Wow.

[judge]

90 members to the forum, and growing daily. We're going to have our own little Waco here pretty soon. How much does this have to do with Mel Gibson's upcoming film?

I gotta say I was absolutely amazed when I first even heard there was an Aramaic NT. I am alsoi amazed that the peshitta has not been studied at all (or hardly at all )by western scholars.
When it is finally examined and accepted as the original it wll be much more difficult for detractors to attack the intergrity of the NT.


The following quotes will lose their sting. <!-- s --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/smile.gif" alt="" title="Smile" /><!-- s -->

"In AD 178 the secular writer Celsus stated in polemic against the Christians: ‘some of the believers . . . have changed the original text of the Gospels three or four times or even more, with the intention of thus being able to destroy the arguments of their critics.’ (quoted in Origen, Contra Celsum, SC 132, 2, 27). Origen does not deny the existence of such changes.” 1

 Indeed, Origen wrote, "It is an obvious fact today [third century A.D.] that there is much diversity among the manuscripts, due either to the carelessness of the scribes, or to the perverse audacity of some people in correcting the text, or again to the fact that there are those who add or delete as they please, setting themselves up as correctors." 2

 "It is therefore not possible to reconstitute with certainty the earliest text, even though there is no doubt about its having existed in written form from a very early date, without a preparatory oral stage." 3

 "In the period following AD 135, the recensions proliferated with a resultant textual diversity which reached a peak before the year 200." 4

---

footnotes:

* Leon Vaganay and Christian-Bernard Amphoux, An Introduction to New Testament Criticism, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)
1 Ibid., 96.
2 Ibid., citing Origen, In Matthaeum 15.14, in PG 13:1293.
3 Ibid., 97.
4 Ibid., 98.

More arguments that will "lose their sting" can be found here.
<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=61703">http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php? ... adid=61703</a><!-- m -->