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Akhi Dean, You have hit upon a very important issue which has the potential to change the way the world at large looks upon the Peshitta. The type of rhyming you are talking about is more precisely called "alliteration," the rhyming of consonants. It is important for our cause because it can be measured mathematically through statistics. A goofy example of alliteration would be the following sentence: "Willie walked to work on a windy Wednesday" If we were to translate this sentence into another language literally, without allowing the use of synonyms, it would be unlikely that the words "walked," "work," "windy" and "Wednesday" would all begin or contain a "w" to rhyme with "Willie." As a result, the translation would be less alliterative. Further, every language has its own statistical average for how much alliteration occurs in normal speech. We would expect poetry written in its original language to be high in alliteration. Whereas, we would expect a literal translation from another language, even if the original was poetic, to be less alliterative than the normal mean average alliteration of a language. The purpose of this long winded explanation is to draw your attention to an article by a SOC priest named Fr. Dale Johnson, which I have appended below. In this article Fr. Johnson argues the precedence of the Peshitta over the Greek text by showing that the Peshitta is more statistically alliterative than the Greek. If there is a flaw in Fr. Johnson's logic, it is that, since the Greek primacists already argue that the Greek is a partial translation drawing on Aramaic oral sources, a more alliterative Peshitta text by itself proves nothing. However, if we were to compare the Peshitta to other early Aramaic texts that we know for a fact are Aramaic originals, then we might have something. If such statistical analysis were to show that the Peshitta's average alliteration is equal to or higher than the average for early Aramaic in general, then it would be much harder to dismiss the Peshitta as a late translation from Greek, since the two texts follow each other so literally. In fact there would only be a few ways to explain this: 1. The Peshitta is the original text. 2. The Peshitta was translated from the Greek with the aid of an original Aramaic "sayings" text. 3. The Peshitta was translated from the Greek at a time when the translator's Aramaic was virtually identical to the original Jesus spoke, and he had enough genius to recapture all the rhymes, puns and subtleties of the original Aramaic while still following the Greek literally.. 4. The Peshitta was translated from the Greek with the aid of miraculous Divine intervention. Whichever possibility you choose, this would still make the Peshitta one of the most important, if not THE most important witness to the New Testament record. All of the texts one would need to start this research are available either here on peshitta.org or at https://cal1.cn.huc.edu/text_browse.html Choose the Syriac radio button search option. Unfortunately, I don't have either the programing or math skills necessary to do this research. If someone out there does, and wants to try this approach, I would be very interested in your results. Shlama, John -------------------------------- Alliteration as a Clue to Determining Original Manuscript Sources by Fr. Dale A. Johnson Nearly fifteen years ago I read Matthew Black's An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts. I was profoundly influenced by the power of the argument for an Aramaic Gospel. He outlined the history of Aramaic studies seeking to prove the hypothesis that the Gospels were originally written in Aramaic. Burney and Torry translated from the Greek back to the Aramaic. Jeremias tried to demonstrate a better cultural veracity in the Aramaic text. Black sought out linguistic features that bore the mark of originality. The methodology of Burney and Torry was flawed because of the various possibilities that existed for each word translated from Greek to Aramaic. It seemed highly impro bable that a perfect regressive translation could be done. Cultural authenticity in the Aramaic as proposed by Jeremias and his students, could also be demonstrated in the semitic greek of the koine. These were also the criticisms of Black and what inspired him to seek better scientific methods to demonstrate the Aramaic hypothesis. Nevertheless, as much as I was convinced of the argument proposed by Black, I recognized inherent flaws in his methodology. The aramaicisms may have been simply the influence of a translator who redacted the Aramaic version as he translated from the Greek. Next to finding a first century Gospel in Aramaic, I wondered if there was a scientific method or device that could prove or disprove the Aramaic hypothesis. The Syrian Orthodox traditions teach that the Gospels, especially Matthew, were first written in the language of Jesus. Scholars of the West have not weighted the authority of tradition highly enough to offset their view that the Syriac /Aramaic Gospels were translated from the Greek. It confronts the common sense notions of the Orthodox student and even the thoughtful Occidental student that Jesus spoke the Syriac/Aramaic language and gave us the teachings not in Greek but in