The "O" argument

[gbausc]

Shlama Dawid,

I find it difficult to have a serious discussion with you after reading your full response. 4 to the 27th power? Are we to accept this
as a serious argument mitigating the Peshitta primacy position? Come on, David, stop with the sophistry, already.

You seem more interested in defending yourself than discovering truth, even when you have no real position to defend.

An objective assessment of the facts will lead one to see the reasonableness of the Peshitta primacy position as supported by the predominant testimony
of historical and internal evidence. If you had read my NT and had seen all the evidence which I have illustrated in detail throughout the NT books, you would understand
my position much better. There is much more than tradition to support Peshitta primacy and refute Greek and Hebrew primacy. I have no doubt that the Peshitta primacy position is the correct one, and I was a Greek primacist for almost 30 years.

Even if you do not accept the Rev. 1:8 example as evidence, though I do not respect your cynical "I rest my case" as a scholarly response, there are many far better examples showing very plainly how various Greek readings arose from Dead Sea scroll script or Ashuri script readings in the Peshitta. BTW , if you are not using MS Internet Explorer browser, you may not even be able to read the Hebrew and Greek fonts here. I have found that my Firefox browser does not show them. The illustration of Rev. 1:8 in my books is a much better graphic.

This kind of Hebrew is attested to in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Most notably in the Great Isaiah Scroll,

The Great Isaiah Scroll is Biblical Hebrew with Aramaicisms, that is, it often adds an Alap to the end of a word. If that is Mishnaic Hebrew, well that's news to me, but it certainly demonstrates that Aramaic was being used in Israel at the time (100 BC) and so much so, that it changed the Hebrew writing, even of Biblical mss.!
How does that support anything but the idea that Aramaic was the language of Israel at the time?

Your response to Acts 1:19 is very weak. It does not say "the primary language of the region"; its says "the language of the region". If there were more than one, Luke was quite capable of saying so, and he did not. "Khaqel dma" is not Hebrew; it is Aramaic. And Acts 1:19 is not the only such example showing the language of Israel was Aramaic. The Greek NT gives no examples of Hebrew transliterations of Yeshua's speech or that of others, as it does of Aramaic, except for its apparent quote from Psalm 22:1 in Matthew 27:46. And the Greek NT declares itself to be translating Aramaic into Greek in six places. The Peshitta has no statements to the effect that Greek was being translated into Aramaic.

Please don't try to school me in Aramaic. I'm certainly not Mr. Younan, but I have spent countless hours pouring over Judean Aramaic texts and over the Peshitta.

Just what in 'tarnation have you have been "pouring" over them? <!-- s --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/smile.gif" alt="" title="Smile" /><!-- s -->

You also mention "unbroken tradition" as the reason you support Peshitta primacy, not argument from evidence. Greek primacy is the unbroken tradition of the West; it would appear tradition alone cannot settle the matter. We must weigh the evidence, and it is disingenuous to say the evidence for each position is equal. That is simply false. I know you did not say that, directly, but you imply it.

Eusebius simply used the Greek word ,"ebraisti", and you assume it means, "Hebrew". Have you looked up the word in a Greek lexicon? If you had, you would know it refers to "Chaldean"-"Aramaic". Oh, I know, those 19th century guys, what did they know? Thayers and Edersheim, who studied and wrote Greek and Hebrew all of their adult lives, and were familiar with the primary documents the Hebrew and Greek literature going back to Homer's Odyssey & Iliad 900 BC, and all the classic works written since, but they had no computer or the internet to Google search and dredge up every new fad and theory that crops up and may dissipate in a night. We know about evolution and global warming, humanism and communism, rockets to Mars and computer technology, so we must be way ahead of their thoughts and ideas, right?

We stand on their shoulders? I doubt it. Isaac Newton certainly did stand on the shoulders of giants; most of us never even appreciate, let alone master the work of such men, to be able to climb up to the shoulders of giants. I think that in the area of Biblical scholarship and spiritual understanding, we have been regressing, not progressing. Someone once told a famous evangelist, "You want to turn back the clock 50 years." He responded, "No, I want to turn it back 2000 years." He meant, he wanted to get back to the original message of God. We have lost something, something very great, and we cannot improve on what we lost, morally and spiritually. We need to go back and find it. Our forefathers had something we lack, generally today, as a culture. This is true for the whole Western culture, and that something is, certainty.

