Acts 2:24 Redux

[Dave]

I did not want the topic to stray too far off subject. I read what you posted Dan and have some agreements with it.

Back to topic here.

Paul wrote in another post:

The Aramaic text, the original, was preserved among Aramaic-speakers. The Greek Mess (what you call "Western Texts") was a series of independent translations that turned out to be a big friggin mess (like your English versions today, which can't even agree with one another.)

I was looking around on the web for some items that Trimm did on comparisons a while back, but was unable to find what he had shown on the revisionary aspect of the peshitta and the byzantine greek texts, so I'll work with what I had copied down from his.

What I want to do is attempt to present a picture of this revisionary process that happened. Most of the time when a standardization has happened in the NT, it involves a condensing and shortening of the sentences and words of God into a smaller form for some reason. Standardization happened in the OT also, but it amounted to the removal of texts and some moving around and shifting of things instead of the changing of the word, at least for the most part. This was discovered when the DSS appeared on the scene, elsewise no one knew about it beforehand, and probably answers one of the questions as to why it is taken so long for those sorts of texts to come to light, and the money aspect also, we can't forget that.

Here is an example of a standardization:

Mt. 10:42

Codex D: his reward will not be lost

Old Syriac: his reward shall not be lost

Alexandrian &
Byzantine: he shall in no way lose his reward

Peshitta: his reward is not lost

See how it got shortened in the syriac?

Here is better example from Trimm with some explanations:

Mt. 18:2
DuTillet Hebrew Matthew: ???And Yeshua called to one boy??????(a certain boy)

Shem Tob Hebrew Matthew: ???And he called one boy??????(a certain boy)

Old Syriac Matthew: ???And Yeshua called to one boy??????(a certain boy)

In the Hebrew and in the Old Syriac Aramaic (but not the Peshitta) we
have a common Semitic idiom by which a ???certain??? thing is modified with
the word ???one???. In this case Yeshua calls ???one boy??? in the Hebrew and
Aramaic, i.e. ???a certain boy???. Codex D has: ???And Iesus called the one
boy?????? This Western Greek reading preserves the Semitic idiom ???one boy???
which has no place in the Greek language.

However the traditional Greek has been revised into smoother Greek to
read: ???And he called a boy??????

And the Peshitta was revised to agree with the traditional Greek text to
read: ???And Yeshua called a boy??????

That example tends to paint a better picture of the tampering that happened as the years went on by both sides of the fields.

Standardization is an evil, brought on by men who thought they were doing something good, or in the case of the OT, the removal of texts that certain folks thought were too much for people outside of themselves, or who knows the reasons, really, it is still evil brought on by satan.

I don't care if people want to follow the traditional greek, syriac, or the aramaic texts as Paul and his friends put it, but no one can claim originality of this text or the traditional greek simply because of the standardizational aspect that the Western texts can show in relationship to them. By the way, this is common knowledge within the scholarly circles, and when one starts to look it over with an eye towards understanding without bias, the evidence is outright and overwhelming.

If anyone wants true originality, then they would have to head to the Western family of texts, of which all the oldest fragments of manuscripts and texts are a witness of.

Claiming this is the language that Jesus spoke and so this must be the original text, is (just to be as candid as possible with everyone here) stupid.