Tovey: Prolegomena ܦܫܝܛܬܐ or Peshitta. Thoth, Plato, Greek, Aramaic and Matthew 27:47

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Aug 7, 2020 at 17:42

Tovey you wrote:

>I am sure that my memory of those assertions that much of the New Testament writings were Greek, the single exception of the teaching in my youth that Matthew was in Aramaic, apparently since the tax-gatherer Levi was local to the region where he met the Nazarene and such a conclusion was not hard to take.

Good points. And remember that I'm not a theologian. I read history books!

Well, historiography (and these are books of history) is not unlike writing fiction. The writer will tell us what he believed happened or was said to him. I'm sure you are aware of the Egyptian God Thoth who was the God of writing. He called the Hieroglyphs the language/writing of the Gods and he called the every day written texts in Egyptian be it the Hieratic or Demotic scripts, the language of the books. Thoth believed that every thing should be written.

https://www.ancient.eu/Thoth/#:~:text=Thoth%20is%20the%20Egyptian%20god,%2C%20wisdom%2C%20and%20the%20moon.&text=His%20name%20was%20often%20taken,lunar%20disc%20above%20

Now, Plato's argument against writing is well explained in this link:

https://fs.blog/2013/02/an-old-argument-against-writing/

And this is indeed a very valid opinion and a real problem in reading these old texts and what they really mean and the reliability of a written text

So what does this have to do with George Lamsa? Here is the Aramaic text

ܐܝܠ ܐܝܠ ܠܡܢܐ ܫܒܩܬܢܝ

Or Eli Eli LEMNA Shabaqtani

And here is a link to the text in the Peshitta

http://dukhrana.com/peshitta/analyze_verse.php?verse=Matthew+27:46&font=Estrangelo+Edessa

Notice that in the Aramaic text it is Lemna and not as you shall see Lama

Here is Lamsa's translation:

My God My God For this I was kept.

The real problem here is that the Greek language lacked all these Semitic letters the likes of Kha and Qaf and Hah and this leads to a serious problem and that is transliteration from an Aramaic ORAL text to a written Greek text.

I will end with the text in Arabic and then there will be a part two

Here is the text in Arabic:

الهي الهي لماذا تركتني

This can be rendered as: My God My God why did you leave me behind

The Aramaic word ܫܒܩܬܢܝ Shabaqtani can be read in Arabic as the root س-ب-ق and the word would be سبقتني or Sabaqtani it can also be read as the root ت-ر-ك or تركتني or Taraktani which is what you would find in the Arabic translation so which one is it?

Now compare with the text in English: Eli Eli Lama Sabachtani ....My God My God why hath thou forsaken me

This example makes me wonder that this text is Aramaic first and foremost. So was the NT written first in Aramaic and then translated to Greek? Well, the Christ must have spoken let us say the Sermon on The Mount in Aramaic and not Greek.

It makes one wonder

Last, there is a famous saying in Islam by Othman, who collected the Qur'an, when he realized that the scribes were making many mistakes in the Quranic text and his advise was: لاتغيروها فان العرب ستغيرها or Do not change it (correct the mistakes) because the Arabs (read this as Arabic speaking Muslims) will change (fix the mistakes) it.

May be Lama is just as good as Lemna? Food for thought

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