3:37 a.m.--9/5/2005.
Indications of Scribal Interference in Religious Ideation of Respondants
In the Witness of the Babatha Archive.
The bulk of the Babatha Archive is in Koine Greek, the product of scribes who were under the employ of the Roman government. It is clear that Babatha-- from the context and expressly-- that Babatha is a Jewish lady of upper-middle-class status who dwelt around the Dead Sea area, held land, had two marriages and orphaned a son Jesus by one marriage; these facts are borne out in the legal documents-- 37 in all-- in the Babatha Library. [I have a volume with about 2/3 of the total library, so-called 'Volume I.']
As a Jewess, we see on several occasions that the secular--yea profane!-- Roman form of worship was intruded upon the very acts of business which daily had to be conducted. In 'Document # 12,' we read that a proceeding for guardianship over orphan Jesus had its minutes displayed in the 'temple of Aphrodite in Petra,' which was in Nabatea, one of Babatha's 'haunts.'
This document clearly states that the participants to the proceedings were Jews, which must have implied a ritual uncleanness of sorts that would require undoing by purification. Whether this purification actually took place is, of course, a matter of speculation, utterly dependent on how much value these Jews placed on Pharisaic halakah.
More tellingly, in 'Document #16,' which gives every semblance of being a Greek translation of a Latin document posted in the Roman government basilica at Rabbath, we read that the Emperor Trajan is called "Kaisaros theou," ['a Caesar of God'] and that his father Nerva gets the appellation "oiou theou" ['Son of God'], which of course invokes a number of theological and pragmatic stumblingblocks for a Jew (or Christian!) then and now.
I have read that the Caesars took on the title of deus and filius dei; my lapse of memory now however fails to indicate which Caesar was the first to take up this mantle of divinity. Certainly the habit was by no means original with the Caesars, however, for we know it dates back in the East to the despots of the Middle Eastern Empires and to Pharoahs. We do know, however, that the Jews rebelled against the notion of a divine Caesar, and Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich writes that Jews in Jerusalem rioted when a statue of Caligula was commanded to be placed in the Mount Zion Temple (A Concise History of Israel, Harper Torahbooks, New York, 1962, pp. 134-135.)
I feel some primal, let us say psychological yen to speculate about what the scribes taking a Jesus Movement which was primarily Aramaic-speaking and inserting such ideas as 'Son of God' talk into the theological language. While such construction is possible in Aramaic/Hebrew, it has a wider range of semantics than its literal meaning in Greek: Adam was the 'son of Jawheh' and in an indirect sense so are all men/humankind. This is the register of meaning that seems to be implied in Luke's version of Jesus' genealogy, Lk. 3:23-38, ending with the announcement that Adam was 'the son of God.'
But more frequently we read of Jesus calling himself 'the Son of Man,' an expression which to Christians has assumed mystical and sacerdotal ultimacy far beyond what I think its aboriginal context might have been, provided we assume-- as is still the prevailing view-- that Jesus spoke Aramaic as his first language.
In the Targumim--the Aramaic versions of the Bible available to Jews in Rabbinical times--the expression 'son of man,' bar [e]nosh, occurs quite frequently, which the general sense of meaning 'anybody, a particular person, that particular person.' In a negation (with a la for 'not' in context) we read in the Dead Sea Scrolls Genesis Aprocryphon 12:13 br anvsh as 'no one.' The expression bar enash also appears in Daniel 7:13, where the NRSV translates it, "As I watched in the night visions, I saw one like a human being coming with the clouds of heaven. And he came to the Ancient One and was presented before him." [Emphasis mine.]
From these contexts, synchronic relative to Jesus, and historically diachronic-retrospective, we can see that 'son of man' as an Aramaic expression amounted to a way to talking in the third-person about someone. If Jesus was speaking Aramaic in his teachings, considerable distortion of semantic intent would have had to occur to switch from an implicature (semanticist Paul Grice's term for implication in conversation that gets its meaning-across) of Jesus' trying to point out that someone is the Messiah here--is it you?-- is it this man?--is it this woman?--or is it I, the Sage, the Rabbi to whom you speak, Jesus? ...VERSUS: the 'Son of Man' as an inherently mystical concept to the rarefied into Godhead?
