An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts

[John Reece]

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Continuation of excerpts from the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:

But, as Howard has pointed out, if Luke is translating Aramaic, then he gives the correct rendering of laḥda, namely, σφόδρα, in Acts vi. 7. A still more serious objection is the assumed equation of ἐπὶ τὸ αὐτό with laḥda; the evidence of the Syriac versions is irrelevant; laḥda is there equivalent to a quite different phrase, εἰς ἕν. The Aramaic adverb laḥda could never be represented in Greek by ἐπὶ τὸ αὐτό; the Aramaic for Luke's Greek adverbial phrase is kaḥda.*

*This adverb means both 'together' and 'at the same time', e.g. Isa. lxv. 25, Hebrew kᵉʾeḥādh (LXX ἅμα), Dan. ii. 35, Aramaic kaḥda (LXX ἅμα). This latter meaning would suit Acts ii. 47 (D): 'And the Lord was adding those who were being saved at the same time in the ecclesia'; the adverb refers back to verse 46―they continued in prayer in the temple, and were breaking bread from house to house, and at the same time, the Lord was adding those who were being saved in the ecclesia. Fresh light is shed on the peculiar Lucan expression προστιθέναι ἐπὶ τὸ αὐτό by an exact parallel in the Manual of Discipline (ed. M. Burrows, 1951), Plate V, line 7, בהאספם ליחד, where the phrase means 'to join the congregation'. The relevant Qumran evidence has now been fully examined by M. Wilcox, op. cit., pp. 93 ff. This is the fullest treatment available of this idiomatic Lucan expession and the Qumran usage seems conclusive for the sense, 'to be united to the (Christian) fellowship' at Acts ii. 47.

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[John Reece]

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Continuation of excerpts from the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:

In Jn. i. 5, Burney takes up the earlier suggestion of C. J. Ball that κατέλαβεν is a mistranslation of ʾaqbel, 'darkened', which had been misread as qabbel, 'received'. A similar mistranslation is suspected in Jn. xii. 35, ἵνα μὴ σκοτία ὑμᾶς καταλάβῃ. But whatever meaning is to be given to κατέλαβεν here, it is not simply 'received', and cannot therefore be equated with qabbel. It may be possible that an original Aramaic read la qabbleh qabhla, 'the darkness did not receive it', a characteristic Aramaic word-play. It is this idea which we find in verse 11. But we have still to account for κατέλαβεν as a rendering for qabbel. Is it perhaps Greek interpretation, the choice of the Greek verb being suggested by its idiomatic use for darkness or night 'overtaking' a person? We may compare xii. 35 or Diodorus, 20. 86, τῆς νυκτὸς καταλαβούσης.

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[John Reece]

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Continuation of excerpts from the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:

One of Burney's most valuable observations of this kind is that μονογενὴς θεός in Jn. i. 18 mistranslates yᵉḥidh ʾᵉlaha, 'the only-begotten of God'. It has an attractive simplicity, is free from philological difficulties, and the Greek reading is unusual. Equally remarkable, however, would be the ignorance of the translator who made the blunder, unless we look on his 'version' as a deliberate theological interpretation of the Aramaic.

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[John Reece]

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Continuation of excerpts from the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:

Similar objections, mainly philological, may be made to most of the examples of 'mistranslations' of original Aramaic which have been adduced by Torrey and Burney. Nevertheless, it would be unfair to overlook a number of valuable suggestions, credible and sound in their proposed Aramaic, of both these scholars. Some of these are quite certainly the best and probably right explanations of the difficulty in the Greek. And it is only in such instances, where a case both credible and philologically sound can be made out for translation, that this precarious method of approach is justifiable. 'The fascinating pursuit of Aramaic originals may lead to a good percentage of successful guesses; but they are mere guesses still, except when a decided failure in the Greek can be cleared up by by Aramaic which explains the error, and this acts as corroboration.'

