Groping with the Language of Jesus: Aramaic/Hebrew

2006-01-29T17:44:00.000-08:00

Notes and Explication on Luke 3:10-14-- the Second Part of S3

From the Q Parallels,

As well as Some Side-long Business to Which IWould Like to Attend in This Web-Log.

First, let me get some matters extraneous to the bigger project of trying to reconstruct the putative Jewish Aramaic substrate of Q, matters more closely related to my thoughts that occur to me as I work this project and 'learn the ropes' of Aramaic-- all the most-difficult way, without professor or classroom, and only my fairly good personal library and Internet to abet my studies, which are all a work in progress...

I to this point would like to decry the bane of work-a-day distractions, even those which are fairly close to the business of this web-log. I find myself thinking a great deal about my blogs on Biblical languages as I work, frequently finding myself in situations where I would like to 'put pen to paper' and cannot do so. So now, given pause, I shall 'open up' and try to spiel out the high-level-abstractions that have been coming to me in this work, and as well the abstractions of an intermediate level.

To begin with, I would like to say that I am very pleased with the services of the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon (CAL), http://cal1.cn.huc.edu, for here-- along with the great tools of the Aramaic dictionaries of Marcus Jastrow, Michael, and R. Payne Smith-- plus grammars in which to 'swim'-- I am able to build a vocabulary in the sundry dialects of Aramaic-- which with the cross-study of other languages (especially Hebrew, Koine Greek and Arabic) enables me to grow as I try to master this immense job.

As to my initial hypothesis as I began this web-log, that I would need to ascertain whether the differential in languages between Aramaic and Greek presents cognitive discrepancies, I would have to say that in the main, this thesis seems confirmed. The method I am using-- with qualification that I do not think it more than a pragmatic tool for analyzing languages semantically-- is essentially the ad-hoc, simplified form of componential analysis of which we read in Eugene A. Nida's "Procedures for the Analysis of the Componential Structure of a Single Referential Meaning," pp. 151-173, in Componential Analysis of Meaning: An Introduction to Semantic Structures, Mouton, The Hague, Netherlands, 1975; the gist of this approach is to array the semantic senses of a word/expression and choose which sense of the word best fits the context at-hand interpretively. The great elegance of this apprroach-- as well as its potential vulnerabity-- is its assumption that semantics can be understood abstractly-- that once the meanings have been lined up in one language, they can be imputed to another. This 'gives me a logical permission-slip' to use the lingua-franca of CAL-- English-- in deriving semantics for the Aramaic; in a larger sense, it 'permits' me to impute an Aramaic reconstruction even when certain scholars are adamant that the N.T. had no Aramaic substrate per se. In other words, the putative construction is a valid word of academics in-and-of-itself; and if we can accept the very meager assumption that there WAS an active Aramaic-speaking Church population in Palestine for several centuries after Jesus-- yea unto the Syriac Church today-- then this reconstruction is perchance not so speculative after all.

Now to the Lucan portion of S3 from Q Parallels, pp. 8-11 of our "reference text." Since Luke 3:7-9 contains cognates which are-- in the Greek-- identical word-per-word with the Matthean text, I shall forego discussion of these verses as redundant with the discussion in my last-- very long!-- entry.

This leaves us, according to Dr. Kloppenborg, with the Lucan S3 entry remainder in 3:10-14-- which Kloppenborg claims are dubious, but he cites the following as vindicating its placement in Q: I. Howard Marshall, Commentary on Luke, Paternoster Press, Exeter, United Kingdom, 1978; Alfred Plummer, The Gospel According to S. Luke, ICC, 4th Edition, T&T Clark, Edinburgh, Scotland, 1901; Heinz Schurmann, Das Lukasevangelium, Herder & Herder, Basel and Vienna, 1969; B.H. Streeter, The Four Gospels, Macmillan & Company, 1924 [with big doubts, Kloppenborg notes!]; Migaku Sato, "Q und Prophetie: Studien zur Gattuns- und Traditionsgeschichte der Quelle Q," Inauguraldissertaion Universitat Bern, 1984. Kloppenborg says all other scholars deny that this is in Q. To err on the side of 'safety,' I shall try to provide Aramaic cognates for key words in Luke 3:10-14, just in the same manner as I have done heretofore, trying for completeness in reconstruction yet realizing here that there may be some problems with the 'originality' of the text.

