rips- all Mathematicians from Israel. They claim that mathematics proves that codes exist in Genesis.
I have used code software similar to & even better than theirs; I have found long codes in The Hebrew Bible and some in the never before searched Peshitta NT. I believe they are rather amazing and have published articles in BibleCodeDigest.com on these in the past 2-3 years. Ed Sherman hosts the newsletter and web site.
He is a professional mathematician ??? former opponent to and now convert to belief in Bible codes.
My experimental hypothesis is:
IF GOD WERE TO PUT CODES IN THE BIBLE, HE WOULD LEAVE A SIGNATURE IN IT USING THE NAMES AND TITLES OF GOD WHICH ARE MENTIONED IN THE PLAIN BIBLE TEXT, AND INSURE THAT THEY OCCUR IN HIGHLY SIGNIFICANT NUMBERS, FAR BEYOND OR BELOW STATISTICALLY EXPECTED AMOUNTS. THESE WOULD CONSTITUTE A DIVINE SIGNATURE OF THE AUTHOR OF THE BOOKS INDIVIDUALLY, THE SEPARATE TESTAMENTS AND THE BIBLE AS A WHOLE.
THE CONTROL TEXTS SHOULD NOT PRODUCE RESULTS NEARLY AS SIGNIFICANT , IF AT ALL SIGNIFICANT.
I have analyzed The Peshitta text , searching for 75 Divine Names and titles by skipping a certain number of letters in the text, using some super fast and finely tuned software called CodeFinder. It can search, produce and analyze over a million ELS???s (Equidistant Letter Sequences), sometimes called codes , searching by skipping from 2 up to 230,000 letters at a time through the entire text in ten seconds ! Of course I???m using a fairly fast Pentium 4 with 400 megs of RAM.
The results so far are staggering. The 75 words are searched a total of 690 times in order to cover all the skip sequences for each word; 345 are searched in The Peshitta and 345 in a scrambled Peshitta control text for the same words at the same skip numbers.
The probability for the Peshitta ELS???s is approx. 1E-26; That???s 10-26 or 1 chance in 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 .The control yields a probability of approx. 1 in 10.Ed Sherman and I are working on perfecting the statistics, but we agree that they are extremely significant.
I believe this experiment scientifically demonstrates the divine inspiration of The Peshitta New Testament as a whole. I have similar results for the Tanach which are incomplete. The codes are deliberately inserted by a superhuman intelligence in the original text of the NT canon, arranged in and searched in its proper order according to the Eastern arrangement of books (with the 5 Western included). Perhaps the effect would be increased if The CoE text were to be searched. I hope to find out.
The text I analyzed is The Western Peshitto, apparently the same as the United Bible Society 1979 Edition. The maker of CodeFinder supplied me with this text when I requested an edition of The Peshitta prepared as a search text for the program. All 27 NT books were searched at once for each ELS.I am working on searching The Nestorian text of The CoE. Hopefully I will be able to complete that soon.
I have also done extensive word comparison analysis of Aramaic and Greek equivalents in the NT and the same for The Hebrew OT and The LXX as a standard model by which to compare The NT. To encapsulate the principle of this particular study, the original word total will outnumber the translated word total, when comparing two plainly equivalent words in two different languages of two texts, one of which is a translation of the other.
Example:Greek NT & Peshitta
Revelation 21:24 kai peripathsousin ta eynh dia tou fwtov authv kai oi basileiv thv ghv ferousin autw doxan kai timhn twn eynwn eiv authn
Peshitta
[font=Estrangelo (V1.1)]0txwb$t hl Nytym 09r0d 0klmw hrhwnb 0mm9 Nyklhmw [/font]Revelation 21:24
gh- 251 in the New Testament
[font=Estrangelo (V1.1)]09r0[/font] ??? 242 of the parallel Aramaic words to the Greek gh are [font=Estrangelo (V1.1)]09r0[/font]
242/251 = 96% for [font=Estrangelo (V1.1)]09r0[/font]/gh
[font=Estrangelo (V1.1)]09r0[/font] ??? 288
gh ??? 246 (parallels to [font=Estrangelo (V1.1)]09r0[/font] ) -Two are unconnected to [font=Estrangelo (V1.1)]09r0[/font].
oikoumenh - 9
cwra - 6
epigeiov - 2
246/288= 85% for gh / [font=Estrangelo (V1.1)]09r0[/font]
gh +oikoumenh + cwra + epigeiov =263/288= 91%
Notice the similarities to the Hebrew OT-LXX relationship;
Totals for LXX Genesis & parallel Hebrew:
391/412 = 95% for ([font=Estrangelo (V1.1)]cr0,hMd0,hd$[/font])/gh ???Hebrew original & Greek LXX translation of Hebrew.
