The Aramaic Period of the Nascent Christian Church

[John Reece]

Continued from last post above ↑

Continuation of excerpts from The Aramaic Period of the Nascent Christian Church (ZNW, 44 [1952/53], 205-23), by Charles C. Torrey:

Ben Zakkai's successor was Gamaliel II, who received the Presidency in the year 80, at Jamnia. He had been, from the first, a determined enemy of the Nazarenes, and one of the earliest measures that he took, on assuming office, was to insert a curse on the Christians in the daily prayer, Shemone Esre. This was virtually excommunication, and so it was regarded.* Gamaliel had made the daily repetition of the Eighteen Benedictions obligatory on every man. The Nazarene who felt himself to be a loyal Jew was now put in an intolerable position. He could neither lead the prayers in the synagogue nor join in them. He and his party ― the Christians ― were effectually and finally shut out.

There came a time when the leaders of the Nazarenes saw that they must cut loose from the Jews and cast their lot with the Gentiles. There is in Christian sources no record of such a time; and indeed a definite date might not be expected, in as much as the actual separation took place slowly (see below), since ties of race and kinship, and of long-continued custom, are not readily broken. But on the other hand, leaving the Synagogue and "casting lot with the Gentiles" certainly involved adopting Greek as the official language of the Palestinian Church and discontinuing the use of Aramaic. Here was a distinct and permanent mark of separation.

*Moore, Judaism, I, 292, footnote, gives the earliest Palestinian form of the anathema as follows: "For apostates may there be no hope, and may the Nazarenes and the heretics suddenly perish." In Vol. III (the volume of Notes), p. 97, Moore gives references from Epiphanius and Jerome, and remarks that in the quotations from the curse which they both give the Nazarenes are specifically mentioned.

To be continued...

[John Reece]

Continued from last post above ↑

Continuation of excerpts from The Aramaic Period of the Nascent Christian Church (ZNW, 44 [1952/53], 205-23), by Charles C. Torrey:

This momentous change of Church policy naturally implies a definite date for the decision, and for the actual beginning of a new order. It is a reasonable conjecture that the determination to withdraw once for all from the Jewish fellowship was finally made effective by the anathema introduced by Gamaliel II. The lower limit of the Church's Aramaic Period may then conveniently be put at the year 80. This date satisfies, better than any other, the conditions known to us.

The taking of this step relieved a tense situation which no one liked to remember. The "orthodox" Jews had been eager to be rid of the heretics, and they now wished to hear nothing more about them and their Messiah. For the attitude of the Nazarenes, I may repeat what I wrote more than ten years ago in the Introduction to my "Documents of the Primitive Church" (1941), pages xi f.:

"The fact that the nascent Church had been mainly Jewish for about half a century was very unpleasing to the Christians after the final break with the Synagogue, and it was ignored as soon and as completely as possible. Palestine was of course revered even in Antioch and Ephesus as the cradle of the Church, and the learned were well aware that Jesus and his disciples and the people of their land spoke, read, and wrote Aramaic; but this was now the language of the Church's arch-enemy, the vernacular of the Jews not only in Palestine but also in every land of the Dispersion. It therefore was speedily dropped from sight and allowed no influence in the actually existing Christian documents. By the end of the first century, probably, the language of the Church was definitely and finally Greek; the whole tradition was given a Greek form, and there could be no further question of a rival (Aramaic) authority". The memory of Aramaic was to be buried and not resurrected

To be continued...

[John Reece]

Continued from last post above ↑

Continuation of excerpts from The Aramaic Period of the Nascent Christian Church (ZNW, 44 [1952/53], 205-23), by Charles C. Torrey:

The evidence seems to show that there was a definite purpose, understood and agreed by the leaders of the Church, to leave out of sight and forget the "Aramaic Period" of the Church's history. Now that they had cut loose from the Synagogue ― and the rift was growing wider; now that the Gentiles, in ever growing numbers, were flocking to the standard of Jesus of Nazareth; it became evident that the future of the Church lay outside Palestine. For dealings with the pagan world the Aramaic language would be of little value, indeed would be a hindrance.