As far as the literary context in which this material occurs, we find John-Baptizer being asked questions by 'the crowd' about various ethical problems. There may be some conflation of these teachings with those of the Jesus Movement, but one is left with the strong impression-- partially corroborated by a reading of Josephus ANTIQUITIES OF THE JEWS 18:5:2, to wit as follows:

"...John, that was called the BAPTIST; for Herod slew him, who was a good man,

and commanded the Jews to exercise virtue, both as to righteousness owards one

another, and piety towards God, and so to come to baptism; for that the washing

[with water] would be acceptable to him, if they made use of it, not in order to the

putting away [or the remission] of some sins [only], but for the purification of the

body; supposing still that the soul was thoroughly purified beforehand by righteousness."

--- William Whiston's translation,

from The Works of Josephus,

Hendrickson Publishers,

Peabody, Massachusetts,

1987.

Consistent with these virtues, John teaches the 'crowds' to share, not to exloit one another, not to extort wages; since he gives 'Rabbinical' teaching to soldiers, who are likely to be Gentiles, one is inclined to wonder whether the outreach of John-Baptizer was in part to the non-Jewish community. This is only speculation on my part! But the Nunc Dimittis, Luke 2:29-32, with its proclamation that the Messiah is one who will be a PhOs eis apokalupsin ethnOn--"Light/Illumination in uncovering the hiddenness of the Gentiles" [translation mine]-- is frequently said to be a 'Baptist' document. If this is a valid claim, then it jibes generally with the thesis I am presenting here in this subtext, that John may have preached to Roman soldiers [the text does not indicate they were Zealots or insurgents referring to John], which to me may be taken as a beginning of a trend away from the exclusively-Jewish orientation of John-Baptizer's forbearers. Perhaps-- if this point may be pushed a little further-- we see this in the first part of S2, where John says that the Jews can no longer count on having a safe inheritance from Father Abraham, for God is able to bring up children from [cobble]stones [Matthew 3:9; Luke 3:8.] The evidence is not certain, but it seems possible that John 'opened the doors of salvation' to Gentiles as well as Jews-- a radical thought which may have had some impact on the subsequent Jesus Movement.

At any rate, here, below, are the key words for the Koine Greek words in Luke 3:10-14---

Luke 3:10--

"Crowd," Greek: hochloi, noun, masculine, nominative, plural; the CAL print-out was singularly not helpful, but in reference to the Old Syriac Gospels-- both Sinaiticus and Curetonianus-- mention k^n^$^), which R. Payne Smith defines-- p. 219-- as "a gathering together [of waters]"; "a multitude [of people]"; "a congregation, assembly"; "a company [of monks]"; this corresponds to Marcus Jastrow, p. 652, k^n^$^), a "gathering, people"; Michael Sokoloff, p. 264, presents a verbal noun k^n^$^w^[t], meaning "assembling'; this word seems likely as a candidate for 'crowd' here.
"Ask," Greek: epErOtOn, verb, indicative, active, imperfect, third person plural; CAL print-out has two likely words for use here: 1. b^(^y, which according to Jastrow p. 180, means a. "to search"; b. "to ask"; "inquire"; c. "to ask, want, desire; require"; d. "to beg leave to say; to remark; assert"; Sokoloff, pp. 107-108, shows this word meaning "to ask, wish, search for, require, state"; 2. $^)^l, cf. Jastrow p. 1507, with meanings: a. "to ask, inquire, beg"; b. "to borrow"; Sokoloff at pp. 532-533 has this meaning "to ask, inquire, desire, borrow"; according to CAL, $^)^l is "passim," i.e. "universal," so it seems to be a more-natural choice at this juncture.
"Do," Greek: poiEsOmen, verb, subjunctive, active, aorist, third person plural; for Aramaic, CAL provides a 'mixed bag' of 74 pages print-out, yet with only one word that really seems germane to the semantics at this point: (^b^d, which in Jastrow at page 1035 is said to mean: 1. "to do, labor; make to act"; 2. "to do, fare, prosper"; 3. "to spend time"; a noun-form with the same letters means "servant, slave"; Sokoloff, pp.391-393, renders this word with the meanings "to do, make, act, designate, determine, spend time, be, become"; the noun-form "slave, servant," is also mentioned.

