Aramaic Peshitta Bible

[Kathe]

Is anyone familiar with it? Here is a link to a website about it. Just wondered if anyone had words of wisdom concerning it. I came across it last night. Thanks, Kathe

http://aramaicpeshitta.com/


If you google Lamsa Bible it will be the first link that comes up.

[Joel]

I wouldn't put a vote of confidence in him or his work. There's better translations out there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamsa_Bible
http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/cri/cri-jrnl/web/crj0032a.html

[Kathe]

Joel,

Is the aramaic bible a good one though? Maybe just not this particular translation?

Thanks, Kathe

[Wildcat81]

The website's claim that the Peshitta deserves preference over the Greek text is at best extremely dubious. Someone who wants to argue that, say, Romans was originally written in Aramaic needs to have a really good explanation as to why a Greek-speaking diaspora Jew (Paul) would write to a Greek- and Latin-speaking church (made up largely of Gentiles) in Aramaic instead of Greek. It's nonsense.

Aramaic had a very small base of native speakers. Greek was the lingua franca of most of the Roman Empire. The Peshitta is one non-Greek version among many translations of the NT into regional languages that began around the 4th or 5th century. Around this time, the western half of the empire began to transition to Latin instead of Greek as the dominant spoken language, and various non-Greek versions of the NT were created, including Latin, Coptic, Ethiopic, Armenian, Arabic, and others. The Peshitta was undoubtedly one of these texts. The term "Peshitta" was first used in the 10th century, and the earliest manuscripts we have of it are from the 5th and 6th centuries.

Also, the language of the Peshitta is not Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, but rather Syriac - Eastern Aramaic, spoken largely on the eastern side of the fertile crescent. There is a NT written in Palestinian Jewish Aramaic, but the manuscript evidence for it is fairly limited, and concentrated around the 5th century. Although it's in Palestinian Aramaic, it's written with Syriac script*, and so usually classified with Syriac versions.

*The Peshitta is written in Syriac script also. This is significant because that script differs significantly from the script used by Palestinian Jews to write Aramaic. They would have used the same script in which Hebrew texts were used - the one you'd see if you opened up a Hebrew Bible, or looked at road signs in modern Israel. That script, in fact, is an older Aramaic script that the Jews acquired during the Exile and began using to write Hebrew during that time.

In sum, the Peshitta is interesting from a text-critical standpoint, but it is not the ancestor of the Greek New Testament. The NT was written in Greek and translated into other languages a few centuries later. It is possible that there were some Aramaic documents floating around the church very early, before the gospels as we know them were written down, but there is no documentary evidence of this.

[Kathe]

Thanks! I appreciate your response. Kathe