Josephus, at about this time, had seen that in order to interest the Graeco-Roman world in Jewish affairs he must write in Greek. For the Christians, the need was even more imperative, for they must reach the common people of the Gentiles, not just the learned and the influential.

There is good evidence that toward the end of the first century the Jewish authorities, led by Akiba, made on end of the extra-canonical literature in Hebrew or Aramaic. The Nazarene leaders must have welcomed this help in getting rid of their own Aramaic writings, now long familiar in Greek translation. The Greek must have undisputed possession.*

*Those Nazarenes, and there may have been many, who would gladly have preserved the Aramaic scrolls, were not permitted the choice. The Jewish authorities were in earnest in their purge of the literature, and no exception was made in favor of the Christians! Indeed, if the already existing books should be destroyed, the Christian menace, in so far as it was a literary menace, would be stamped out.

To be continued...

[John Reece]

Continued from last post above ↑

Continuation of excerpts from The Aramaic Period of the Nascent Christian Church (ZNW, 44 [1952/53], 205-23), by Charles C. Torrey:

At the time when the Romans advanced on Jerusalem, in the year 70, the members of the Church were "all" of the Jewish Christian faith, as might be inferred from Acts 15, as well as from Revelation chapters 1―3. Their language was at least prevailingly Aramaic, the language of the land and of their Church. Sixty years later, before the outbreak of the Bar Cocheba rebellion, the Palestinian Church was still mainly Jewish Christian, as we are expressly told by Eusebius (H. E. iv,5). The language, however, was Greek, like that of the great body of the Church outside Palestine.

The Aramaic of the Nazarenes' earliest literature now survived only in small and diminishing groups. When the members of one such group, early in the second century, wished to have in their own language the text of the Four Gospels and the book of Acts, they obtained it by means of a faithful translation made for them from the existing Greek.*

*This highly interesting Aramaic version of the five books was soon erroneously believed to come from apostolic time, and therefore was re-translated into Greek; which Greek survives in Codex Bezae and the "Western text" of the Gospels and Acts. See my "Documents of the Primitive Church," pp. 128-131. The text of the Gospel of Matthew went through an exactly similar process: its Greek rendered into Aramaic (with some additions) as "The Gospel According to the Hebrews," and the Aramaic eventually re-translated (by Jerome) into Greek; ibid., p. 130)

To be continued...

[John Reece]

Continued from last post above ↑

Continuation of excerpts from The Aramaic Period of the Nascent Christian Church (ZNW, 44 [1952/53], 205-23), by Charles C. Torrey:

The authoritative Christian scriptures were now only Greek, and so was the entire Church tradition. The Greek Bible now entered upon its best period. The special authority once vested in the Semitic tradition had ceased before the end of the first century. After the Bar Cocheba war, when both Jews and Jewish Christians were excluded from Aelia Capitolina, the Palestinian Church, made up of Gentiles with one Marcus at their head (as Eusebius informs us), bore little resemblance to the scepter-holding mother church of the fifteenth chapter of Acts and the Letters to the Seven Churches of Asia.

How much, or little, the Church's "official language" may have meant, is a matter of conjecture. We are hardly to suppose that the church of Jerusalem was at any time accustomed to indite to Greek churches, in Aramaic, such letters as are contained in Revelation, chapters 2 and 3. There were plenty of Nazarene writings in Greek, from the first, and the churches would naturally expect to be addressed in their own language. The case of Revelation was exceptional, as has been shown. The doctrine of the primacy of Palestine rested firmly on the holy books. The Prophets had declared, with one voice, that Yahweh had chosen this land as his own, and had promised that the Messiah should reign in the city of David. And the Messiah was soon to return!

To be continued...

