03-26-2013, 09:44 AM
Shlama khati Sarah:
It's sometimes difficult to picture writing Aramaic letters to Greek communities. However,The entire population of non-Jews were from pagan origins. Now, Aramaic and Hebrew are sister languages. There are short portions of the old testament which were written in Aramaic but there is not one line,written by any Jewish Biblical scribe which was written in Greek. This is why we have an exclusive Peshitta, The intended recipients of the Peshitta of every community were Jews, because they were the chosen people and the Word of Alaha was committed to them. The Peshitta New Testament is a seamless continuation of the Jewish Bible (Old Testament). It's likely that only a handful of Greek believers spoke Aramaic hence the early translation of the Hebrew Old Testament into the Greek language used what has been commonly known as Koine. This language is a word for word translation and ignores Semitic idioms. Both th Old Testament and New Testament have the independent Greek witness, but since Greek does not share any gramatical roots with the Semitic languages it was imperative for translations into Greek to be a literal translation, thus inadvertently the Greek cannot record the Semitic idioms that exist in the original languages.
The early church was not intentionally ethnically divided. Both Jews and Gentiles followed the pattern of non-ownership, to a great degree and had all things in common. it was the job of bilingual Jewish believers in Yeshua to give the idiomatic sense throughout both the Hebrew/Aramaic Old Testament as well as the Peshitta New Testament. Virtually all of the very early comunities had one Bible, or portions of the Peshitta text (there were no printing presses so the copying of the Peshitta was a slow and methodical process, not done by novices but by learned Jewish teachers ordained as such.
As a side note Josephus the Jewish historian had great difficulty when his second writing of his Jewish history into Greek, the translation that we have today. Internal readings show tis to be his own witness.
Shlama,
Stephen Silver
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It's sometimes difficult to picture writing Aramaic letters to Greek communities. However,The entire population of non-Jews were from pagan origins. Now, Aramaic and Hebrew are sister languages. There are short portions of the old testament which were written in Aramaic but there is not one line,written by any Jewish Biblical scribe which was written in Greek. This is why we have an exclusive Peshitta, The intended recipients of the Peshitta of every community were Jews, because they were the chosen people and the Word of Alaha was committed to them. The Peshitta New Testament is a seamless continuation of the Jewish Bible (Old Testament). It's likely that only a handful of Greek believers spoke Aramaic hence the early translation of the Hebrew Old Testament into the Greek language used what has been commonly known as Koine. This language is a word for word translation and ignores Semitic idioms. Both th Old Testament and New Testament have the independent Greek witness, but since Greek does not share any gramatical roots with the Semitic languages it was imperative for translations into Greek to be a literal translation, thus inadvertently the Greek cannot record the Semitic idioms that exist in the original languages.
The early church was not intentionally ethnically divided. Both Jews and Gentiles followed the pattern of non-ownership, to a great degree and had all things in common. it was the job of bilingual Jewish believers in Yeshua to give the idiomatic sense throughout both the Hebrew/Aramaic Old Testament as well as the Peshitta New Testament. Virtually all of the very early comunities had one Bible, or portions of the Peshitta text (there were no printing presses so the copying of the Peshitta was a slow and methodical process, not done by novices but by learned Jewish teachers ordained as such.
As a side note Josephus the Jewish historian had great difficulty when his second writing of his Jewish history into Greek, the translation that we have today. Internal readings show tis to be his own witness.
Shlama,
Stephen Silver
<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.dukhrana.com">http://www.dukhrana.com</a><!-- m -->