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Earliest Aramaic Manuscript?
#1
I found this article about an Aramaic Manuscript in Palestine. Do you know if this is really the earliest manuscript of the New Testament? Do you know what is the Manuscript they are referring too? I would appreciate your comments.

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#2
It's just another palimpsest like Old Scratch, found by the same twin sisters who had a knack for discovering scratched off texts of useless New Testament translations that were overwritten with stories of lives of a particular saint. This one also falls under that category. The text of the New Testament was so sacred to those monks in Egypt, that they scratched off the text so that they could write the most important thing to them, the story of a life of a saint.

Oh, those Egyptians and their saints. Those monasteries in that land of hornets have brought us so much joy with their faithful and accurate transmission of all those various New Testament texts. Scratched off, or not.

Anyway, this is not the oldest New Testament manuscript. It's not even the oldest New Testament manuscript in Aramaic. It's only the oldest Christian Palestinian Aramaic dialect manuscript. An odd dialect that seems to like to pretend to be Greek, so much so that they apparently didn't know the Messiahs name wasn't Yesous. <!-- sWink --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/wink1.gif" alt="Wink" title="Wink" /><!-- sWink -->

+Shamasha
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#3
Thanks for the information, Paul!
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#4
Paul Younan Wrote:It's just another palimpsest like Old Scratch, found by the same twin sisters who had a knack for discovering scratched off texts of useless New Testament translations that were overwritten with stories of lives of a particular saint. This one also falls under that category. The text of the New Testament was so sacred to those monks in Egypt, that they scratched off the text so that they could write the most important thing to them, the story of a life of a saint.

Oh, those Egyptians and their saints. Those monasteries in that land of hornets have brought us so much joy with their faithful and accurate transmission of all those various New Testament texts. Scratched off, or not.

Anyway, this is not the oldest New Testament manuscript. It's not even the oldest New Testament manuscript in Aramaic. It's only the oldest Christian Palestinian Aramaic dialect manuscript. An odd dialect that seems to like to pretend to be Greek, so much so that they apparently didn't know the Messiahs name wasn't Yesous. <!-- sWink --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/wink1.gif" alt="Wink" title="Wink" /><!-- sWink -->

+Shamasha

Just my 2p (2c?) on the subject of palimpsests in the west. Something I have learned from Bruce Metzger's "The Text of The New Testament. Its Transmission, Corruption and Restoration" :

<<In A.D. 692 , the Council of Trullo (also called the Quinisext Council) issued a canon (no. 68) condemning the practice of using parchment from manuscripts of the Scriptures for other purposes. Despite the canon and the penalty of excommunication for one year, the practice must have continued, for of the 310 majuscule manuscripts of the New Testament known today, 68 are palimpsest.>> (manuscripts here mean Greek manuscripts)

Not that it matters too much for the Aramaic primacy or the value of the "old scratch" (although the history around this synod and Sergius is interesting in itself) but it shows that bishops in the Eastern Roman Empire in those days held the view: "Palimpsesting? That Ain't Right!"
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