The logical step toward calling Jesus a literal Filius Dei, Uios Theou could easily be seen as a logical trend away from the Semitic mindset toward monism and psychological dynamism. Certainly it is a bone-of-contention with Nestorian Christians, Jews, and Muslims, all of whom are cultured in language of worship which does not accomodated Incarnation in a human being. These language patterns are deeply-engrained, but not pre-determinative; nevertheless, they bias the kind of response a particular speech-community will make toward a cognitive set like an ideology.
I am led to believe on the slender basis of the evidence marshalled here that we need to examine the New Testament in general and the teachings of Jesus in particular for evidence of contamination by later editorialists and theologians, all-too-ready to read something mistaken-in-context from the sayings of Jesus-- which must have been mulled over and mulled over and mulled over many times from Aramaic followers into crudest fishmonger's Greek then into the polished forms in which we find it in the edited Koine Greek versions (which as I have indicated all show much sign of editorial over-work!)
The quintessence of editorial revision lies in the texts behind the King James Bible, the so-called "Majority Greek Text," which is the New Testament of the Byzantine Church, and the Vulgate Latin text behind the Douay Bible in English. If I may be permitted a generalization, I would have to say that these texts all show a trend toward beautifying and making coherent the logical lapses in previous versions, or in correcting previous theological errors. We have every sociological and thus sociolinguistic reason to think that a shift occurred between the utterance of Jesus, the reiteration by the 'disciples,' and the interface with the earliest editors who crafted the Ur-Text of Q...then ever afterward distorting the distortions initially effected.
It cannot be-- if this all-too-inevitable charge be true-- that our scholarship should shirk from the correction of what seems like a patent deviation of linguistic drift.
We near completion of our discussion of the Babatha Library, in a series, but we shall return to it topically as whim and studies focus on this great resource. We shall take up a new line of inquiry in the next entry.
Indications of Scribal Interference in Religious Ideation of Respondants
In the Witness of the Babatha Archive.
The bulk of the Babatha Archive is in Koine Greek, the product of scribes who were under the employ of the Roman government. It is clear that Babatha-- from the context and expressly-- that Babatha is a Jewish lady of upper-middle-class status who dwelt around the Dead Sea area, held land, had two marriages and orphaned a son Jesus by one marriage; these facts are borne out in the legal documents-- 37 in all-- in the Babatha Library. [I have a volume with about 2/3 of the total library, so-called 'Volume I.']
As a Jewess, we see on several occasions that the secular--yea profane!-- Roman form of worship was intruded upon the very acts of business which daily had to be conducted. In 'Document # 12,' we read that a proceeding for guardianship over orphan Jesus had its minutes displayed in the 'temple of Aphrodite in Petra,' which was in Nabatea, one of Babatha's 'haunts.'
This document clearly states that the participants to the proceedings were Jews, which must have implied a ritual uncleanness of sorts that would require undoing by purification. Whether this purification actually took place is, of course, a matter of speculation, utterly dependent on how much value these Jews placed on Pharisaic halakah.
More tellingly, in 'Document #16,' which gives every semblance of being a Greek translation of a Latin document posted in the Roman government basilica at Rabbath, we read that the Emperor Trajan is called "Kaisaros theou," ['a Caesar of God'] and that his father Nerva gets the appellation "oiou theou" ['Son of God'], which of course invokes a number of theological and pragmatic stumblingblocks for a Jew (or Christian!) then and now.
I have read that the Caesars took on the title of deus and filius dei; my lapse of memory now however fails to indicate which Caesar was the first to take up this mantle of divinity. Certainly the habit was by no means original with the Caesars, however, for we know it dates back in the East to the despots of the Middle Eastern Empires and to Pharoahs. We do know, however, that the Jews rebelled against the notion of a divine Caesar, and Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich writes that Jews in Jerusalem rioted when a statue of Caligula was commanded to be placed in the Mount Zion Temple (A Concise History of Israel, Harper Torahbooks, New York, 1962, pp. 134-135.)
