re: dhimmi no more - bogus translation or incomplete verses

Submitted by bill's girl (Saudi Arabia), Oct 31, 2009 at 16:36

To begin, I feel compelled to address the following issue first.  You write:

I state again, I never claimed to be Arab!  And, I ask that you give me the same courtesy that I give you, a little respect as a fellow human and seeker of knowledge.  Thus, I must insist that you refrain from calling me 'ms ignorant' or 'darling'.  As for what follows:

You write:>

1st of all, you are only quoting part of the ayah!... Look at the Quran and read it.  Don't copy and paste (from whatever anti-Islam source) a few lines and expect to convince me with that!  You keep repeating the same part of the ayah, and no more... Have you no other proof? You previously asked:

Well, here is the complete ayah, copied directly from the Arabic Quran followed by the translation from 'Interpretation of the Meanings of The Noble Qur'an' by Dr. Al-Hilal and Dr. Khan (theNobleQuran.com), plus definitions from Vocabulary of the Holy Qur'an' compiled by Dr. Abdullah Abbas Nadwi':

وَمَا أَرْسَلْنَا مِن رَّسُولٍ إِلاَّ بِلِسَانِ قَوْمِهِ لِيُبَيِّنَ لَهُمْ فَيُضِلُّ اللّهُ مَن يَشَاء وَيَهْدِي مَن يَشَاء وَهُوَ الْعَزِيزُ الْحَكِيمُ

And We sent not a Messenger except with the language of his people, in order that he might make (the Message) clear for them. Then Allâh misleads whom He wills and guides whom He wills. And He is the All-Mighty, the All-Wise. (Ibrahim 14:4)

لِيُبَيِّنَ – لِ = to,   يُبَيِّنَ = make clear

لَهُمْ – for them

You wrote:

I am not editing anything, I am using the complete text, not only what suits me for my argument as you do!

And, again, I am not hindi or pakistani.  I am American!  However, by the way you write and by your obsession with 'hindi, pakistani, tablighee', I might be tempted to suggest that you may be the hindi or pakistani.  Also, I have asked you to refrain from referring to me as 'darling'.  Please find a more tactful way of addressing people.

You write:

I am not suggesting that Moses being sent only to the Jews or Jesus only to the Aramaics is the correct view... I am stating that your argument/logic suggests it.

Bogus?... your whole argument is bogus.

You further write:

>

Despite what you may hope to accomplish by your name calling, it is in fact Aramaic (some may argue Hebrew), not Syriac...

I quote Steven Gertz from Chritisanitytoday.com:  "Aramaic was the dominant Semitic language of Jesus' time.  Emerging around 1000 BC in several Aramean kingdoms, Aramaic spread through the conquests of the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian empires to encompass the entire Middle East, stretching from Egypt to Pakistan.  In the Holy Land, Aramaic supplanted Hebrew as the language of the people sometime between 721 BC, the year Israel's capital Samaria fell to Assyrian invaders, and 500 BC, following the fall of Jerusalem to Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon.

The return of Jews to Jerusalem and the rebuilding of the Temple did not undermine Aramaic's newfound status in Hebrew culture.  Aramaic appears at times in the Old Testament, and recent evidence gathered from the Dead Sea scrolls suggests that the apocryphal book of Tobit was written entirely in Aramaic.  The Gospel of Mark quotes Jesus in Aramaic several times; the best known of these may be his words on the cross – "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?" … Judging from its renderings in Matthew and Luke, some scholars think Jesus composed the Lord's Prayer in Aramaic.…

… Aramaic was the language of the Middle East at the time, among Jews and Gentiles alike.  Inscriptions in churches across the Holy Land attest to this – scholars have even found early Aramaic copies of the Bible…

Today, the majority of those who use Aramaic as their mother tongue belong to the Syrian Orthodox Church … "

And Fr. Massimo Pazzini of the "holy land" quarterly: "The Hebrew language, the same language used in writing the Books of the Old Testament…

Besides Hebrew, there was another language – Aramaic – which had already been used along side for some centuries.  This language was the "familiar" language which the people spoke in most of the villages and towns of Palestine, particularly in the North (Nazareth, Capharnaum, etc) Where Jesus was educated, grew up, and spent the major portion of His life.  It was also understood and spoken outside the confines of this region.…

One incident recorded in the Gospel of Luke (Luke4:16-30) helps us understand that the Hebrew language was familiar to Jesus.  In this passage, it says that Jesus read the Scroll of the Law (from Prophet Isaiah) in the Synagogue at Nazareth.  Certainly this Reading was done in Hebrew.  The few words that Jesus added by way of comment were most probably spoken in Aramaic.  A little like our Church, before the liturgy was reformed, when the Readings were proclaimed in Latin but the Homily was given in the native language of the people.  This, therefore, was the atmosphere in which Jesus grew up.  It was a multi-lingual environment in which Hebrew and Aramaic had to at least have the advantage of usage in the ordinary conversations of daily life.

… These Words, found in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, are interpreted for us as a Prayer of Jesus.  They were in fact the beginning of Psalm 22, spoken by Jesus in Aramaic, and faithfully written down by the Evangelists in Greek.  It is possible that the Evangelists wished to preserve and hand down through their writings some words certainly spoken by Jesus, words which the Early Christians (since they spoke Aramaic) faithfully remembered…

Specialists of the Aramaic language have analyzed closely this topic, and had come to distinguish various Aramaic dialects in the contemporary Palestine of Jesus as testified to by inscriptions thus discovered. Based on this data, they are able to distinguish seven dialects that were shared by seven different localities in this small region: 1. Aramaic of Judea. 2. Aramaic of Southern Judea. 3. Aramaic of Samaria. 4. Aramaic of Galilee. 5. Aramaic from beyond Jordan. 6. Aramaic from Damascus. 7. Aramaic spoken in the Orontes River Basin of Syria. …

Jesus certainly spoke the Aramaic dialect of Galilee…"

Abraham Geiger suggests that Mishnaic Hebrew was an artificial creation of Rabbis whose native tongue was Aramaic .

