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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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Introduction: Title and Purpose
Then Moses held out his arm over the sea and YHWH
(the L-RD) drove back the sea with a strong east wind all that
night, and turned the sea into dry ground. Exodus 14:21
(1999 Jewish Publication Society Hebrew-English
Tanakh)
The words RUACH QADIM each have several meanings in
Hebrew. RUACH is the divine spark or "spirit" that
Elohim (G-d) imbues all humanity with. However, because
Adam received the first of these by having Elohim breathe it into him
(Genesis 2:7), RUACH also took on the meaning of
"breath" or, as in the case of the above verse, "wind".
On the other hand, QADIM is rendered as "east" in the
above verse, but also means "ancient". Its usage
is very powerfully employed in Jewish mystical writings
to describe the spiritual blueprint of man held in
Elohim's
mind before being breathed into life, or ADAM QADMON
(Adam Before). All these meanings, and their
various permutations, are relevant to this book.
Primarily, our
explorations will center on the original "eastern
spirit" that in part evolved into the movement the
Western world would later dub "Christianity".
However, owing to the fact that all the original
followers of Messiah--not to mention Messiah
himself--were first century Jews in Israel, it is also
fair to say that we have an "ancient spirit" as well,
and one that has been lost to the world for almost two
thousand years. It is also the original "breath"
that gave life to the faith of two billion people, and
the "eastern wind" that began in Jerusalem and blew its
way all across the face of the earth. However,
even after all these centuries, many deep questions
about the origins of Messianic Judaism and early
Christianity remain obscure. In fact, there can be
no distinction between the Jewish-Messianic debates of
the New Testament and those that continue on to this
very day. Did Torah "pass away" and have its
ordinances "nailed to the cross"? Is the Trinity
idolatrous? Was Paul of Tarsus an apostate from
the Torah, eschewing his expert training from the
grandson of Rabbi Hillel in favor of Greek paganism?
These questions, and many others like them, will be
fully explored here. The answers however will be
surprising regardless as to whether the reader is a
Gentile Christian, Messianic Jew or in fact a
conventional Jew as well. In particular, three
root causes for the greatest misunderstanding in world
history will be fully addressed:
First, there is the linguistic front.
Y'shua Ha Moshiakh, after all, was a native Aramaic
speaker, as were all his followers who would later write
about him. Furthermore, three quarters of the
Gospels contain teachings, sermons and discourses that
could only have been delivered first in that language.
Such a situation then more than justifies the effort for
anyone looking into what these same Aramaic traditions
have to say about their own beginnings, as well as their
original theology. In the case of the latter, the
Aramaic theological terms mentioned in the New
Testament, regardless as to having entered from either
oral or written sources, in many cases have no
equivalent cognates in either Greek or Hebrew.
Therefore, even if the very best minds came up with a
Greek New Testament that tried to get these Aramaic
discourses down properly into a western paradigm, much
of the nuances of the original would be, and have been,
lost to history.
Secondly, there is the matter of cultural
mistrust and the tendency for one group to allow their
fear to blind them to the individual sectarian
differences of its general ethnic adversary. To
explain what I mean in greater detail, let me use a more
recent example from American history. Let's say
for the sake of argument that I am an army captain--a
veteran from the recently ended Civil War--and my new
mission is to head out West and subdue all the Native
American tribes in a given area. Chances are very
good that, because I see all Native Americans as my
enemy, I don't really care about tribal distinctions or
even individual factions that exist within a given
tribe. Instead, I will paint them all with the
same broad brushstrokes, and treat them all the same
way. The same concept holds true for the way many
Gentiles began to see the Jews in the New Testament,
perhaps as early as the beginning of the second century.
This is not to say that Gentile Christians today are on
the whole anti-Semitic. Quite the contrary, we are
blessed to live in a time when cultural understanding
between Jews and Christians could very well be at an all
time high. However, having said that, it must be
admitted that many of the institutions that Gentile
Christians draw from, whether they know it or not, began
with a denial of Semitism at their core. From
there, we can easily march through history and observe
people like Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and so many others,
who made no secret of their animosity towards Jews.
Then, while the original negative biases that gave birth
to their teachings may have become less obvious with the
passing of the centuries, the discourses containing
these biases have clearly been passed down and accepted
by even the most loving members of Christendom.
Furthermore, those same teachings of Dispensationalism,
Replacement Theology, and the belief that Torah has
passed away are still dominant in Christian circles to
this day. By the same token, these biases also
manifest themselves in the general way that most Gentile
Christians perceive the Jews depicted in the New
Testament. In other words, the key concept that
nearly all of Gentile Christianity gets wrong is not
seeing the New Testament as a Jewish debate about Jewish
Scripture predicting a Jewish Messiah. Now many
will protest and fervently tell me this is not true.
However, the proof of this statement's veracity comes
from Western Christianity's own writings and stated
beliefs. No Jew, for example, would ever say that
Torah was invalid. Instead, the entire theme of
both the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament is
that some Jews believed that Torah's promises were
fulfilled by Y'shua of Nazareth and others did not.
Therefore, the invectives that were hurled from one
Jewish sect to another (synagogue of Satan, leaven of
the Pharisees, etc.) cannot be looked at, as they have
been...
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