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ARAMAIC ORIGINS
OF THE NEW
TESTAMENT
Andrew Gabriel
Roth
358 PAGES
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ISBN 99932-82-03-0
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About Aramaic
Aramaic can be dated to five periods, dating from
inscriptions that go back to the first millennium BCE:
•
Old Aramaic, 925-700
•
Official or Imperial (Assyrian) Aramaic, 700-200
(language was uniform)
•
Middle Aramaic, 200 BCE - 200 CE
•
Late Aramaic, 200-700
•
Modern Aramaic, 700 to our time
The Aramaic in which the Scriptures were originally
written is called the Peshitta Text, this was the
dialect of northwest Mesopotamia as it evolved and was
highly perfected in Orhai, once a city-kingdom, later
called Edessa by the Greeks, and now called Urfa in
Turkey. Harran, the city of Abraham's brother
Nahor, lies 38 kilometers southeast of Orhai. The
large colony of Orhai Jews, and the Jewish colonies in
Assyria in the kingdom of Adiabene whose royal house had
converted to Judaism, possessed most of the Bible in
this dialect, the Peshitta Tanakh. This Peshitta
version of the Old Testament was taken over by all the
Churches in the East, which used, and still use Aramaic,
as far as India, and formerly in Turkestan and China.
The Peshitta Tanakh was completed during Apostolic times
with the writings of the New Testament. This
literary form of Eastern Aramaic was pronounced
differently in the Western countries under Roman rule
and its Byzantine successor, and became the "Western"
dialect, influenced by Greek grammar and style. In
the Parthian (Persian) Empire, the language retained its
archaic style, syntax and pronunciation.
Modern Aramaic, in its various dialects, is spoken in
modern-day Iraq, Iran, Syria, Israel, Lebanon, and the
various Western countries to which the native speakers
have emigrated, including Russia, Europe, Australia and
the United States. Churches which still use
Aramaic as their liturgical language include the Church
of the East, the Chaldean Catholic Church, the Syriac
Orthodox Church, the Syriac Catholic Church, and the
Maronite Catholic Church.
On Scripts, Languages and Early Church History
With this background in mind, the central debate between
Aramaic and Greek New Testament primacists needs to be
briefly addressed. Basically both languages have
been shown to have tremendous influence in the Middle
East. Greek was the language of the Roman Empire
which dominated the region, and anyone who wanted to do
business with this great power had to have at least a
working knowledge of that language, or perhaps even
Latin as well. However, even allowing for a rather
high level of Greek mastery by many Jews in first
century Israel does not deal with the most critical line
of evidence of them all. For myself, as well as
many others in the Hebraic Roots Movement, the proper
question to ask has nothing to do with Greek fluency
among Jews. Instead, the better line of inquiry
should focus on what language those same Jews used in a
sacred context,
which was always in Hebrew. Now some will counter
this idea, pointing to the strong Hellenistic Jewish
communities scattered throughout the Mediterranean at
this time in history. However, this line of
evidence is irrelevant because
both Y'shua and his disciples come from the Israeli
tradition that hated the Greek translation of the Torah
so much as to inaugurate a day of fasting for the day it
was finished.
That being said, most historians
today freely acknowledge a clear enough bifurcation
between Hellenistic and Israeli Jewish traditions as to
invalidate any attempts of extrapolating one group's
linguistic usage and applying it to the other.
Whichever side on this debate the reader may share in
this issue, the important point to understand is that
the best evidence for proving which language gave birth
to New Testament lies within the texts themselves, and
this is the area I plan to focus on for the duration.
For now however, we need to turn to a different
question, which is why the Roman Catholic Church
venerates Greek NT texts as originals, while having
copious traditional attestation to the contrary for at
least two Gospels, Acts and one Pauline Epistle.
Furthermore, is there anything in the historical record
to account for an apparent discrepancy between some
authorities who assert a Hebrew origin and others who
believe they were done in Aramaic? That answer, as
it turns out, begins by consulting the sources
themselves, and what they say about the origin of the
Gospel of Matthew and the Epistle to the Hebrews... |