And, Matthew Black, an expert of Aramaic and proponent of the idea that Hebrew was a dead language in the time of Jesus says: "… the Aramaic speaking masses… could no longer understand Hebrew."

Douglas Hamp, in his introduction in 'Discovering the Language of Jesus, Hebrew or Aramaic?' considers arguments for Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic, but makes no mention of Syriac.

Gabriel M. Sawma in his A study in the Aramaic Language of Jesus  states: "There have also been claims by various scholars that clear traces of Aramaic can be found in the origins of Hebrew.³ … Recently, various studies⁴ have emphasized that Aramaic may have influenced the Hebrew language very strongly, mainly in the second half of the first millennium BC up to the beginning of the Christian Era. …Passages of the Old Testament written in the Aramaic language are called Biblical Aramaic. They occur in Ezra 4:8; 6:18 and 7:12-26. Daniel 2:4,7:28; and the gloss in Jer. 10:11 and Gen 31:47. … Various scholars have tried to show that the original language of a number of books from the Persian and Hellenistic periods, were written in Aramaic, and that they were later translated into Hebrew. This view has been presented in connection with Job, Koheleth, Daniel, Esther, 1 and 2 Chronicles, proverbs, and Ezekiel¹¹ … In the New Testament, various Aramaic words or expressions occur, e.g. "Talitha Cumi" (little girl, stand up) Mark 5:41; "Ephphata" (etphtah, be opened) Mark 7:34; "Eli, Eli, Lama Shabachthani" (my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me) Matt.27:46, Mark 15:34; "Rabboni" (my Lord) Mark 10:51, John 20:16; "Maran Atha" (our Lord, come) Cor. 16:22. … Aramaic influence is apparent in personal names such as " Cephas" John 1:42, 1 Cor 1:12 and "Tabitha" Acts 9:36, 40, and in place names, including "Akeldama" (field of blood) Acts 1:19; "Gesthsemane (oil press) Matt 26:36, Mark 14:32; and "Golgotha" (skull) Mark 15:22 "

At any rate, Omniglot.com states: "The origins of the Syriac script are shrouded in mystery. It was orginally used as the medium for the extensive religious literature of Syrian Christians. In 489 AD there was a schism between the east Syrian followers of Nestorius in Persia and the west Syrian followers of Jacob of Edessa. … Aramaic, a Semitic language that was the lingua franca of much of the Near East from about 7th century BC until the 7th century AD, when it was largely replaced by Arabic. Classical or Imperial Aramaic was the main language of the Persian, Babylonian and Assyrian empires and spread as far as Greece and the Indus valley. … Aramaic was once the main language of the Jews and appears in some of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is still used as a liturgical language by Christian communities in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, and is still spoken by small numbers of people in Iraq, Turkey, Iran, Armenia, Georgia and Syria.

Aramaic has also been written in versions of the Latin, Hebrew and Cyrillic alphabets, though the Syriac is the most widely used script to write Aramaic.

Syriac, an eastern dialect of Aramaic spoken by Christians in the lands in between the Roman and Parthian empires between the 1st and 12th centuries. Syriac is still used used nowadays as ritual and literary language by speakers of Neo-Aramaic in Syria. It is also used for sermons in Syrian churches in the southern Indian state of Kerala."

Furthermore, according to Wikipedia:

1.      Aramaic is a Semitic language with a 3,000-year history.^[3] It has been the language of administration of empires and the language of divine worship. It was the day-to-day language of Israel in the Second Temple period (539 BCE – 70 CE), the original language of large sections of the biblical books of Daniel and Ezra, likely to have been the mother tongue of Jesus of Nazareth and is the main language of the Talmud. … Aramaic's long history and diverse and widespread use has led to the development of many divergent varieties which are sometimes treated as dialects. Thus, there is no one Aramaic language, but each time and place has had its own variety. Aramaic is retained as a liturgical language by certain Eastern Christian sects, in the form of Syriac, the Aramaic variety by which Eastern Christianity was diffused…

2.      Syriac is a dialect of Middle Aramaic that was once spoken across much of the Fertile Crescent. Classical Syriac became a major literary language throughout the Middle East from the 4^th to the 8^th centuries.  … It became the vehicle of Eastern Christianity and culture, spreading throughout Asia as far as Malabar and Eastern China and was the medium of communication and cultural dissemination for Arabs and, to a lesser extent, Persians.  … Syriac is a Middle Aramaic language, and as such a language of the Western branch of the Semitic family. … Syriac is written in the Syriac alphabet, a derivation of the Aramaic alphabet. … Syriac began as an unwritten spoken dialect of Old Aramaic in northern Mesopotamia. …  The earliest example of Syriac, rather than Imperial Aramaic, is in an inscription dated to 6 AD, and the earliest parchment is a deed of sale dated to 243 AD.  Other early inscriptions were found at Sumatar Harabesi.  All of these early examples of the language are non-Christian."

3.      "Jesus" (pronounced /ˈdʒiːzəs/) is a transliteration, occurring in a number of languages and based on the Latin Iesus, of the Greek Ἰησοῦς (Iēsoûs), itself a Hellenisation of the Hebrew יהושע (Yehoshua) or Hebrew-Aramaic ישוע (Yeshua, Joshua), meaning "YHWH rescues" or "YHWH delivers".^[

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