before I begin

[Burning one]

Shlama,

Kevin, i do hope you prayerfully consider the points that Judge has brought up here. they really are valid. the positions taken by most of us on here come from carefully weighing the evidence and testing the historical record. are there still unanswered questions hanging out there? of course there are, and yet we can also make educated guesses as to the best place to throw in our lot based on the majority of answers and evidence that we do have.
we're never told to have it all figured out, but to seek, and we shall find.

the story of Job can be applied in this instance: he repeatedly stated that all would be okay if he could just get his questions answered by the Holy One. well, the Holy One showed up and he didn't get to ask a single question, but the content of what was spoken to Him was sufficient enough to allow him the realization that he could TRUST what the Holy One did reveal. he never received the answers to his questions, but he still could trust what was revealed to him.

it is the same way for us all, and in this case, is applicable to the textual criticism of the New Testament manuscripts. there are all kinds of questions to be asked, and some simply cannot be answered, or at least, seem to have no answer on this earth. but a great majority can be answered in the affirmative when returning to the Peshitta -- NOT the OS, or Philoxenian, or Curetonian, Greek, etc. the historical record also bears much of this out, which is another witness that we are on the right track. still, we must remember that not every answer is laid out for us, but there are enough which are to evince that pursuing the Peshitta's text is the most logical route to take because it is the most trustworthy route to take. if it smells, acts, and sounds like a duck, why try to force it to be something else just because you can't see the duck? perhaps a poor analogy, but the hour is late and that's the best i can come up with - sorry! but hopefully you get my drift! why not go with the honest majority of information and witnesses -- not what people "suggest" or what "tradition" holds, but what the actual evidence portrays? so what if there remain a few unanswered questions? not even Muwshe had everything revealed to him when he specifically asked for certain allowances, so we really shouldn't expect it all to be given, but strive to get as far as we can with what we have, and trust that if that is all that is given, then the Holy One knows what He is doing by limiting our knowledge, and that such a situation is sufficient for man.

anyhow, i hope that spurs more consideration for you.


Chayim b'Moshiach,
Jeremy

With this in mind, I cannot be totally convinced that Aphaphat directly quoted from the Peshitta NT, a manuscript that is placed, at earliest, at scores of years after his death (442CE), until it can be irrefutably shown that his Demonstrations did not suffer alteration at the hands of a fifth-century scribe who favored the new, accepted version of the Syriac Bible (Peshitta). This possibility must be ruled out first.

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But again Kara, as before you are asking Nimrod to prove a negative. We can never prove that soemthing didnt happen (in most instances).
All we can do, is see that Aphrahat quotes the peshitta against the OS. We can see that the COE liturgy quotes the peshitta. We can see, as Prof Gwynne dd, that Aphrahat, never quoted from the 5 disputed books. We can see that even though he quoted from the 22 books of the peshitta even though no OS versions of the other books (apart from the gospels and Acts) are known to have existed.
We can look at all this and using Occhams razor conclude that Aphrahat used the peshitta.

Against this you have a conspiracy theory that an unknown scribe changed some, but not all of Aphrahats quotes in Demonstrations, removed any quotes from the disputed 5 books (presumably as the OS was found in an area which used them), and that somehow the OS version of the other 17 NT books were lost without so much as a trace.

Which is more likely to be true?