Totals for Hebrew Genesis:
380/442=86% for gh / ([font=Estrangelo (V1.1)]cr0, hmd0,hd$[/font])
Peshitta & Greek NT:
242/251 = 96% for [font=Estrangelo (V1.1)]09r0[/font] /gh
246/288= 85% for gh / [font=Estrangelo (V1.1)]09r0[/font]
The translation word total divided by the total # of times the corresponding original word parallels the translated word will yield a lower percentage score than the converse ratio: original/translated is greater translated/original.
This model seems to hold consistently for word pairs that are related in meaning(25% correlation or more).It is consistent in The LXX-Hebrew model . I have charted at least 7 LXX-Hebrew comparisons as models. They show a very consistent pattern that conforms to the above rule. The avg. ratios for those seven comparisons are: LXX Greek/Hebrew = 79% ; Hebrew/ LXX Greek = 85%.
The second ratio is higher, supporting a Hebrew original and The Greek LXX as a translation of The Hebrew. We know this is actually the case.
This sets a standard by which to measure other original & translation texts.
I have also compiled data for The Latin Vulgate and The Greek NT. The avgs. for these are:Greek/Latin = 98%; Latin/Greek=87%. This indicates The Latin Vulgate NT is translated from The Greek NT.
The ratio for Peshitta/Greek is 87%; Greek/Peshitta is 73%. These represent 19 word pair comparisons.
These data indicate The Greek NT is a translation of The Peshitta. The Westcott and Hort text and The Byzantine text yield almost identical results.
These are relative numbers; It is not important how high the percentages, only which is higher. I highlight in blue the language tested for primacy.
LXX Greek primacy has a 79% rating compared to Hebrew primacy, which has 85%.
A 0.1 % difference would suffice in a large number of occurrences. Most of the searches involve more than a hundred occurrences each ,so the statistics should be accurate.
The principle involved in this study is the natural information loss in translation and the variety of translations for any particular original word. In some cases a word will not be translated at all(a small percentage). A particular word that occurs frequently will also have various translations by one translator and different translators will amplify that effect.
The information loss is illustrated by the Hebrew OT-LXX relationship. The tetragrammaton occurs in 5788 verses in The Tanach. The LXX has Kurios in 5153 verses. Here is the first occurrence of Yahweh:
[font=Estrangelo (V1.1)]mym$w ur0 myhl0 hwhy twv9 mwyb m0rbhb ur0hw mym$h twdlwt hl0 [/font]Genesis 2:4 Hebrew BHS
Genesis 2:4 auth h biblov genesewv ouranou kai ghv ote egeneto h hmera epoihsen o yeov ton ouranon kai thn ghn LXX
The LXX does not translate it in 24 places out of 73 in Genesis alone!
So these facts enable us to predict generally that an original vocabulary word will outnumber the total for any one of its translation words when comparing translation & original documents. There must be large numbers (preferable several hundred) for the effect to be significant.
I have also studied letter frequencies of New Testament books in Greek and Aramaic to ascertain authorship; the results for these are also telling, but I don???t want to weary you with the technical details. I do believe they also show The Peshitta is the original and the Greek is not.
I hope we can present this information to the world for the glory of God and His Son , Maryah Yeshua.
I could use the help of someone who knows Aramaic and The Peshitta as well as you do. I am still a novice in that field.
I do believe this information can move the earth a bit more in the right direction if properly handled in prayer and humility through The Spirit.
God bless you in His service.
Rev. David Bauscher
I am a new subscriber to your Peshitta.org forum and have benefited immensely from your articles and from others on the Peshitta. I am a rather recent student of The Peshitta and Aramaic, of perhaps three years.
I am a Peshitta primacist who has studied The Greek NT and Textual Criticism for almost 30 years, having long believed the Majority Greek text is the most accurate and reliable Greek text. I now believe it is merely the best translation of the original Peshitta text .
