Why did Rabulla make his own Aramaic gospels?

[Paul Younan]

Shlama Akhi Dave,

I think the main issue is that you are combining Western and Eastern church textual history and trying to make sense of it all. You can't do that with any reliablility, any conclusiveness.

There were two empires in which the Apostles travelled and in which the scriptures circulated. It is imperitive to treat these two traditions seperately. They did not interact very much as the empires they lived in were in constant battle and the churches themselves were not all that friendly towards one another.

Ephrem belonged to the western empire. In fact, when Persia conquered Nisibis, his home town, he fled to Edessa so that he could be within his own western Church.

In the Western church, again, many copies circulated. And all scholarship points to the "Western-style" textual family as being full of additions......people added to the stories.

You say that's it's not in human nature to add, rather you would have expected people to subtract instead. But that is completely inaccurate, as the story of the woman taken in adultery shows. People very many times ADD stories rather than subtract.

Again, I don't pretend to have all the stories about why all these different Greek textual families exist. Perhaps the footnote on Codex Vaticanus I posted a few days agio gives us a clue. <!-- s --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/smile.gif" alt="" title="Smile" /><!-- s -->