I feel some primal, let us say psychological yen to speculate about what the scribes taking a Jesus Movement which was primarily Aramaic-speaking and inserting such ideas as 'Son of God' talk into the theological language. While such construction is possible in Aramaic/Hebrew, it has a wider range of semantics than its literal meaning in Greek: Adam was the 'son of Jawheh' and in an indirect sense so are all men/humankind. This is the register of meaning that seems to be implied in Luke's version of Jesus' genealogy, Lk. 3:23-38, ending with the announcement that Adam was 'the son of God.'
But more frequently we read of Jesus calling himself 'the Son of Man,' an expression which to Christians has assumed mystical and sacerdotal ultimacy far beyond what I think its aboriginal context might have been, provided we assume-- as is still the prevailing view-- that Jesus spoke Aramaic as his first language.
In the Targumim--the Aramaic versions of the Bible available to Jews in Rabbinical times--the expression 'son of man,' bar [e]nosh, occurs quite frequently, which the general sense of meaning 'anybody, a particular person, that particular person.' In a negation (with a la for 'not' in context) we read in the Dead Sea Scrolls Genesis Aprocryphon 12:13 br anvsh as 'no one.' The expression bar enash also appears in Daniel 7:13, where the NRSV translates it, "As I watched in the night visions, I saw one like a human being coming with the clouds of heaven. And he came to the Ancient One and was presented before him." [Emphasis mine.]
From these contexts, synchronic relative to Jesus, and historically diachronic-retrospective, we can see that 'son of man' as an Aramaic expression amounted to a way to talking in the third-person about someone. If Jesus was speaking Aramaic in his teachings, considerable distortion of semantic intent would have had to occur to switch from an implicature (semanticist Paul Grice's term for implication in conversation that gets its meaning-across) of Jesus' trying to point out that someone is the Messiah here--is it you?-- is it this man?--is it this woman?--or is it I, the Sage, the Rabbi to whom you speak, Jesus? ...VERSUS: the 'Son of Man' as an inherently mystical concept to the rarefied into Godhead?
The logical step toward calling Jesus a literal Filius Dei, Uios Theou could easily be seen as a logical trend away from the Semitic mindset toward monism and psychological dynamism. Certainly it is a bone-of-contention with Nestorian Christians, Jews, and Muslims, all of whom are cultured in language of worship which does not accomodated Incarnation in a human being. These language patterns are deeply-engrained, but not pre-determinative; nevertheless, they bias the kind of response a particular speech-community will make toward a cognitive set like an ideology.
I am led to believe on the slender basis of the evidence marshalled here that we need to examine the New Testament in general and the teachings of Jesus in particular for evidence of contamination by later editorialists and theologians, all-too-ready to read something mistaken-in-context from the sayings of Jesus-- which must have been mulled over and mulled over and mulled over many times from Aramaic followers into crudest fishmonger's Greek then into the polished forms in which we find it in the edited Koine Greek versions (which as I have indicated all show much sign of editorial over-work!)
The quintessence of editorial revision lies in the texts behind the King James Bible, the so-called "Majority Greek Text," which is the New Testament of the Byzantine Church, and the Vulgate Latin text behind the Douay Bible in English. If I may be permitted a generalization, I would have to say that these texts all show a trend toward beautifying and making coherent the logical lapses in previous versions, or in correcting previous theological errors. We have every sociological and thus sociolinguistic reason to think that a shift occurred between the utterance of Jesus, the reiteration by the 'disciples,' and the interface with the earliest editors who crafted the Ur-Text of Q...then ever afterward distorting the distortions initially effected.
It cannot be-- if this all-too-inevitable charge be true-- that our scholarship should shirk from the correction of what seems like a patent deviation of linguistic drift.
We near completion of our discussion of the Babatha Library, in a series, but we shall return to it topically as whim and studies focus on this great resource. We shall take up a new line of inquiry in the next entry.
posted by learningaramaic at 12:37 AM
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