The building is new - a bit too contemporary for my taste.
Posted on 02/06/2009 9:35:02 AM PST by Between the Lines
NICOSIA (Reuters Life!) - Authorities in northern Cyprus believe they have found an ancient version of the Bible written in Syriac, a dialect of the native language of Jesus.
The manuscript was found in a police raid on suspected antiquity smugglers. Turkish Cypriot police testified in a court hearing they believe the manuscript could be about 2,000 years old.
The manuscript carries excerpts of the Bible written in gold lettering on vellum and loosely strung together, photos provided to Reuters showed. One page carries a drawing of a tree, and another eight lines of Syriac script.
Experts were however divided over the provenance of the manuscript, and whether it was an original, which would render it priceless, or a fake.
Experts said the use of gold lettering on the manuscript was likely to date it later than 2,000 years.
"I'd suspect that it is most likely to be less than 1,000 years old," leading expert Peter Williams, Warden of Tyndale House, University of Cambridge told Reuters.
Turkish Cypriot authorities seized the relic last week and nine individuals are in custody pending further investigations. More individuals are being sought in connection with the find, they said.
Further investigations turned up a prayer statue and a stone carving of Jesus believed to be from a church in the Turkish held north, as well as dynamite.
The police have charged the detainees with smuggling antiquities, illegal excavations and the possession of explosives.
Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic - the native language of Jesus - once spoken across much of the Middle East and Central Asia. It is used wherever there are Syrian Christians and still survives in the Syrian Orthodox Church in India.
Aramaic is still used in religious rituals of Maronite Christians in Cyprus.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
That would be a “Targum” wouldn’t it, if it were an Aramaic bible from the time of Christ. I would think it would be pretty easy to tell if it really were that ancient, and I thought all bibles were scrolls back then.
Not if it were an Old Testament Jewish text in Aramaic (a Targum).
The building is new - a bit too contemporary for my taste.
The Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus both date from the 4th century, and are the oldest known more-or-less complete manuscripts to bind most of the modern books of the Bible into a single codex.
Prior to the popularisation of the codex format there was no such thing as a “Bible,” since the different books were kept as separate scrolls.
Thanks for the info.
I agree; I prefer traditional buildings to modern ones.
I took a closer look at the inscription on the Bible, and it says: “To Yeshua, from Yusef and Miriam.”
Don't judge a book by it's cover. : )
It is not unusual to find scrolls that have been cut up and bound into books.
LOL
Patriarch Nasrallah Peter Cardinal Sfeir, dedicated the new structure on March 6, 2001
"Syrian Orthodox Church in India"
I'd guess there is a story behind that.
Look up Saint Thomas, AKA Doubting Thomas.
From Wiki:
Eusebius of Caesarea (Historia Ecclesiastica, III.1) quotes Origen (died mid-3rd century) as having stated that Thomas was the apostle to the Parthians, but Thomas is better known as the missionary to India through the Acts of Thomas, written ca 200. In Edessa, where his remains were venerated, the poet Ephrem the Syrian (died 373) wrote a hymn in which the Devil cries,
...Into what land shall I fly from the just?
I stirred up Death the Apostles to slay, that by their death I might escape their blows.
But harder still am I now stricken: the Apostle I slew in India has overtaken me in Edessa; here and there he is all himself.
There went I, and there was he: here and there to my grief I find him. —quoted in Medlycott 1905, ch. ii.
St. Ephraem, the great doctor of the Syrian Church, writes in the forty-second of his “Carmina Nisibina” that the Apostle was put to death in India, and that his remains were subsequently buried in Edessa, brought there by a merchant.[19]
A Syrian ecclesiastical calendar of an early date confirms the above. The entry reads: “3 July, St. Thomas who was pierced with a lance in India. His body is at Urhai [the ancient name of Edessa] having been brought there by the merchant Khabin. A great festival.” It is only natural to expect that we should receive from Edessa first-hand evidence of the removal of the relics to that city; and we are not disappointed, for St. Ephraem, the great doctor of the Syrian Church, has left us ample details in his writings. [20]
I used Wiki, because it is easy to find on line, but over the years, I have read other books with similar information, written by recognized scholars.
Also, look up George Lamsa at Amazon. He was an Assyrian Orthodox Church scholar, and wrote about the beginings of that church. Also, his people also still spoke Aramaic, so he did a popular, rather than scholarly, work on Aramaic idioms used in the Bible, aimed at helping Western Christians better understand what what was being said. They use the Syriac, not the KJV, in his church.
Here’s a link to part of the Liturgy in Aramaic
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnXcKYNOsAw&feature=related
Thanks!
Interesting and we have a descendant of this in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Syro-Aramaic_Reading_Of_The_Koran
Interesting....
Arabic was rarely written prior to Islam but did exist as a spoken language 400 years before Muhammad was even born. However, the Arabic spoken prior to and during early Islam was classical Arabic; quite different from modern Arabic and the dialects.
The short vowels were not added to the writing until after Islam, by one of the caliphs. Also many letters were written without the dots, which distinguish some letters from others. It was assumed that the reader would just know what the word was supposed to be based on context. The assumption didn’t go over too well as many people had trouble reading the letters, and eventually the dots were included in written Arabic. Along with the short vowels, they were written in red ink to distinguish them from the skeleton of the letters which was written in black.
related:
Saving the monastery of Mor Gabriel
(Muslims seek to close oldest Christian monastery)
Asia News | January 26, 2009 | Geries Othman
Posted on 02/02/2009 12:50:11 PM PST by NYer
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2176897/posts
ROMA - That Aramaic was the lingua franca of a vast area of the ancient Middle East is a notion that is by now amply noted by a vast public, thanks to Mel Gibson´s film "The Passion of the Christ," which everyone watches in that language.
But that Syro-Aramaic was also the root of the Koran, and of the Koran of a primitive Christian system, is a more specialized notion, an almost clandestine one. And it´s more than a little dangerous. The author of the most important book on the subject - a German professor of ancient Semitic and Arabic languages - preferred, out of prudence, to write under the pseudonym of Christoph Luxenberg. A few years ago, one of his colleagues at the University of Nablus in Palestine, Suliman Bashear, was thrown out of the window by his scandalized Muslim students.
In the Europe of the 16th and 17th centuries, mangled by the wars of religion, scholars of the Bible also used to keep a safe distance with pseudonyms. But if, now, the ones doing so are the scholars of the Koran, this is a sign that, for the Muslim holy book as well, the era of historical, linguistic, and philological re-readings has begun.
This is a promising beginning for many reasons. Gerd-Rüdiger Puin, a professor at Saarland University in Germany and another Koran scholar on the philological level, maintains that this type of approach to Islam´s holy book can help to defeat its fundamentalist and Manichean readings, and to bring into a better light its ties with Judaism and Christianity.
The book by "Christoph Luxenberg" came out in 2000 in Germany with the title "Die Syro-Aramäische Lesart des Koran" ("A Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran"), published in Berlin by Das Arabische Buch. It is out of print, and there are no translations in other languages.
You can read the rest of the article at the following link.
The Virgins and the Grapes: the Christian Origins of the Koran
>> Turkish Cypriot police testified in a court hearing they believe the manuscript could be about 2,000 years old. <<
When Jesus was eight? I guess they mean the Old Testament? Does it include the Dueterocanonicals?
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