05-30-2005, 10:01 PM
Quote:"I tried, for my own personal use, to see what Mark would yield when translated back into the Hebrew of Qumran. I had imagined that this translation would be difficult because of considerable differences between semitic thought and Greek thought, but I was absolutely dumbfounded to discover that this translation was, on the contrary, extremely easy. Around the middle of April, 1963, after only one day of work , I was convinced that the Greek text of Mark could not have been redacted directly into Greek and that it was in reality only the Greek translation of an original Hebrew.
(Jean Carmignac, "Birth of the Synotics", p. 1; the author was a scholar who worked for a decade on the Dead Sea Scrolls)
Presumably this would hold for Aramaic as well?