Greek primacists favoring certain anciet texts

[Rob]

What does the statement mean that "GOD has still not moved from the greek scriptures?" I don't understand - is the Holy Spirit confined to white~european churches?

This is a general theological issue with God preserving his word among the masses throughout the ages. (Romans 9:14-21)

The vast majority of the church?

The Calvinistic belief in God preserving his word coincides with the belief that he will intervene on large scales in order to do so. The issue then is not whether or not the Peshitta had a time of prominance, but rather that in the end the Western traditions dominated. This goes into both linguistic and theolgical issues, but I don't think that God would preserve his word through a medium that would lose it's influence in any age. If the bible was written in Aramaic, it would have been preserved in Aramaic, and translated from Aramaic; in every generation.

Of course there is nothing before the 4th century. Everyone who has studied history knows what happened in the 4th century in the Roman empire, and how it affected the Christians in the Eastern (Persian) empire. His name was Constantine - and ever since he established Christianity as the state religion - the Eastern Christians have been persecuted.

Both the Jesus Seminar and the fans of the Da Vinci code would agree with you on this. <!-- s --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/smile.gif" alt="" title="Smile" /><!-- s -->

We have also proven that the earliest Arabic copy of the Diatesseron demonstrates that the Diatesseron of Tatian, composed during the 2nd century in Assyria (Tatian called himself an Assyrian) contains 100% the same readings as the Peshitta, against the Western Greek texts.

This is a rather dynamically linked proof. The point is that the Diatesseron isn't the original and is a harmonized version of the Peshitta. The Peshitta then, must provide evidence of antiquity which beats the Greek tradition, which it does not. The Peshitta certainly is old, but its not old enough. I have already provided evidence that the Gospels were written after the Pauline Epistles; which are mostly directed towards Hellenized Churches. Why circulate Aramaic documents to churches which originally received apostolic instruction in Greek?

Geography has nothing to do with the language in which an epistle is written. Epistles sent out by the Patriarch of the Church of the East today, to the church in India who are ethnically Indians and who do not understand Aramaic, are written in Aramaic.

The Church of the East uses it as a liturgical language and has dogmatic claims behind the Peshitta's authenticy; I don't believe either of these things existed in the 1st Century church.

Secondly, all those churches in Asia Minor were started in the synagogues and the Jews were the elders of those churches. Surely you don't mean to imply that Jews didn't understand Aramaic simply because they lived in Ephesus?

Living in Gentile culture one would imagine that they spoke the local language, but likewise no early congregation was comprised of completely jews, otherwise Paul would not have been concerned with the Galatian church practicing Jewish customs while not being concerned with the Jerusalem church. Why else was he called the apostle to the Gentiles?

And what single Greek tradition is that?

An old one, I will give you guys that.

Would you agree that all translators make mistakes and that all translations have some mistakes in them?

Yes, but they can be easily smoothed out in later translations.

Can you point me to one instance, just one, where the Peshitta contains any error which you can convincingly demonstrate came from a translators' misreading of a Greek word, a misspelling of a Greek word, etc?

Besides it's own Greek loan words, (outside of Roman culture, there should be none) the quality of the Peshitta has no merit as an original if it can't first answer the historical questions, which to myself, are nothing but speculation.