Shlama Akhay, This example is interesting in that it contains a Semiticism that is hard to understand in Indo-European languages like Greek. Part of the evidence shown in this post will demonstrate how scribes went to great lengths in some of the Greek manuscripts to rearrange the word order contained in this verse to make it more 'suitable' Greek. Here is the verse in the Peshitta: 0wh M0q 04yrp whw (And that Pharisee standing was..)
h4pnl Yhwnyb (with himself..)
0wh fcm Nylhw (and he would pray this way..) In the Greek text the words "by himself" are found right after "standing" (which is translated "stood and") and right before "these things", just as in the Aramaic and how Aramaic would be spoken. In English it would be "And that Pharisee stood with himself and started praying these things"!! This is very difficult to understand. In English versions, we usually see this translated as "And that Pharisee stood and started praying these things with himself." But that is not the word order of the original Aramaic, which idiomatically means "he was alone." It is clear that Luke originally wrote this the correct way and preserved the idiom, whereas some Greek copyists changed it so that it would make sense in Greek. Because of the difficulty in understanding the phrase, they either moved "with himself" next to "started praying", omitted the words, changed them to "by himself," or omitted "these things." The Greek manuscripts which preserve the original idiom, even at the expense of the Greek, are A, K, W, X, Delta, Pi, f13, 28, 33, 565, 700, 1010. The ones that altered it are P75, B, L, T, Theta, Psi, f1, 892, 1241. We always hear that Luke's Greek is the best in the NT - if so, why would he preserve such a barbaric turn of phrase as this by translating it into literal Greek rather than conform it to usages of the Greek language?
Fk^rwbw 0ml4
Peshitta.org
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