Syriac/Aramaic. The Gospel writers, except for Luke perhaps, would have surely wrote in Syriac/Aramaic if they wrote at all. Why would the first writings be in a language that Jesus and his disciples probably did not know? The Common Sense Argument Certainly the missionary activity of Paul created the necessity for the story of Jesus to be told in Greek. But does it not seem that the Palestinian Church and its later communities in the diaspora would have demanded a Gospel in their own language? Some have speculated that Tatian's Diatesseron was used as the Gospel for the Syriac-speaking people throughout the Fertile Crescent for the first three centuries Now just because we reason that there should have been a Syriac/Aramaic Gospel does not mean that there was one. But even modern theorists of the Gospels tradition admit to a logia,, the sayings and teachings of Jesus. The Nag Hammadi Coptic material found in Egypt strongly suggests that there was a written Sayings Source. But most theologians in the West are taught that the Q source was an oral tradition. The Semitic Greek Argument When we look at the Greek of the Gospels they are heavily semitized. The word order follows a semitic pattern in many places. The grammar is tinged with semitic elements. Even semitic phrases are transliterated. Opponents of the Syriac/Aramaic theory counter that the Gospel writers perhaps thought in Syriac/Aramaic and wrote in Greek, giving the Greek a semitic form in places.2 But if this is so, then how could the Syriac/Aramaic be more alliterated than the Greek, especially when the word order and sense units are nearly identical? Of course one could get a translation to sound better and be more poetic than the original if one took great liberty with word order and meaning. But this is not the case when doing intra-text comparison. Socio-cultural Argument Joachim Jerimias argued that the best way to understand the founder of Christianity is to study the life and times of Jesus Christ. The "Palestinian" color or flavor and a saying's rhythm, assonance, and parallel structure were strong evidences of authentic materials according to Jerimias. Identifying the sociological clues as well as the linguistic features of a text were the solid indications of authenticity. What better way to understand the parable about the Wedding Feast than to study the social and cultural customs of Jesus' day. 3 The linguistic beauty of a passage does not prove that Jesus spoke certain words or that the Gospel writer even wrote them. Neither Jesus nor the Gospel writers had a monopoly on 1st century Aramaic. Fr. John Meyer in his recent book, The Marginal Jew writes, " After all, where does one get the initial data base that tells us that authentic sayings of Jesus are marked by particular poetic qualities? Until all or part of the Original Gospels are found, there will never be a base of data to identify the original sayings of Jesus."4 In the meantime, I have developed a mathematical tool that seems to be a kind of litmus test for determining if a text is original ( or close to it) or a translation text. It cannot prove who is the author because a forger or revisionist can make changes in the original language that match the poetic quality, though altered, of the original. Also, for the same reason the test cannot identify if the text is the original. But, it can identify a translation text when compared to one in the original language. This mathematical tool may identify if the Gospel of Matthew, or parts of it, were first written in Syriac/Aramaic or Greek. But it cannot determine if Matthew wrote it. A Mathematical Marker For several years I have noticed a poetic quality in the Syriac Peshitto text that seemed to be missing in the Greek text. The Syriac exploded with poetic splendor. I wondered if there was a way to quantify the Syriac and Greek so a scientific comparison could be made. I hypothesized that the melodic and poetic quality of a text is generated by repeated patterns and combinations of sounds that gives a wavelike rhythm to the text. This quality would be detectable by focusing on consonants that would repeat in frequencies beyond standard deviation. In other words, accounting for normal variation in frequency, certain sounds would "cluster" in statistically significant frequencies, suggesting that the author intended for certain sounds to dominate a text. This is a kind of sound thread the weaves its way through the fabric of the text. It is this quantifiable characteristic that cannot be translated. Words that rhyme, or assonantally associate in one language rarely do so in their translated form. Only if the translator would take great liberty in word order and meaning could such an effect be produced. But knowing from my reading of Greek and Syriac texts, no such "paraphrasing" occurs. In fact, it is remarkable to the student of both Syriac and Greek how close are the texts to each other in word order and meaning. Through the suggestions of my first mentor in the Syriac language, the Rev. John Freeman, a Methodist minister in the Pacific Northwest conference, I counted 10,000 Syriac letters and computed the frequency for each letter.5 I did the same in the Greek. Then for each letter I computed the standard deviation for each frequency based on randomly selected Syriac/ Aramaic texts.6 Therefore armed with a data base of frequencies for the letters of each language and each letter's standard deviation, I wrote a computer program that would count, determine frequencies, and identify letters that fell below the range of -1 SD. Thereafter, I proceeded to count and compute the frequencies for each letter in original and translation texts. For example I used the Apology of Aristides which we know was written in Greek then translated into Syriac. By comparing the frequencies for each letter against the baseline data, I found that the original Greek text was 23% more alliterated than the translation Syriac. Conversely, I counted and computed the frequencies for each letter in Syriac and Greek in the Testamentum Adae where the Syriac is original and the Greek is a translation from the Syriac. Here, the Syriac was 25% more alliterated. Now I knew I might be on the trail of a kind of mathematical test for determining original texts from translation texts. I tested passages in the Gospels in both Greek and Syriac. To my surprise, I found the Syriac of Luke, chapter 2 for example, to be highly alliterated in places and in other places the Greek was more alliterated. It seemed as if my theory had fallen apart. Upon closer inspection, though, I found that the Syriac was alliterated in only those places where there was sayings material. Where the angels spoke, and when Anna and Simeon spoke the alliteration was highly significant. Could it be that while the Gospel of Luke was more alliterated in Greek than in Syriac, except in the sayings passages, that the mathematical test was revealing what we have long suspected about the Gospel development, namely, THERE WAS A SYRIAC/ARAMAIC LOGIA TEXT PRIOR TO THE FORM OF THE GOSPELS AS WE NOW KNOW THEM? What I was observing was that the Greek form of the Gospel was an original writing created from a substrata of Syriac/Aramaic material we have long called the logia material. In fact the evidence suggested that what we have in the Syriac/Aramaic, while the Peshitto is a version of the Greek, actually preserves a more original text than the Greek, but only in the sayings materials. What we have in the Nag Hamadi Material in Coptic and most certainly translated from the Syriac/Aramaic, may be parallel evidence that the first Gospel was a Syriac/Aramaic Gospel of the Sayings of Jesus and others (such as Peter, the angels, and others). Inter-textual analysis of Matthew 2 The preliminary studies gave me confidence in the mathematical test so that I began to think of it as a kind of litmus test or the equivalent of a carbon 14 dating technique. There has long been a controversy over the relationship of the Old Syriac versions to the Peshitto and Harclean texts. Until this century it was understood that the Peshitto Syriac translation was perhaps the earliest version of the New Testament. In 1901 F. C. Burkitt proposed the view that the Peshitto was a creation of Bishop Rabbula in the early 5th century.7 Voobus, Nau, Harris, and Mingana disagreed with the chorus of approval for Burkitt's thesis. Burkitt went so far as to suggest that the Old Syriac was displaced completely by the Peshitto in the 5th century. Voobus and others challenged Burkitt's speculation with evidence from 5th century writings of the church fathers proving that the Old Syriac was not dead, in fact, the evidence suggests that there was not universal acceptance of the Peshitto. Some suggest that the Old Syriac is a late 4th century text (Black, Lagrange)8 . Thus, the Peshitto is considered to be from the end of the second or beginning of the 3rd century and it would be older than the Old Syriac. Others argue for the close relation between the Diatesseron and the Old Syriac to prove its priority over the Peshitto (Baethgen, Wright, Zahn, Nestle, Burkitt, Turner, Vogels, Baumstark, Dobshultz, Lagrange, Voobus)9 . Because I had samples of Matthew 2 in Old Syriac, the Peshitto, and White's Harklean text, I submitted them to an alliteration analysis. In two texts there were four letters that were statistically significant. Only the Peshitto text had five letters that were statistically significant. The were beyond the -1 SD. In all five cases the Peshitto was more alliterated than the Harklean text as we would expect. We know that the Harklean came after the creation of the Peshitto. But the Peshitto was more alliterated than the Old Syriac in 80% of the cases. This suggests that the Peshitto is older, or closer to the original source than the Old Syriac. The evidence is strong for the idea that the Old Syriac is merely a 4th century attempt to translate from Greek to Syriac that came after the Peshitto. Frequency Rates Be yond -1 SD Letter -1SD Old Syriac Peshitto Harklean 58.64 63.65 97.75 104.71 91.5 104.26 (14.37) 12.51 (13.36) 66.63 63.65 68.0 183.25 183.0 195.5 Conclusion What remains to be done is a complete analysis of all the Gospels in both Greek and Syriac/Aramaic to reveal if the results of the first samples remain true. If a complete analysis shows that the first Gospel was in Syriac/Aramaic, then we have mathematical evidence that would shift the weight of evidence more toward the Syriac Gospels than to the Greek Gospels when searching for the authentic sayings of Jesus.
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