I have been conducting a very telling and interesting experiment which bears directly on the inspiration and originality of The Peshitta as opposed to The Greek NT. It relates to the existence of coded information in The Bible. As you may know, There are claims of codes existing in The Hebrew Bible containing names of famous rabbis, their birth dates and dates of death, birth places, etc. Several books have been published since an original article appeared in The Journal of Statistical Science , Oct. 1994, by Witztum, Rosenburg, and Rips- all Mathematicians from Israel. They claim that mathematics proves that codes exist in Genesis.
I have used code software similar to & even better than theirs; I have found long codes in The Hebrew Bible and some in the never before searched Peshitta NT. I believe they are rather amazing and have published articles in BibleCodeDigest.com on these in the past 2-3 years. Ed Sherman hosts the newsletter and web site.
He is a professional mathematician ??? former opponent to and now convert to belief in Bible codes.
My experimental hypothesis is:
IF GOD WERE TO PUT CODES IN THE BIBLE, HE WOULD LEAVE A SIGNATURE IN IT USING THE NAMES AND TITLES OF GOD WHICH ARE MENTIONED IN THE PLAIN BIBLE TEXT, AND INSURE THAT THEY OCCUR IN HIGHLY SIGNIFICANT NUMBERS, FAR BEYOND OR BELOW STATISTICALLY EXPECTED AMOUNTS. THESE WOULD CONSTITUTE A DIVINE SIGNATURE OF THE AUTHOR OF THE BOOKS INDIVIDUALLY, THE SEPARATE TESTAMENTS AND THE BIBLE AS A WHOLE.
THE CONTROL TEXTS SHOULD NOT PRODUCE RESULTS NEARLY AS SIGNIFICANT , IF AT ALL SIGNIFICANT.
I have analyzed The Peshitta text , searching for 75 Divine Names and titles by skipping a certain number of letters in the text, using some super fast and finely tuned software called CodeFinder. It can search, produce and analyze over a million ELS???s (Equidistant Letter Sequences), sometimes called codes , searching by skipping from 2 up to 230,000 letters at a time through the entire text in ten seconds ! Of course I???m using a fairly fast Pentium 4 with 400 megs of RAM.
The results so far are staggering. The 75 words are searched a total of 690 times in order to cover all the skip sequences for each word; 345 are searched in The Peshitta and 345 in a scrambled Peshitta control text for the same words at the same skip numbers.
The probability for the Peshitta ELS???s is approx. 1E-26; That???s 10-26 or 1 chance in 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 .The control yields a probability of approx. 1 in 10.Ed Sherman and I are working on perfecting the statistics, but we agree that they are extremely significant.
I believe this experiment scientifically demonstrates the divine inspiration of The Peshitta New Testament as a whole. I have similar results for the Tanach which are incomplete. The codes are deliberately inserted by a superhuman intelligence in the original text of the NT canon, arranged in and searched in its proper order according to the Eastern arrangement of books (with the 5 Western included). Perhaps the effect would be increased if The CoE text were to be searched. I hope to find out.
The text I analyzed is The Western Peshitto, apparently the same as the United Bible Society 1979 Edition. The maker of CodeFinder supplied me with this text when I requested an edition of The Peshitta prepared as a search text for the program. All 27 NT books were searched at once for each ELS.I am working on searching The Nestorian text of The CoE. Hopefully I will be able to complete that soon.
I have also done extensive word comparison analysis of Aramaic and Greek equivalents in the NT and the same for The Hebrew OT and The LXX as a standard model by which to compare The NT. To encapsulate the principle of this particular study, the original word total will outnumber the translated word total, when comparing two plainly equivalent words in two different languages of two texts, one of which is a translation of the other.