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[John Reece]

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Continuation of excerpts from the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:

Several of Burney's and Torrey's more convincing examples of mistranslation are considered in later chapters; especially valuable are the former scholar's examples of the mistranslated Aramaic particle dᵉ. The following two examples from the work of Torrey merit the description 'brilliant', and deserve to rank with Wellhausen's observation on Mt. xxiii. 26 (Lk. xi. 41).

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[John Reece]

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Continuation of excerpts from the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:

In Luke 1:39 he [Torrey] suggests that εἰς πόλιν Ἰούδα mistranslates either Hebrew ʾel mᵉdhinath yᵉhudhah or Aramaic liyᵉhudh mᵉdhinta, i.e. 'into the province, country of Judea', εἰς τὴν χώραν τῆς Ἰούδαίας; Semitic mᵉdhina may be either 'province' or 'city'. The objection the mᵉdhina cannot be shown to have the meaning 'city' when Luke wrote is without foundation so far as general Aramaic, uninfluenced by any local usage, is concerned. But there is a reason to think that mᵉdhina was specially and locally employed in Palestine for the 'the Province', i.e. Palestine itself. The definite form mᵉdhinta meant 'city' and the two forms and uses are as a rule distinguished. An Aramaic lᵉwath mᵉdhinath yᵉhudha might be translated either εἰς πόλιν Ἰούδα or εἰς τὴν χώραν τῆς Ἰούδαίας. A translator who was not a Palestinian Jew may not have been acquainted with the special Jewish Palestinian use of the word, and have rendered by the familiar 'city'.

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[John Reece]

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Continuation of excerpts from the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:

In the following paragraph, Black continues his references to work by Torrey that Black has termed 'brilliant'.

In Lk. xi. 48 = MT. xxiii. 31 it is surely remarkable that the parallel in Matthew to Luke's 'ye are building' should be 'you are children (of)'; and Aramaic ַאתון בנין אתון could be rendered either way. Moreover Luke's 'and ye are building' is obviously anticlimactic as compared with the clear point made by Matthew. An intentional word-play in the employment of two such similar sounding words may well have been original in the Aramaic of this saying from Q.

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[John Reece]

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Continuation of excerpts from the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:

Wilcox recalls two examples of alleged mistranslation in Acts ii. 47 and iii. 14, both of which possess a high degree of plausibility. The first is the Bezan variant κόσμον for λαόν, possibly arising from the confusion of עלמא for עמא in the original Aramaic (the confusion is also possible in Hebrew). Alternatively we may prefer to detect the influence on D of a Syriac version, where [....] and [....] have been similarly confused. Neither explanation can be more than plausible, for it is also possible to explain an alteration of λαόν to κόσμον as the work of a scribe seeking to magnify the impression made by those early converts on the 'whole world'.

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[John Reece]

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Continuation of excerpts from the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:

The second instance is the Bezan ἐβαρύνατε (d aggravastis) for ἠρνήσασθε at Acts iii. 14: here the original in Aramaic (or Hebrew) of ἠρνήσασθε (undoubtedly the 'true text') can only have been כברתון or כַּדֵּבִתון. It has been suggested that the variant ἐβαρύνατε has arisen by confusing the roots כפר and כבר or (so Torrey) כדב and כבד. Wilcox tends to favour Torrey's explanation, but suggests reading אכבדתון, Aphel, (= ἐβαρύνατε) instead of Torrey's כבדתון, which it is by no means certain could mean ἐβαρύνατε. The same doubt, however, attaches to Aphel which (like its Syriac equivalent) means 'to irritate' rather than 'to oppress' (βαρύνειν). Nevertheless, some such explanation of this curious variant does seem plausible, for it is difficult to imagine a scribe arriving at ἐβαρύνατε in any other way. Another suggestion is that from an original כדבתון (or כפרתון) a translator gave ἐβαρύνατε in addition to ἠρνήσασθε by way of an alternative pesher on the original, perhaps understanding the Aramaic word in a Hebrew sense; or he may have found a variant which had arisen by corruption, e.g. כבדתון, and understood it in the sense of 'oppressed'.

