Re: More on Logos
Ok, but do you see that Jesus has already died before this? What relevance does this have on what language Jesus would have spoken? It is still that these people would not have been proficient in Koine Greek, because they were the simpletons of Judea and small villages around the place.
You yourself have shown a translation from the Aramaic book of John - albeit translated to English from that language. We can see it clearly differs a great deal from what has happened in the Greek version - we can see clearly that they have applied Hellenistic principles to the work. Logos for instance has been discussed by the Hellenistic peoples for at least 500 years before Jesus, and now Jesus is the Logos? It is bizarre to say the least, and certainly rather suspect...
This translation came from documents from
The Ancient Church of The East, part of the Eastern Rite branch of Syriac Christianity.
Syriac Christianity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Syriac Christian heritage is transmitted through various
Neo Aramaic dialects (particularly the
Syriac dialect of Mesopotamia) of old
Aramaic. Unlike the Greek Christian culture, Assyrian culture borrowed much from early
Rabbinic Judaism and
Mesopotamian culture. Whereas
Latin and
Greek Christian cultures became protected by the
Roman and
Byzantine empires respectively, Syriac Christianity often found itself marginalised and persecuted.
Antioch was the political capital of this culture, and was the seat of the
Patriarchs of the church. However, Antioch was heavily
Hellenized, and the Mesopotamian cities of
Edessa,
Nisibis and
Ctesiphon became Syriac cultural centres.
The early literature of Syriac Christianity includes the
Diatessaron of
Tatian; the
Curetonian Gospels and the
Syriac Sinaiticus; the
Peshitta Bible; the
Doctrine of Addai and the writings of
Aphrahat; and the hymns of
Ephrem the Syrian.
The first division between Syriac Christians and
Western Christianity occurred in the 5th century, following the
First Council of Ephesus in 431, when the Assyrian Christians of the
Sassanid Persian Empire were separated from those in the west over the
Nestorian Schism. This split owed just as much to the politics of the day as it did to theological orthodoxy.
Ctesiphon, which was at the time the Sassanid capital, became the capital of the
Church of the East.
Here is the wiki article on the
Peshitta.
The Peshitta version of the New Testament is thought to show a continuation of the tradition of the Diatessaron and Old Syriac versions, displaying some lively 'Western' renderings (particularly clear in the Acts of the Apostles). It combines with this some of the more complex
'Byzantine' readings of the 5th century. One unusual feature of the Peshitta is the absence of
2 Peter,
2 John,
3 John,
Jude and
Revelation. Modern Syriac Bibles add 6th or 7th century translations of these five books to a revised Peshitta text.
Almost all Syriac scholars agree that the Peshitta gospels are translations of the Greek originals. A minority viewpoint (see
Aramaic primacy) is that the Peshitta represent the original New Testament and the Greek is a translation of it. The type of text represented by Peshitta is the
Byzantine. In a detailed examination of Matthew 1-14, Gwilliam found that the Peshitta agrees with the
Textus Receptus only 108 times and with
Codex Vaticanus 65 times, while in 137 instances it differs from both, usually with the support of the Old Syriac and the Old Latin, in 31 instances is stands alone.
[10]
In reference to the originality of the Peshitta, the words of Patriarch
Mar Eshai Shimun XXIII are summarized as follows:
"With reference to....the originality of the Peshitta text, as the Patriarch and Head of the Holy Apostolic and Catholic Church of the East, we wish to state, that the Church of the East received the scriptures from the hands of the blessed Apostles themselves in the Aramaic original, the language spoken by our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, and that the Peshitta is the text of the Church of the East which has come down from the Biblical times without any change or revision."[11] For more information, see
Peshitta primacy.
I do like to look at different translations of scriptures for comparative purposes. As you can see there is controversy surrounding the Peshitta, which you are free to investigate for yourself.
Christianity is not the religion of Jesus - Jesus was a Jew - it is more the morphing of Socrates into alignment with the Jews. If we want to discuss Socrates, I am happy to do so, but lets not pretend this is relevant to Jesus... I will certainly say Socrates was another Enlightened master - no less important, but completely unrelated to Jesus.
Actually, I see Jesus as
introducing dharma teachings to the Jews, but that's really going far from the Theosophical view of the Messiah.