It's funny that moderns think that the further away from the origins of things we get, the more we know about them. For instance, scholars think that Westcott and Hort
in 1881 at Cambridge,England,knew more about what the original Greek Bible looked like than Jerome, who translated Greek to Latin in the 5th century, or Origen or Eusebius, who collected Greek mss.in the 3rd and 4th centuries. Well, we argue, we have mss. that are 1800 years old, back to the 2nd century. They, of course, had no access to 1st century manuscripts, which would have been no more than 200 years old?!??!!

What on earth were they copying from- 10 year old mss.? If a manuscript can last 2000 years, and we have quite a few from Israel, and yet we believe that we know better than a 4th century scribe that a 5th century Peshitta ms. is unreliable, because the original was lost and never accurately preserved, or the same for the Greek NT, then what have we learned from the Dead Sea Scrolls? Does not The Great Isaiah scroll tell us a different story? Does it not show that the 10th century Leningradensis was a very accurate representative of at least a 100 BC manuscript, and that we in the 21st century have in that 10th century AD ms., a Hebrew Bible that is at least very close to the Hebrew Bible used 100 BC? Think about it. An 12th century Peshitta ms. is annotated by its scribe to have been copied from a mid 4th century ms. (the Khabouris). If a 12th century scribe had an 800 year old ms., are we going to affirm that a 4th century scribe never saw a 300 year old manuscript? This is to stretch credulity beyond the breaking point. Modern Biblical scholarship is adrift in the middle of the Pacific in a canoe without a paddle or compass.We have bought a bill of goods from a bunch of charlatans.

I have a copy of the Codex W (Washingtonensis), whose readings I have cited in my translations. This ms. of the 4 gospels has all the evidence needed to verify its date as 1st century. It was recently found to be dated in Aramaic, in each Gospel, by Dr. Lee Woodard. His book is titled, Kodex W, Old and Holy. He has revised and enlarged it also, and given a new title, which eludes me just now. What is just as interesting about this, is that there are Aramaic signatures and codes in very small and cryptic seals, giving not only dates and names of copyists, but of place of composition! This is probably one of the first Greek copies of the Gospels, and many of its readings are unique and agree with the Peshitta, against all other Greek mss. Much more study needs to be done, but this ms. was formerly dated as 5th century, or 4th, at the earliest, but no one had even detected these Aramaic seals and signatures before.

Now why would the NT be lost? Why should we expect less for that, than of the OT?

Tradition is great if it is founded on truth. If it is grasped just to avoid the insecurity of uncertainty, then it is false security born of fear and doubt.

What you say about God not preserving His words is most troubling. If He does not preserve His words, what hope do we have of knowing the truth that sets us free?
We will be plagued with doubt, as we see we human beings are.

I have never been content to be uncertain about the Bible, its origins, its words, its language. You seem content to live with uncertainty, which saddens me a bit, especially since you are so young.

Edersheim passed away in 1889. That's not quite 200 yrs. ago, now, is it? If he were living today and were still teaching at Oxford and lecturing, I would be a fool not to avail myself of his lectures if I had the opportunity. Please do not put yourself on your own pedestal; humility is a mark of wisdom, and pride, the mark of fools. 40 years from now, you will hopefully change your thinking on hundreds of points, not the least of which will be how you think of yourself and how smart you are. Not that you will know less, but you will think less of what you know, and are, and more of what you do not know and what you are not. Hopefully you will think more of Him Whose very Name and Being is Truth, and Who said:
Nrben al ylmw Nwrben aeraw ayms Lu 21:33
"Heaven and earth will pass away; my words will never pass away."

Kqdu jpsm-lk Mlwelw tma Krbd-sar 160 (BHS)
160 ?? (ERV) The sum of thy word is truth; and every one of thy righteous judgments endureth for ever. Psalms 119:60


Blessings,

Dave Bauscher