Luke 3:11--

"Answer," Greek: apokritheis, verb, participle, depondent, passive, aorist, nominative singular masculine; Aramaic from CAL generates two prospects of differing merit: 1. t^w^b, which CAL indicates in Jewish Galilean Literary Aramaic means "to answer," [using the pa'el!], but Jastrow only links this with a Hebraism; 2. (^n^y, which CAL indicates in all Aramaic dialects means "to respond" and Jastrow, p. 1094, indicates has the meanings a. "to tarry, be detained, be late"; b. "to afflict, oppress"; "give answer"; c. "to violate"; d. "afflict oneself, fast"; Sokoloff, p. 412, gives the first meaning of (^n^y as "to answer, respond." Given the choice available, (^n^y seems to be the most-natural 'fit' in context here. But the 'fit' is not loose!
"Two," Greek: duo, number, cardinal, indeclinable; Aramaic from CAL, the universal symbol for two is said to be t^r^y^n; Jastrow, page 1698, cites t^r^y etc., with this meaning, while Sokoloff has for this cognate t^r^y^y^n , t^r^y^y and others. The gist seems to be that the basic cognate does not alter across diallects of Aramaic.
"Tunic (Kloppenborg's translation)/Shirt (TEV) / Cloak (semantic domain), Greek: chitOnas, noun, masculine, plural, accusative; Aramaic from CAL was singularly unhelpful; but at "shirt," the TEV expression here, CAL had t^w^t^b, corresponding to Jastrow p. 1659, t^w^t^b, "sheet, shirt." This is the likeliest choice, almost the only word of the lot presented that makes 'sense' in context.
"Share," Greek: metadotO, verb, imperative, active, 2 aorist, third person singular; Aramaic from CAL has limited options; actually the only word which seems to have any prospects is p^l^g, which universally in Aramaic means "to divide"; Jastrow pp. 1175-1176 renders this word to mean 1. "to divide, share" a. "divided, at heart"; b."differing in opinions"; 2. pa'el means "to divide, distribute, assign a share'; Sokoloff, pp. 433-434, defines this as "to be divided, share, be at variance, be in doubt, divide, distribute." This word thus would seem to be an acceptable candidate in the context here.
"Food," Greek: brOmata, noun, neuter, accusative, plural; Aramaic in CAL print-out is six pages long, but the first entry, )^k^l is the best in quality; Jastrow , p. 25 cites )^w^k^l^) as 1. "edible food"; 2. "digested food found in entrails"; "excrements"; 3. "an eye disease"; Sokoloff, p. 38, lists )^k^l simply as "food."
"None," Greek: mE, particle of negation; echonti, verb, participle, active, present, dative singular masculine, meaning "to [a] holding"; Aramaic from CAL generated essentially nothing; contextual study of Old Syriac Gospels and Aramaic overall leads me to believe that the negation l^ and an additional ^h [for "it'] renders about the sense we desire, for so we read it in Sinaiticus, Curetonianus and Peshitta; we also find such in the Targums.
"Likewise," Greek: omiOs, adverb; Aramaic from CAL has Syriac expression h^k^w^t; Jastrow, page 350, cites h^k^n, "thus"; Sokoloff, p. 165, has this expression meaning "so, in this manner." I think this word will certainly suffice for the purposes to which we must put it.

