The Origin of the Western Five

[gbausc]

Grace to you Brother Otto,

Thank you for your response and your kind words. The issue we are discussing has nothing to do with Bible codes. It has to do with The Holy Spirit and the scripture I quoted in 1 Cor. 2:14

But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.

Do you think The Holy Spirit would leave it to human intellect to discern what is scripture and what is the work of man? I do not think so.

You keep referencing what "those on this web site" believe, which is completely irrelevant. I want to know what God says about the matter, and so should you.

You are obfuscating what you said when you say you merely question the origin and history of the Western 5 books. You wrote earlier:

The resulting hodge-podge of translations, revised translations, altered versions, added books, and damaged translations, provide the basis of the Greek documents that are used today to form the Greek New Testaments.

You are affirming that whole books were added to the canon by men which do not belong there, are you not? It certainly sounds that way to me. As such, you are condemning those added books as uninspired and spurious.

I have the greatest respect for Paul Younan and also for his belief in The 22 book Peshitta, which I also share. He allows that some or all of the Western 5 may be authentic writings of the Apostles, as I understand what he has written in the past. You sound dangerously close to taking the next step and rejecting those
books out of hand as

The resulting hodge-podge of translations, revised translations, altered versions, added books, and damaged translations, provide the basis of the Greek documents that are used today to form the Greek New Testaments.

And you have never even read these books in Aramaic (and I am not talking about the Harklean version) but The Crawford ms. and critical edition of John Gwynn. Everyone on this forum should obtain his books : The Apocalypse of St John and Remnants of the Later Syriac Versions of The Bible.
I don't know if even Paul has read Gwynn's edition and books. Gwynn was not a Peshitta primacist, but he certainly pointed out the differences between the Aramaic mss. he collated and The Harklean version. He concluded that the mss. he used for the Western five were very Peshitta like in their idiomatic Aramaic style and word usage, in glaring contrast to The Harklean's slavish adherence to Greek word order and even transliteration, as in an interlinear translation of Greek. He believed the text of those 20 manuscripts would have been indistinguishable from The Peshitta, if included in a volume with it.

Here is what he wrote:

"It would be difficult for a reader unacquainted with the Greek of The Apocalypse to discover that he had before him a translation, and not an original document."

He is referring to The Crawford ms. of Revelation.
He also wrote: "

The Syriac of the four epistles (2,3 John, 2 Peter, Jude) is idiomatic, and its method combines faithfulness with freedom.... I suspect that if the first editor of the Syriac NT in 1555 had had in his hands this or a similar ms., these Epistles would have been unhestitatingly included by him, and accepted by Biblical scholars without question, as an integral part of The Peshitto."

Greek transliteration and adaptation is "

less frequent than even in The Peshitto NT."

Comparing these mss. to The Harklean, Gwynn includes this quote from an older source

:"We justly claim for this version, as regards its general tone and manner , that it approaches the excellence of The Peshitto; and in point of force, directness, and dignity, that it gives worthy expression to the sublime imagery of the Apocalyptist. It has strength and freedom such as few translations attain; such in fact that it would not be difficult to make out a plausible case for accepting it as the Aramaic original, or a close reproduction of an Aramaic original of the book. In it , far more than in the cramped and artificial diction of its reviser, the Aramaic idiom asserts its power to supply for the burden of the divine visions an utterance more adequate than could be found for them in the Greek which is their actual vehicle. (Remember, this is from a Greek primacist position.) From it, as a comparison of the 2 versions shows, the latter one has borrowed the touches of simple majesty which ever and again raise it out of its usual level of painstaking and correctness: in it, I may almost venture to say, more perfectly than in the written Greek, we may read 'the things which shall be hereafter', well nigh in the form in which St. John first apprehended the divine word that came to him, and inwardly shaped into speech the revelation of 'The Lord God, which is and was and is to come, The Almighty.""

Gwynn was a Greek primacist, as was the source he quoted, yet they both set forth the Western 5 in a text they claim looks like an original, reads like The Peshitta and is better than the Harklean & Greek in diction, simplicity and power. How can these things be, if it and The Peshitta were translated from Greek to start with?
It is all very simple. It is the original Aramaic writing of the Apostles, John, Peter and Jude.

I will forego your statements about the codes, except to ask: If anyone with a computer can reproduce the kind of codes I have found, why is it that nobody has done so thus far? I cannot find such ELS's in any text but the Hebrew Bible and The Peshitto NT. You make it sound like I tried millions of configurations of the NT until I got one that worked, and that is simply false. There are other texts included in the program, including scrambled Hebrew texts, War and Peace in Hebrew, Eastern Peshitta, 5 Greek texts, Josephus' "Wars" in Greek, English Bibles, 21 books & scrambled texts in all. Someone should have come up with something significant by now, but I have seen nothing like what I have found in The Peshitto.

I will save the fine points of code searching and whether I believe the text I searched is the letter perfect text, for another time.

Do you believe 1 Cor. 2:14, Otto? Do you believe in The Holy Spirit, and do you listen to Him? That is the most important matter at hand.

Burkta b'Rukha d'Qoodsha (Blessings in The Spirit of Holiness),

Dave