[John Reece]

Continued from last post above ↑

Continuation of excerpts from The Aramaic Period of the Nascent Christian Church (ZNW, 44 [1952/53], 205-23), by Charles C. Torrey:

There is a startling piece of evidence ― manuscript evidence ― recently come to light, which shows the early Palestinian Church as the source of authority, giving the Greek churches instruction in Holy Writ which included a lesson in elementary Aramaic.

It was of the highest importance that all the Gentile churches should know the list of Israel's sacred books, the true Hebrew titles of those that were held to be divinely inspired. There were no other such books in the world; their names, at least, must be familiar. It now appears that the mother church of Palestine sent out to the Greek churches a document of instruction giving the complete list of the Hebrew canonical books, the Semitic titles appearing in Greek transliteration. This, of itself, would be interesting enough; but the interest and importance of the document are vastly increased when it is observed that the familiar list of Hebrew titles is elaborately transformed into an Aramaic list. The way in which this is accomplished will be shown presently.

The copies of this churchly bulletin must have been sent out, presumably from Jerusalem, early in the second half of the first century. How widely distributed they may have been, we have no means of knowing, but the number cannot have been small. There was only a brief period of time in which they can have been of use; they would speedily have been driven out of circulation by the regular Hebrew titles on the one hand, and by the long familiar LXX titles on the other, when the insistence on Aramaic came to a sudden end. It could hardly be expected that any trace of the unique edict would survive, and it therefore is a surprising fact that we now are in possession of the document*

*Indeed, we seem to have just a trace of a third copy; as to this, see below.

To be continued...

[John Reece]

Continued from last post above ↑

Continuation of excerpts from The Aramaic Period of the Nascent Christian Church (ZNW, 44 [1952/53], 205-23), by Charles C. Torrey:

It is only very recently that this fact has become known. Both specimens of the interesting little monument have been within reach of scholars for many years, but have not been recognized in their true character.

The first of the two examples is found in the works of Epiphanius (c. 315―403), the learned Bishop of Salamis in Cyprus. It is a stray document preserved in his treatise on Weights and Measures (De Mensuris et Ponderibus Liber). It contains just that which was described above, a list of Hebrew canonical books in a Greek transliteration of the Semitic titles; with the strange added peculiarity, the the Hebrew titles are given ― as far as is possible ― an Aramaic dress.

This could hardly be expected to arouse interest (though it evidently interested Epiphanius); there was nothing with which to compare it; nothing that could show its purpose or suggest its date. It could only be put down as a curiosity.

This state of things was completely changed by the discovery of a second example of the same Hebrew-Aramaic List. It was seen at once that both are more or less faulty copies of the same original, which must have been an official document of some sort. Neither one of the two examples is derived from the other, and each is the result of a process of transmission which covered some time. The strange use of Aramaic must be connected in some way with the purpose of the document.

To be continued...

[John Reece]

Continued from post #20 above ↑

Continuation of excerpts from The Aramaic Period of the Nascent Christian Church (ZNW, 44 [1952/53], 205-23), by Charles C. Torrey:

The place where this second copy of the list has remained hidden is in a famous manuscript belonging to the Greek Patriarchate Library in Jerusalem, the same manuscript from which in 1883 Bishop Bryennios published for the first time the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles. The codex is otherwise famous as a repository of ancient and important Christian documents. Our list stands isolated on fol. 76a, between the second Epistle of Clement and the Didachē. Obviously, it was preserved as a rarity, a relic of importance which might easily be lost.

Bishop Bryennios printed the list in his publication of the Didachē, but gave it no further notice; indeed, as is shown in the important work of M. Jean-Paul Audet, soon to be mentioned, Bryennios neither recognized the Aramaic element in the list nor took especial pains to give an accurate transcription. The title of the list in the manuscript itself is simply ὀνόματα τῶν βιβλίων παρ' ἑβραίοις. Bryennios describes it as the names of the Old Testament books "in Hebrew and Greek" (ἑβραιστὶ καὶ ἑλληνιστί). It is no wonder that one expert scholar after another, coming to the catalogue of titles and seeing that its first words are βρισιθ. γένεσις, ελσιμοθ. ἔξοδος, etc., would feel that any attention given to the list would be a waste of time. Greek transliterations are an old story, and these are not even given correctly. The list was lost to sight and forgotten.