Luke 3:12--

"Tax-Collectors," Greek: telOnai, noun, masculine, nominative, plural; Aramaic from CAL is useless; checking the Old Syriac Gospels at loc. cit. reveals a word m^k^s^), which R. Payne Smith defines as "tribute, impost, toll, tax"; whereas the root m^k^s/m^k^s^) means "publican, collector, tax-collector"; Jastrow has no word per se for tax-collector like this, but does have cognates for m^k^s, cf. pp. 783-784; but note that Sokoloff, p. 308, at m^k^s, meaning #3, defines this word as "tax-collector"; otherwise he has it mean "tax."
"Baptize," Greek: baptisthEnai, verb, infinitive, aorist, passive; Aramaic in CAL is deficient of good, Jewish Aramaic equivalents for baptism, although there are plenty of Syriacisms from ecclesiastical experience with baptism. Here, the Old Syriac Gospels are already colored by this ecclesiastical tradition and the word in Syriac for "baptism" m^(^m^d in Jastrow only seems to refer to "standing up [at a funeral procession]"; this may not be the context in which the baptism-of-John is cast. This led me to do the full complement of research for this piece, not that I should not do so per word anyway. Correspondingly, I checked the Hatch and Redpath Concordance to the Septuagint in order to learn: 1. whether baptizein is present in the LXX; 2. to what Semitic root[s] it may be associated. I learned that this Greek word is associated with the Hebrew T^b^l, cognate with the Aramaicism in Jastrow at p. 517, meaning 1. "to dip"; 2. "to immerse, to bathe for purification"; " to season"; "to take luncheon"; "to be immersed, made clean"; this latter word would appear to be most-relevant for describing the baptism of John-Baptizer.
"Teacher," Greek: didaskale, noun, masculine, vocative, singular; Aramaic from CAL says that r^b, universally meaning "chief," and in Jewish Literary Aramaic Galilean, Jewish Literary Aramaic Targumic, Babylonian Jewish Aramaic, and Syriac, this word means "teacher." Jastrow, at p. 1438, says r^b means 1. "superior, master"; 2. "teacher"; as a feminine noun it means "mistress"; Sokoloff devotes several pages to r^b entries, at first defining the word as "great, large, important, older, master, teacher, chief." This aappears to be the correct word here.

Luke 3:13--

"Collect," Greek: diatetagmenon, verb, participle, passive, perfect, accusative neuter singular; the Aramaic from CAL is quite helpful, 9 pages of copy with several germane listings. The first notable listing is g^l^y, which Jastrow says --p. 206-- means 1. "to rake"; 2. "to collect"; Sokoloff-- p. 119-- has "to collect" for this. Next we have a minor entry, but one also witnessed in Jastrow, at pp. 650-651, k^n^p, which according to Jastrow means "to press, crowd, gather." Then we have l^q^T, which at page 718 Jastrow means "to pick up, gather"; Sokoloff-- p. 286-- defines this usage as "to gather, pick up, glean." Of these usages, we are left with several apparently good choices; I must confess that I do not know enough about the sociolinguistics of use in the various speech communities where these words come to play in order to make an optimum decision as to which one is the best word for 'the job' at hand. So using Bayesian logic, I shall declare the likely probability for using all three words-- as far as I know-- equal!
"Entitle," Greek: prassete, verb, imperative, active, present, second person plural; Aramaic from CAL has but one listing, z^k^y, which universally in Aramaic dialects means "to be innocent"; Jastrow, p.399, holds that the pa'lel of this word means "to entitle, give possession-to"; Sokoloff at p. 177 defines this word as "to be innocent, worthy, gain possession, give charity." It is clear that this is a very broad word, yet with a semantic domain covering the meaning intended by the context here.

