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Shlama Akhay,

As most of you already know, when the New Testament was first penned, there were no vowel or diacretic markings in Aramaic. They were not invented until many centuries after the NT was first written.

One of those markings sigified plurality, and is called the Seyame marking (for more info, see <!-- w --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.assyrianlanguage.com">http://www.assyrianlanguage.com</a><!-- w -->, level two, lesson 40 for an in-depth treatment of this topic.)

The Seyame marking consists of two small dots placed above a word which, when supplied, made the noun plural rather than singular. Therefore "brother" in the singular is [font=Estrangelo (V1.1)]0---x0 [/font]and in the plural it is [font=Estrangelo (V1.1)]0---^x0 [/font], but absent these markings as would have been the case in the 1st century AD, the two forms would look exactly the same.

Therefore, unless it was obvious from the context, a scribe would need to make an educated guess as to which reading is proper, whether to translate singular or plural.

In the latter scenario, different scribes would come to different conclusions - obviously. Yukhanan 6:14 is one of those cases, and it proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Yukhanan first penned his gospel in Aramaic, and everyone translated "as best they could."

The word in question in the Aramaic of this verse is "miracle/sign" - [font=Estrangelo (V1.1)]0t0[/font]

The following Greek manuscripts were the result of a scribe(s) who guessed it was plural [font=Estrangelo (V1.1)]0t^0[/font] : p75 B 0191

The following Greek manuscripts were the result of a scribe(s) who guessed it was singular [font=Estrangelo (V1.1)]0t0 [/font]: S A D K L W