To be continued...

[John Reece]

Continued from last post above ↑

Continuation of excerpts from The Aramaic Period of the Nascent Christian Church (ZNW, 44 [1952/53], 205-23), by Charles C. Torrey:

In the Journal of Theological Studies (New Series), Vol. I, Part 2, Oxford University Press, October, 1950, there appeared in pages 135-154 an article by Mr. Jean-Paul Audet, entitled "A Hebrew-Aramaic List of Books of the Old Testament in Greek Transcription". Here, for the first time, the ancient list is correctly described and its high importance is made clear.

Audet discusses the document very ably and acutely; there is not much that can be said about it that he has not said. He fails, indeed, at the all important point, to see what the strange use of the Aramaic language signifies; as to this, he has nothing plausible to say. This failure is in no way surprising, for the present-day exponents of Christian Beginnings have not yet waked up to an understanding of the part played by Aramaic in the early Church's literature and life.

Audet assigns the list to the second half of the first century, for reasons which he gives in detail. (The only possible date, as the present essay has shown!) Other important conclusions may be indicated by brief quotations. "As far as we can judge, the list is Greek and Christian as regards its range and diffusion" (p. 144). "There was a period of time and a milieu where the list was certainly known to a wide circle" (p. 142f.). "It must have historic significance, otherwise we cannot explain the wide diffusion which it certainly had originally. Only because the list had for a long time clear meaning and was commonly useful in a certain milieu, has it come down to us" (p. 148).

To be continued...

[John Reece]

Continued from last post above ↑

Continuation of excerpts from The Aramaic Period of the Nascent Christian Church (ZNW, 44 [1952/53], 205-23), by Charles C. Torrey:

An especially important service performed by Audet is his comparison of our Jerusalem list with the one (mentioned above) which was preserved by Epiphanius. He prints both texts, and discusses them at some length. His main conclusion, that the text of Jerusalem has preserved, better than the other, the form of the original document will meet with general assent. (In the sequel, the list of the manuscript will be represented by M, that of Epiphanius by E.).

The transforming of the old Hebrew list into an Aramaic list was a difficult task well accomplished. The names, familiar for generations past, partook of the sacredness of the books themselves; no one of them could be discarded, nor ever seriously altered. Here was a problem, for in spite of the sacred tradition the new voice of authority, the voice of the Church, must be plainly heard.

To be continued...

[John Reece]

Continued from last post above ↑

Continuation of excerpts from The Aramaic Period of the Nascent Christian Church (ZNW, 44 [1952/53], 205-23), by Charles C. Torrey:

In cases where the word is nearly the same in both languages, and the form employed is masculine plural, as in Judges and Kings, it might be supposed that the substitution of the Aramaic ending -īn for Hebrew -īm could suffice. This is not quite the fact, however; see below. Great use is made of the Aramaic particle dī (commonly rendered d', here often written de or da), by simply prefixing it to every one of the traditional Hebrew names with which the particle could properly be used. It is plain that it could not be used with any of the titles of the Pentateuch, nor with Psalms, nor Song of Songs, nor Chronicles. However, there are 27 titles in all, and to 18 of these d is prefixed! Through this simple and wholesale mode of conversion a Hebrew catalogue is made Aramaic.

To be continued...