Example:Greek NT & Peshitta
Revelation 21:24 kai peripathsousin ta eynh dia tou fwtov authv kai oi basileiv thv ghv ferousin autw doxan kai timhn twn eynwn eiv authn
Peshitta
[font=Estrangelo (V1.1)]0txwb$t hl Nytym 09r0d 0klmw hrhwnb 0mm9 Nyklhmw [/font]Revelation 21:24
gh- 251 in the New Testament
[font=Estrangelo (V1.1)]09r0[/font] ??? 242 of the parallel Aramaic words to the Greek gh are [font=Estrangelo (V1.1)]09r0[/font]
242/251 = 96% for [font=Estrangelo (V1.1)]09r0[/font]/gh
[font=Estrangelo (V1.1)]09r0[/font] ??? 288
gh ??? 246 (parallels to [font=Estrangelo (V1.1)]09r0[/font] ) -Two are unconnected to [font=Estrangelo (V1.1)]09r0[/font].
oikoumenh - 9
cwra - 6
epigeiov - 2
246/288= 85% for gh / [font=Estrangelo (V1.1)]09r0[/font]
gh +oikoumenh + cwra + epigeiov =263/288= 91%
Notice the similarities to the Hebrew OT-LXX relationship;
Totals for LXX Genesis & parallel Hebrew:
391/412 = 95% for ([font=Estrangelo (V1.1)]cr0,hMd0,hd$[/font])/gh ???Hebrew original & Greek LXX translation of Hebrew.
Totals for Hebrew Genesis:
380/442=86% for gh / ([font=Estrangelo (V1.1)]cr0, hmd0,hd$[/font])
Peshitta & Greek NT:
242/251 = 96% for [font=Estrangelo (V1.1)]09r0[/font] /gh
246/288= 85% for gh / [font=Estrangelo (V1.1)]09r0[/font]
The translation word total divided by the total # of times the corresponding original word parallels the translated word will yield a lower percentage score than the converse ratio: original/translated is greater translated/original.
This model seems to hold consistently for word pairs that are related in meaning(25% correlation or more).It is consistent in The LXX-Hebrew model . I have charted at least 7 LXX-Hebrew comparisons as models. They show a very consistent pattern that conforms to the above rule. The avg. ratios for those seven comparisons are: LXX Greek/Hebrew = 79% ; Hebrew/ LXX Greek = 85%.
The second ratio is higher, supporting a Hebrew original and The Greek LXX as a translation of The Hebrew. We know this is actually the case.
This sets a standard by which to measure other original & translation texts.
I have also compiled data for The Latin Vulgate and The Greek NT. The avgs. for these are:Greek/Latin = 98%; Latin/Greek=87%. This indicates The Latin Vulgate NT is translated from The Greek NT.
The ratio for Peshitta/Greek is 87%; Greek/Peshitta is 73%. These represent 19 word pair comparisons.
These data indicate The Greek NT is a translation of The Peshitta. The Westcott and Hort text and The Byzantine text yield almost identical results.
These are relative numbers; It is not important how high the percentages, only which is higher. I highlight in blue the language tested for primacy.
LXX Greek primacy has a 79% rating compared to Hebrew primacy, which has 85%.
A 0.1 % difference would suffice in a large number of occurrences. Most of the searches involve more than a hundred occurrences each ,so the statistics should be accurate.
The principle involved in this study is the natural information loss in translation and the variety of translations for any particular original word. In some cases a word will not be translated at all(a small percentage). A particular word that occurs frequently will also have various translations by one translator and different translators will amplify that effect.
The information loss is illustrated by the Hebrew OT-LXX relationship. The tetragrammaton occurs in 5788 verses in The Tanach. The LXX has Kurios in 5153 verses. Here is the first occurrence of Yahweh:
[font=Estrangelo (V1.1)]mym$w ur0 myhl0 hwhy twv9 mwyb m0rbhb ur0hw mym$h twdlwt hl0 [/font]Genesis 2:4 Hebrew BHS
Genesis 2:4 auth h biblov genesewv ouranou kai ghv ote egeneto h hmera epoihsen o yeov ton ouranon kai thn ghn LXX
The LXX does not translate it in 24 places out of 73 in Genesis alone!
So these facts enable us to predict generally that an original vocabulary word will outnumber the total for any one of its translation words when comparing translation & original documents. There must be large numbers (preferable several hundred) for the effect to be significant.
I have also studied letter frequencies of New Testament books in Greek and Aramaic to ascertain authorship; the results for these are also telling, but I don???t want to weary you with the technical details. I do believe they also show The Peshitta is the original and the Greek is not.
I hope we can present this information to the world for the glory of God and His Son , Maryah Yeshua.
I could use the help of someone who knows Aramaic and The Peshitta as well as you do. I am still a novice in that field.
I do believe this information can move the earth a bit more in the right direction if properly handled in prayer and humility through The Spirit.
God bless you in His service.
Rev. David Bauscher