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[John Reece]

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Continuation of excerpts from the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:

This line of evidence, mistranslation of Aramaic, while it can have a secondary value only as necessarily conjectural, cannot therefore be ignored altogether. But it must be pursued with the greatest caution.

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[John Reece]

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Continuation of excerpts from the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:

The fulfillment of a third condition is desirable. The strongest argument in favour of a mistranslation is its inherent probability in its Aramaic context. Possible mistranslations should be studied, not as isolated phenomena, but, so far as that is possible, in their setting in the Aramaic saying or passage. The advice of S. R. Driver is again worth quoting in full: '. . . in order to judge of it [the translation and mistranslation of Aramaic] properly, we ought to have not single isolated phrases, but entire verses, or at least entire sentences, retranslated into Aramaic, and the origin of the variants in the parallel texts, examined and accounted for, one by one.'

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[John Reece]

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Continuation of excerpts from the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:

CHAPTER II

THE LINGUISTIC AND TEXTUAL APPROACH

The Linguistic Approach

Aramaic was one of the great languages of the civilized East. It flourished mainly from the sixth to the third centuries B.C., during the period when oriental empires ruled the civilized world, when it was the international medium of governmental, cultural, and commercial intercourse from the Euphrates to the Nile, even in countries where there was no indigenous Semitic culture. It became the language of the Jews, when exactly is not known, but probably during and after the Exile.

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[John Reece]

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Continuation of excerpts from the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:

With the rise of the Empire of Alexander the Aramaic language was superseded throughout the civilized world by the Koine, but Greek never wholly displaced Aramaic among the Jews of Palestine or Babylon, or among peoples with a Semitic culture in Syria and Mesopotamia, where Greek was cultivated, but Aramaic in one of its main branches, Syriac, was still the chief spoken and written language of the people. Even as far west as Syrian Antioch, Syriac in the first century flourished along with Greek, and was as firmly established there as Jewish Aramaic was in Palestine.

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[John Reece]

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Continuation of excerpts from the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:

Four languages were to be found in first-century Palestine: Greek was the speech of the educated 'hellenized' classes and the medium of cultural and commercial intercourse between Jew and foreigner; Latin was the language of the army of occupation and, to judge from the Latin borrowings in Aramaic, appears also to some extent to have served the purposes of commerce, as it no doubt also did of Roman law; Hebrew, the sacred tongue of the Jewish Scriptures, continued to provide the lettered Jew with an important means of literary expression and was cultivated as a spoken tongue in the learned coteries of the Rabbis; Aramaic was the language of the people of the land and, together with Hebrew, provided the chief literary medium of the Palestinian Jew of the first century; Joseph wrote his Jewish War in Aramaic and later translated it into Greek.*

*Preface, § 1; cf. Antiquities, xii. 2. Dalman's important study of the three main languages of first-century Palestine, 'Die drei Sprachen', in his Jesus-Jeschua, should be consulted. These languages were, for the Jew, Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek, the first and the last in everyday use, especially in the cities. The results of Dalman's study for the general question of the language of Jesus may be regarded as firmly established: Jesus may have spoken Greek, but He certainly did speak and teach in Aramaic.

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[John Reece]

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Continuation of excerpts from the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:

If Jesus was a Galilean Rabbi, it is not unlikely that He made use of Hebrew as well as Aramaic, especially, as T. W. Manson has suggested, in His formal disputations with the Pharisees. M. H. Segal has gone so far as to claim that 'Mishnaic' Hebrew, the kind of Hebrew we find in the Mishnah, was actually a spoken vernacular in Judea in the time of Christ. In the Palestinian Talmud Aramaic and Hebrew are found together, sometimes in the form of a kind of Mischsprache; sentences half Hebrew, half Aramaic, are familiar to the reader of the Talmud, and this artificial language, rabbinical in origin, may well have been in use before as well as after the Fall of Jerusalem.

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