Luke 3:14--

"Soldiers," Greek: strateuomenoi, verb, participle, middle, present, nominative masculine plural; Aramaic from CAL shows 3 pages with )^s^T^r^T^y^w^T as a Syriacism for "soldier," to which on p. 92 Jastrow has )^s^T^r^T^w^T, a transliteration into the Aramaic alphabet of the Greek stratiOtEs, "soldier," "Roman soldier." This is deeply unsatisfying because it would not cover the contingency of a Zealot or Nationalist insurgent of other sort who might come to John. But it is very very odd-- even Hebrew seemed to lack words in the O.T. for INDIVIDUAL soldier, although there were words for BANDS of soldiers. Perhaps a parallel expression like the Hebrew AISH TSABA--"man of the army" was the custom in those times. The Aramaic for this would have been ENOSHA D-CHEYL. But this is sheer sheer guesswork on my part.
"Extort," Greek: diaseisEte, verb, subjunctive, active, aorist, second person plural; the Aramaic in the CAL list is almost entirely Syriac, and thus minimally informative. I did check by reconstructive method the Old Syriac Gospels-- which for Wilson's translation at this verse has "oppress" instead of "extort," the Aramaic word for which is -- at root-- (^$^q, which Jastrow, at page 1126, reports as an Aramaic word with Hebrew parallel meaning "to wrong," especially "to withhold what is due a fellowman; to deny a debt." Additional Aramaic meanings include : "to pervert," and "to be outrageously dear." Sokoloff -- p.420-- has this verb only meaning "t flee." This word thus appears to have fair viability in the present language context.
"Falsely-Denounce," Greek: sukophantEsEte, verb, subjunctive, active, aorist, third person plural; the Aramaic in the CAL print-out is partly helpful; it is important to recognize that what is being asked for is "false witness," if one will permit the term, and not just "falseness" per se. To that end, CAL reports that (^l^y^l^h in Targumic Jewish Literary Aramaic means a "false charge." Making a false charge -- we may infer-- would be l^(^b^d (^l^y^l^h. We might also have recourse to the Targum Onkelos at Exodus 20:16 with the expression for "make false witness" i.e. n^q^b^y^l w^l^) y^t^m^l^l (^m^n^) m^n q^d^m y^w^y d^l^m^) ... "You shall not cry out and not be uttering words [of accusation] whence it is proven from you previously to be vain/false..." The key words making "false witness" are q^b^l and m^l^l and l^m^), i.e. "cry-out/condemn," "utter-word[s]," and "vanity/falsity." From these Targumic words we should be able to cobble together a valid 'reading' of this meaning into the context. If this will not 'do,' then we may certainly suffice to use the material already presented in the CAL list, all the while realitzing the hypothetical nature of every aspect of this work.
"Content," Greek: arkeisthe, verb, imperative, , passive, present, second person plural; Aramaic from CAL is brief, but it does not need to be longer than its two pages for me to select $^l^m, see Jastrow 1586, word with meanings "to be perfect, complete, finished, spent"; Sokoloff has this as a cognatie for "peace, well-being, contentment" at p. 554.
"Wage," Greek: opsOniois, noun, neuter, dative, plural; Aramaic from CAL illustrates that there is-- at least from the 1st century standpoint-- no solid word for "wage" as we know it in Jewish Aramaic. The closest aporoximation is the word )^g^r, which in the universal Aramaic sense has the meaning "to hire"; in Palestinian, it means "to rent"; in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, it means "to rent out, to lease," " to be hired out." Jastrow includes the sense of "wages" for the noun-form of this word at p. 14, but it is said that the CAL philology is more-to-be-trusted as being based on modern, exhaustive research using computerized databases.

This concludes my componential analysis of Luke 3:10-14, the 'second part' of S3 from Kloppenborg's Q Parallels. This is plodding work, and I think it will take me the rest of my lifetime to complete the work I have cut-out-for-myself on Q. I am trying to be careful in my work, but there are upper limits to just how much detail I will permit myself on a particular verse or word.

I do want the reader to know-- if there are any readers to this blog-- that I am trying to follow the reconstructive linguistic method by way of pragmatic componential analysis. I have read Linguistic Reconstruction: An Introduction to Theory and Method, by Anthony Fox, Oxford University Press, Oxford, United Kingdom, 1995, and I believe conservative work can be done using semantics on a word-per-word basis for the reconstruction. Eugene Nida is a great mentor for me, but John Lyons, in his Linguistic Semantics: An Introduction, has instructed me to be cautious about uncritical, facile 'overuse' of componential analysis as a way to get at meanings-of-words. Therefore, I feel properly chastened to esteem myself pragmatic in my search for the meanings of these words.

It must always be in the work I am doing the element of guesswork, of hypothesis. Those who exalt the text do have something concrete in their hands which is palpable and from which behavioral operations can be performed. But the work I am doing is like archeology-- reconstructing a vision of what conditions were like before all the 'new construction' appeared and disturbed the ground, leaving traces telling telling telling but indirect. The 'archeology' of my work is no less scientific than many a scientist forced to rebuild a picture and theory of a past which no longer exists. Forensic scientists, geologists, and paleo-ecologists are all compelled to resolve such problems as best they can, using critical reason, the comparative method, and Bayesian logic. I can use such scholar's tools to reason through the thickets of retrospective analysis that will have been necessary to make this project 'work.'

2005-12-31T16:52:00.000-08:00

A Tentative Reconstruction of the Jewish Aramaic of Matthew 3:7-10--S3--
Along with Some Analysis of John-Baptizer's Movement vis a vis the Jesus Movement
As Speech Communities Potentially Independent of Complete Dominance
By the Larger Koine Greek Speaking Culture.

