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Possible Primacy Proof
#1
Shlama kulkun,

I think I may have found a significant Aramaic primacy proof. Recently, I was looking through a book entitled ???The Unvarnished Gospels??? by Andy Gaus which claims to be a literal translation that lets ???the Greek speak for itself.??? In addition to the conjunctions and other features talked about here on peshitta.org which indicate translation from a Semitic original, one feature that caught my eye was the frequent and seeming random flipping between the past and present tense, in both the episodes (periscopes) and the authors narrative. This is especially noticeable in Mark, and all the more peculiar since it only seems to occur with third person singular verbs, like /he said/ - /he says/.

The last point caught my attention because it happens to mirror a feature of the Aramaic verbal system. One of the oddities of Aramaic is that it only has inflection forms for the past and future tenses of the verb. To communicate other tenses Aramaic has to use compound words in specific sentence structures.

In the case of the present habitual tense, this is achieved by using the active participle of the desired verb in conjunction with the appropriate enclitic pronoun. The one exception to this pattern is with the third person singular forms. In these last forms the enclitic pronoun is usually dropped.

In spoken Aramaic, or in writing with vowels, the dropping of the enclitic pronoun in the third person singular is not a problem because the remaining active participle has a unique vowel pattern which distinguishes it from the third person past tense verb. But in consonant only writing, the past tense third person singular verb, and the present tense third person singular verb look identical.

I will illustrate this with the verbs /he said/ - /he says/. Both forms are built upon the three letter root, /Amr/ (Alap, meem, and resh). The past tense form /he said/ is /Aemar/. The present tense form /he says/ is /A??mer/ (?? = sq??p??, a = pth??H??).. The consonant only clause /Amr lhwn/ could therefore be translated either /he said to them/, or /he says to them/. Without vowels, only through the context in which it is used can one determine which is more appropriate, and sometimes the context is ambiguous.

Now, if my observation that the Greek text only flips the tense between third person singular past tense and present tense verbs is true, this could only have happened through the translation of a written Aramaic original vowelless document. Had the Greek writer received his source from a spoken Aramaic transmission as Greek Biblical scholars allege, he couldn???t have made this mistake. (The usual explanation for this tense flipping is that the writer was uneducated, but that is not scientific evidence at all, merely class prejudice.)

The caveat is that I can???t read Greek (beyond the alphabet), and don???t have spiffy new Greek Bible research software, like akhan Rob; so I don???t know if my observation of Gaus??? translation is really true of the actual Greek text. Can anyone here confirm that this tense flipping is really confined to third person singular verbs in the Greek original?

John Marucci
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Messages In This Thread
Possible Primacy Proof - by AramaicScribe - 07-25-2004, 09:44 PM
Re: - by Larry Kelsey - 07-26-2004, 03:11 AM
E-sword's latest additions - by Larry Kelsey - 07-26-2004, 04:41 AM
[No subject] - by AramaicScribe - 07-26-2004, 04:08 PM
re - by Larry Kelsey - 07-26-2004, 04:43 PM
Re: re - by Paul Younan - 07-26-2004, 05:45 PM
[No subject] - by AramaicScribe - 07-27-2004, 12:47 AM
[No subject] - by AramaicScribe - 07-27-2004, 08:19 AM

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