Earliest Gospels Acquired by Vatican (St Luke)

Discovery News ^ | March 2007 | Jennifer Viegas,

[dsc]

I read:

p75 All things came into being through him and apart from him not one thing came into being which had come into being; in him was life and the life was the light of humanity.

P75c All things came into being through him and apart from him not one thing came into being; that which came into being in him was life and the life was the light of humanity.

There does seem to be some difference between these two.

[Andrew Byler]

Or so some scholars claim. You are willing to believe them on the latter point, but not on the former. Why?

There are no manuscripts or manuscript fragments of Matthew or any other New Testament book written in Aramaic or Hebrew. The earliest surviving witnesses are in Greek. This is not to say that it is impossible that they were not originally writting in Aramaic, but there is no physical evidence of these texts.

Um, the Catholic and Orthodox Churches of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, India, etc. (i.e., the Maronites, Jacobites, Nestorians, Malabarese, etc.) would beg to differ with you. Their copy of the Holy Scriptures are written in Aramaic, and they've been using Aramaic since they received the books of the New Testament, since they spoke Aramaic, just like Christ and the Apostles. Its called the Peshitta.

The Greek primacy theory would have us believe that a bunch of Jewish Aramaic speaking fishermen and minor officials wrote the Holy Scriptures in Greek for a mostly Aramaic speaking group of Jewish converts to Christianity.

[jboot]

The oldest Aramaic manuscript of the Peshitta dates to AD 464. There are several older Greek manuscripts.

I don't discount the possibility that the original monographs of some of the books may have been in Aramaic. But until an Aramaic manuscript or a significant fragment of one from the proper era (say < 150 AD) turns up, it is not possible to say for sure.

In doing my research I was a little surprised (and quite truthfully dismayed) to see the level of emotion invested in this issue. In my opinion, that is all the more reason to rely on physical evidence rather than theories.

[Andrew Byler]

The oldest Aramaic manuscript of the Peshitta dates to AD 464. There are several older Greek manuscripts. I don't discount the possibility that the original monographs of some of the books may have been in Aramaic. But until an Aramaic manuscript or a significant fragment of one from the proper era (say < 150 AD) turns up, it is not possible to say for sure.

The preservation of older manuscripts within the limits of the Roman Empire was more likely from the eventual decree of toleration by Constantine. The Persian Empire, where most Aramaic speaking Christians lived, never came to an accomodation of Christianity, and the persecutions there continued for many hundreds of years.

In doing my research I was a little surprised (and quite truthfully dismayed) to see the level of emotion invested in this issue.

I am too.

There is some simple evidence, such as the double repetition of the quote of Psalm 21 by Jesus on the Cross in Mark 15 but not in Matthew 27 in the Peshitta which says to me that Mark is a slavish translation of a Greek text where even an Aramaic quote with its translation was left in the Aramaic text as a double quote, while Matthew appears to preserve the structure one would expect of an Aramaic original, with no translation doublets in the Aramaic.