First, a few practical details. I shall now resort to 'splitting' my commentary on Q in parallel, back-to-back entries, going for the Q in Matthew first, then analyzing the Q of Luke, as that is the format of Q Parallels... which if the avid reader of this web-log knows by following here is the reference-work, the 'Bible,' we shall use to simplify all matters of sorting out my approach to the material at-hand. Generally speaking, there is some discrepancy between the text of Q in Matthew and the parallel text in Luke [although that is nearly "zero" for S2 here--- the texts are largely cognate except for Luke 3:10-14, which Kloppnborg and others consider to be questionably in Q.] To deal with all the ins-and-outs of differences between one text and another in Matthew and Luke in fine is hair-splitting and pedantry... and not a few folks would argue that what I am doing in this immense project is a little pedantice to begin with! So I must be both effective and efficient in my expenditure of energies.

But before I go much further, I must make an utterance that may tend to explain whatever abbreviated quality the reader may find in this entry, this time on S2 Matthew 3:3-10 [and next time for Luke 3:7-9 and 3:1-14, also from S2 ]: I laborously toiled all through this New Year's Eve Day on this entry already, only to 'lose' almost every line of copy to a 'glitch' that may have been my fault-- may have been my PCs fault-- may have been my server's part-- may have been the fault of Blogger.com-- but at any rate a day of blog-entry is gone gone gone. I am only fractionally as ready to tackle this web-log entry-- which is really long-overdue after much hard research.

Let us turn to Matthew 3:7-10 itself, the first half-it of this S2 Q entry. The gist of the pericope is that John-Baptizer is telling-off the religious power-elite, saying that unless they repent for their evil-doing, they will lose their status as 'Chosen People,' which God could-- as He desired-- bring up common stones to be the 'Chosen People." Now some scholars have argued that John was an Qumran-style 'Essene,' but the Qumran sectarians in the "War Scroll" 1QM, portray spiritual and perhaps actual eschatological war with the Kittim [i.e. the Romans, Greeks, and other Gentiles] not in keeping with his passage here where John is passing 'chosen-ness' to those who are righteous, rather than to those who have a certain pedigree through Abraham. It is clear that John-Baptist would have in this sense been considered a peculiar or heretical Essene; but that is not to say he was not an Essene. The very fact that the Essenes "dwelt in many cities," as Philo writes [Hypothetica 11:1] is reason to think that-- like all social organizations they were subject to organizational evolution with changing ideologies. Thus I agree with those who find the Therapeutae of whom Philo writes in "On the Contemplative Live," passim, to be healers with a theology cognate with Qumran and perhaps the Baptist Movement...yea perhaps too the Jesus Movement. I am inclined to agree with Anton Dupont-Sommer, in The Essene Writings from Qumran, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 1961, that "Christianity is an Essenism that has largely succeded."

I am fatigued from having written all this previously, only to have it lost in cyberspace...But let me begin again now to go over the key words in these verses, first mentioning the English word Kloppenborg uses in his translation [or the simpler Today's English Version uses when Kloppenborg's usage does not 'bring up' anything in the "Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon," http://cal1.cn.huc.edu], a contingency that happens often enough to have this option as a "decision rule" in my scholarship-algorithm. After identifying the English-usage-in-translation, I shall identify the [Koine] Greek word in Roman-letter transliteration, then go to findings from CAL to ferret out Jewish-Aramaic words [either words appearing in Jastrow or in Sokoloff] to ascertain the prime use for each semantic domain [conceived pragmatically.] I find it quite remarkable that with Jewish Aramaic there tends to be only one, or at most only very few words that reduce for selection as viable in almost any assay for determining which word is best in a semantic context at-hand.

Here begins the analysis of these semantic domains in Matthew S2:

