In reply to message #0
Shlama Akhi Nicholas, Welcome to the forum and thank you very much for your kind remarks. I assume from your post that you are an Assyrian/Ashuri like myself. I actually started about 1 year ago making this interlinear (prior to publishing it on this site) using a "marked" or vowel-inserted format. The reason I decided to start over and use an un-marked format for the interlinear is because the marked texts came along during the 5th and 6th centuries......the earliest Peshitta manuscripts were, of course, unmarked. This is because the vowel markings were not invented yet. I wanted to make this text identical with the earliest manuscripts. This was very important to me, because although the vowel markings do indeed help in reading, they are sometimes the result of the personal opinion of the scribe at the time, in which they did not always agree (especially when you compare the "Eastern" and "Western" interpretations). The same thought with the 5 disputed books. The earliest manuscripts (and still today in the Eastern tradition) did not contain them, so my translation will not either. I realize that this makes it harder to read and interpret, but it was a trade-off and a decision that I had to make. I thought I would be safest from criticism if I decided to stay with the Pure Peshitta, even to the extent of using the old script (Estrangela) rather than the newer ones (Serto or Swadaya). I have the same modern Assyrian NT that you speak of.....this was created for us by Protestant (Presbyterian) missionaries in Urmia, from the Greek manuscripts. They say they consulted the Peshitta, but in reality this is not our bible, but one created 85 years ago by the Western missionaries from the Greek texts. It is quite different, as I'm sure you noticed. The only marked text I have of the original Peshitta was printed in New York, using the 'Swadaya' script. As I'm sure you know by now, it is almost impossible to find even an unmarked Peshitta in print. Our people are still suffering from the effects of persecution, so it is very hard for us to get back on our feet and begin preserving our heritage and our literary works. The copy I bought many years ago from the Church of the East, I cannot find anymore. Tomorrow, I am going to visit Mar Gewargis Church in Chicago to see if there is a way in which I can secure some more copies, or to find out if they are currently in print somewhere in the Middle East. I also have a copy of the one published in Jerusalem that you have mentioned, and I enjoy it very much. It is how I learned to read the Hebrew Square (Maarav) script too. I find this statement from you to be very interesting: >I imagine that the Greek >advocates will only be silenced >when a Peshitta manuscript from >the first century AD is >discovered That is very true. The same thing happened many times in the past. For instance, believe it or not, 100 years ago the scholarly consensus was that the book of Tobit was written in Greek. This was because the "experts" said the Greek was very good, and that the earliest copies were in Greek. Can you imagine? A Jew living in Ninweh, Assyria, writing in Greek! Of course, the "scholarly consensus" became "egg on their face" when the original Aramaic Tobit was found in Qumran. I also await the day when a first or second century copy of the Peshitta is found. It will be a good day for the egg industry! You know, Akhi, that most of our manuscripts that were very old are hidden in the mountains before we fled the massacre of early WWI. I long to go back there and try to find them. Mar Shimun's library is still up there in Qudch
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