10-18-2014, 07:16 PM
Steve,
I perused through your web site and found out a couple of things that I think are somewhat not factual.
1) "It is a movement that first gained traction with the works of the late George Lamsa, and is primarily a position popularized by individuals within the growing Messianic Judaism movement in North America as well as the official position of the Assyrian Church of the East."
official position of the Assyrian Church of the East: that's not quite so. Based on my interactions with Assyrian churches in Chicago (a few years back when I used to live in Chicago), I could say it's more of mother to child transmitted tradition than an official position. And it's more of a generic assertion something that goes like "this is the language that Jesus spoke". The tradition it is used as argument to motivate children to learn and not give up on their Aramaic inheritance. As such you can have even in Chicago, well established church leaders who believe Greek is the better text of the Bible and use Greek based Bibles for church Bible studies. Whether you believe the tradition or not, has no bearing on your standing in the church - so it's not an official position.
It's more sophisticated/educated people like Lamsa, Mar Eshai Shimun or Paul Younan that take the tradition at its face value and end up arguing (with quite some compelling arguments) for Peshitta Primacy. Paul if you see this, please chime in, but as an outsider observer, that's what I could see.
2) You are somewhat lambasting Peshitta: "Note how the Peshitta renders ?swords? (in the plural) rather than ?sword.? This is very curious..." What it seems curios to me is you using that as contra-argument honestly. Almost every grammar I read says that dots were added later. So that could be translated as either sword or swords. Do you have any other information that I don't have, or am I missing something there?
3) Nun vs. Yod for imperfect. Is that the only thing that puts Peshitta centuries later? You know "by the witness of two or three..." I would like to know more witnesses, if you can refer me to, that would be appreciated. Given the great similarity between Nun and Yod at the start of the word, myself as beginner I stumble still at times and interchange the two. So it's not outside of the realm of possibility for me, for Yod to morph into Nun over time, and still have an older base text, if it should have been Yod indeed in the first place.
I would like to see some pertinent arguments for Peshitta not being what Paul here claims to be, I think what you have posted is quite limited to persuade somebody otherwise. Unless you add the "consensus" in the mix, but consensus is many times just everybody repeating something that somebody who managed to make themselves look like an authority, has decreed.
For me Peshitta Primacy is not a matter of faith, so my faith would not be shattered if it turns out indeed Peshitta is not the original language in which Bible was composed. What you have posted on your site seems quite thin to me though, to persuade me that it was written in something else.
I perused through your web site and found out a couple of things that I think are somewhat not factual.
1) "It is a movement that first gained traction with the works of the late George Lamsa, and is primarily a position popularized by individuals within the growing Messianic Judaism movement in North America as well as the official position of the Assyrian Church of the East."
official position of the Assyrian Church of the East: that's not quite so. Based on my interactions with Assyrian churches in Chicago (a few years back when I used to live in Chicago), I could say it's more of mother to child transmitted tradition than an official position. And it's more of a generic assertion something that goes like "this is the language that Jesus spoke". The tradition it is used as argument to motivate children to learn and not give up on their Aramaic inheritance. As such you can have even in Chicago, well established church leaders who believe Greek is the better text of the Bible and use Greek based Bibles for church Bible studies. Whether you believe the tradition or not, has no bearing on your standing in the church - so it's not an official position.
It's more sophisticated/educated people like Lamsa, Mar Eshai Shimun or Paul Younan that take the tradition at its face value and end up arguing (with quite some compelling arguments) for Peshitta Primacy. Paul if you see this, please chime in, but as an outsider observer, that's what I could see.
2) You are somewhat lambasting Peshitta: "Note how the Peshitta renders ?swords? (in the plural) rather than ?sword.? This is very curious..." What it seems curios to me is you using that as contra-argument honestly. Almost every grammar I read says that dots were added later. So that could be translated as either sword or swords. Do you have any other information that I don't have, or am I missing something there?
3) Nun vs. Yod for imperfect. Is that the only thing that puts Peshitta centuries later? You know "by the witness of two or three..." I would like to know more witnesses, if you can refer me to, that would be appreciated. Given the great similarity between Nun and Yod at the start of the word, myself as beginner I stumble still at times and interchange the two. So it's not outside of the realm of possibility for me, for Yod to morph into Nun over time, and still have an older base text, if it should have been Yod indeed in the first place.
I would like to see some pertinent arguments for Peshitta not being what Paul here claims to be, I think what you have posted is quite limited to persuade somebody otherwise. Unless you add the "consensus" in the mix, but consensus is many times just everybody repeating something that somebody who managed to make themselves look like an authority, has decreed.
For me Peshitta Primacy is not a matter of faith, so my faith would not be shattered if it turns out indeed Peshitta is not the original language in which Bible was composed. What you have posted on your site seems quite thin to me though, to persuade me that it was written in something else.