Final Analysis of Juckel's Study

[yuku]

shlomo oh Paul,

Yuri seems to have skipt my early analysis between the current official Peshitta and Peshitto which have been seperated by over 1500 years. The Official Peshitto doesn't have the variants of these so called variant manuscripts. Why would anyone want to use a manuscript which hasn't influenced the Official Peshitto version. The fact that Peshitto agrees with the Peshitta after more than 1500 years apart, demonstrates that these variant manuscripts are useless.

poosh bashlomo,
keefa-moroon

Greetings, Abudar,

This whole argument is really rather strange IMHO...

I think we all agree that the Aramaic textual tradition of the Peshitta is very stable and uniform, much more so than the others. But it's certainly not _completely_ stable and uniform. There are some variants in the Peshitta textual tradition, as well, although most of them are rather minor.

I can even grant to Akhi Paul that the eastern Peshitta textual tradition may be somewhat more uniform than the western Peshitto textual tradition... but it's only a matter of degree. Fundamentally IMHO these two traditions are very similar in their uniformity.

But OTOH very few people outside of Peshitta.org would be impressed by such uniformity of the Peshitta textual tradition. Among the professional biblical scholars, such uniformity is certainly not considered as a big sign of distinction. Indeed, if uniformity were to be prized highly, then we should see the Byzantine text as the winner among all Greek texts. But it isn't.

Once again, I would like to call on all supporters of the Aramaic textual tradition to try to focus on what we all have in common, rather than on our differences. Let's focus on what unites us, rather than on what divides us.

Because if we only bicker and fight among each other -- "My text is better!", "No, my text is better!", "No, my text is the best!" -- then, unfortunately, we will miss the real enemy.

The real enemy is not your fellow Aramaic supporter. Our real target should be the 99% of professional biblical scholars who've never been exposed to anything outside of Greek dogma. But, if we just keep fighting among each other, I'm afraid that we'll never make any progress in advancing our case to the biblical mainstream.

I think all Aramaic/Hebrew supporters should try to build some sort of a common front, that might also include even some Byzantine text supporters. Then the Alexandrian Greek zombies will really start shaking in their boots... They are really very vulnerable to criticism, because their Alexandrian Greek text is full of holes. Their text is a dud. So _this_ should be our main target of criticism!

Myself, I also find many problems with what Trimm is doing. But sometimes he also gets some things right, so I prefer to stress that, rather than focus on his faults.

Of course, my own criticism of Trimm is the opposite of what some people here are saying. <!-- s --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/smile.gif" alt="" title="Smile" /><!-- s --> They criticise Trimm for allegedly embracing the Old Syriac, but I criticise him for not embracing it enough!

In fact, Trimm of course only pays the lip-service to the Old Syriac. In fact, AFAIK his gospels that he's publishing are 99% Peshitta, so he's not really pushing the Old Syriac in any big way at all.

There seems to be a very big gap between what he says and what he does...

Shlama,

Yuri.