[John Reece]

Continued from last post above ↑

Continuation of excerpts from The Aramaic Period of the Nascent Christian Church (ZNW, 44 [1952/53], 205-23), by Charles C. Torrey:

The most significant fact, by far, in this parading of the particle dʾ is that it is unfamiliar to those whom this Palestinian edict is intended, but must be interpreted. Immediately on its first appearance, in the titles of Joshua, Ruth, Job, and Judges, the reader is told what the prefixed particle signifies; thus: δαρουθ, τῆς ρούθ. διωβ, τοῦ ἰώβ. and in like manner δασοφτιν, τῶν κριτῶν. A familiar Semitic idiom is explained in Greek, and the construction which is interpreted is purely and characteristically Aramaic.

This shows, beyond any question, that those for whom this churchly bulletin was intended were Greeks in Gentile or pagan surroundings. The conclusion is well borne out by the fact that to every title in the list is appended the corresponding title in the Greek Bible; for example, δακοελεθ, ἐκκλησιαστής.

To be continued...

[John Reece]

Continued from last post above ↑

Continuation of excerpts from The Aramaic Period of the Nascent Christian Church (ZNW, 44 [1952/53], 205-23), by Charles C. Torrey:

Both copies of the document, M and E [the list of the manuscript is represented by M, that of Epiphanius by E; see post #25 above -JR], have suffered much in the process of manuscript transmission. Aside from the inevitable lapses of scribes, the constant influence of the traditional Hebrew list of titles has played an important part. The readings of the two versions, which should be compared, are provided not only by Audet, but also by Eissfeldt in the Theologische Literaturzeitung (see above).

One might be tempted to think (especially after looking at list E!) that our document was originally Jewish, and that the only Christian revision consisted in the exuberant use of the Aramaic pronoun dī. This is not the case, however. There is more revision than appears at first sight; the use of trē ʿasar, instead of shenēm ʿasar [over the first "e" of the latter term there is a rocker that I cannot transcribe -JR] (as e.g. in Sirach 49:10), shows that the list is conceived as Aramaic; and it is necessary to bear in mind how "untouchable" a sacred name can be. The God-given scriptures were Hebrew, not Aramaic, and every word, every syllable, had its message. To preserve intact, the revered names of the holy books, and yet to give the list a Christian (Aramaic) edition ― this was the task set for the revisers, and it was skillfully performed.

To be continued...

[John Reece]

Continued from last post above ↑

Continuation of excerpts from The Aramaic Period of the Nascent Christian Church (ZNW, 44 [1952/53], 205-23), by Charles C. Torrey:

It is indispensable to attempt to present here the Church's edition of the list of the Hebrew canonical books; that is, to restore the original form of the official bulletin which was sent out to the Greek churches in the first century; but it is a difficult undertaking. The case is unique, and the attempt at this distance to interpret motives and methods is most precarious. That which is offered here is presented with diffidence.

A few preliminary remarks will be in order.

1. I seem to recognize a very distinct purpose to get rid of the Hebrew ending -īm; that little mark which, more than anything else, would spoil the impression of an Aramaic document. In two cases ― the only possible cases ― the Aramaic ending -īn is substituted for -īm. The first of these is in Judges, where σοφτιν* could pass for either Aramaic or Hebrew, though not strictly accurate in either case. The other example is the title of the two books of Chronicles. Here the Aramaic word yamīn takes the place of the Hebrew yamīm. The result is a construct unit which is half Hebrew and half Aramaic; decidedly awkward, but grammatically legitimate.

*I follow the lead of Audet and Rendel Harris in interpreting the reading of manuscript M.

To be continued...

[John Reece]

Continued from last post above ↑

Continuation of excerpts from The Aramaic Period of the Nascent Christian Church (ZNW, 44 [1952/53], 205-23), by Charles C. Torrey:

Another device is the simple dropping of the m. Thus we have for Deuteronomy ελεδεβαρι (for אלה הדברים), while for the title of Kings we are given μαλαχεί by E, and μαλαχη by M*. Certainly E has preserved the original reading.

*The actual reading of M is μαλαχημ, but I cannot believe that the plural ending was originally written this way; on the contrary, the m came in through the influence of the traditional Hebrew, as so often in E.

To be continued...