MATTHEW 3:7

"Brood," Greek: gennEmata, noun, neuter, vocative, plural; CAL= no viable word for "brood" as noun exists in Jewish Aramaic; "nest" is found to witness q^n, cf. Jastrow p. 1387, 1. "nest, swarm"; 2. "close space"; but note that Old Syriac Gospels Syriacus and Curiatonus plus Peshitta as well show y^l^d^), "offspring," which corresponds to Jewish Aramaic y^l^d, cf. Jastrow p. 578, "child," Sokoloff, "to give birth," af'el "to be born"; in the absence of a viable usage from CAL, the usage in the Syriac witness prompts me to prefer y^l^d as best choice here; this is also consistent with the general translation of gennEmata as "produce, offspring."
"Viper[s]/Snake[s]," Greek: echidnOn, noun, feminine, plural, genitive; CAL= there is one word which is dubiously standing for "viper," )^p^(, cf. Jastrow p. 106, "viper, adder"; but CAL indicates this same word may stand for "hyena"; for "snake" there is a universal Aramaicism x^y^w^y, cf. Jastrow 452, also see Sokoloff, "serpent"; also (^k^n, cf. Jastrow, p. 1079, "coiled snake," Sokoloff roots in echinos, ibid. the Greek word in Q here; (^k^n seems to be a word with long, rooted etymology, even though Greek-in-origin; it is rather difficult to detemine whether John-Baptizer-- who is even less-likely to have spoken Greek than Jesus-- used this (^k^n or the other word )^p^( ; neither choice of words would detract substantially from the general meaning, given the Jewish ideas about the 'uncleanness' serpents of all types.
"Warn[ed]," Greek: hypedeiksen, verb, indicative, active, aorist, singular, 3 person singular; CAL= the CAL print-out is 5 pages long, having but one really germane Jewish Aramaic word of viability: t^r^y, cf. Jastrow p. 1698, relates to a Hebrew cognate, all meaning "to forewarn," especially "to inform a person about to commit a crime of a penalty he will incur."
"Flee," Greek: phugein, verb, infinitive, active, 2 aorist; CAL= of the 4 pages printed, the best choice available was (^r^q, cf. Jastrow p.1123, Sokoloff, also at pertinent cit., "to flee, run"; pa'el,"to put to chase."
"Wrath," Greek: orgEs, noun, feminine, singular, genitive; CAL= few words appear in the CAL print-out for this semantic-domain; the most-viable usage is r^g^w^z, cf. Jastrow p. 1447, Sokoloff p. 515, "anger, wrath" ; Sokoloff relates this to a root-verb r^g^z, "to be angry."
"[To] Come," Greek: mellousEs, verb, participle, active, present, feminine, singular, genitive; CAL= the print-out from CAL for this word was--predictably-- huge at 19 pages, but only two words seem to have any resonance on the topic at hand; first we may consider )^t^y, cf. Jastrow p. 132, relates to Hebrew )^t^h, both meaning "to come, to arrive, to occur-to"; also "a formula of assurance"; also "surely, indeed"; but this word more-nearly refers to a PHYSICAL coming than to a temporal coming; we are led to look at the general word in Aramaic for "to be," h^w^y, for an expression that can be taken to mean-- quite commonly-- a CHRONOLOGICAL coming; cf. Jastrow p. 338 and all the Aramaic dictionaries; this latter word h^w^y seems to be by far the best choice given the context of this pericope in Q.

MATTHEW 3:8

"Bear," Greek: poiEsate, verb, imperative, active, aorist, 2 person plural; CAL= the print-out from CAL is 6 pages in length; it has one good Jewish Aramaic entry, y^l^d, identical to the root of the word for "brood," we chose above in Matthew 3:7, yet cf. again Jastrow p. 578, verb-form, "to bear, to beget"; af'el "to beget, produce"; pal'el "to act as midwife"; ithpa'el "to be born, to grow, to come forth."
"Fruit[s]," Greek: karpon, noun, masculine, singular, accusative; CAL= the print-out is 7 pages long this time, mostly listing different kinds of fruits, with a concentration of listings in Syriac; there is one listing for a generalized word for "fruit," )^b, cf. Jastrow p. 2, "swelling, spreading, the shoots of a tree"; "state of growth, development"; but CAL-- whose philology is more-recent and said to be superior to Jastrow's-- indicates that )^b also means fruit-in-general.
"Repent[ance]," Greek: metanoias, noun, feminine, singular, genitive; CAL= the number of words for "repent[ance] in Aramaic is tiny; I have just about 3/4 of a page print-out for the comprehensive reading from all dialects known; the Jewish Aramaic word that looms out as succinctly viable is t^y^w^b, cf. Jastrow p. 1663, Sokoloff p. 580, with meanings: 1. "to vomit"; 2. "to return [especially to return to God, 'repent']"; 3. "to answer, reply"; 4. sometimes in the plural, "to go-to-and-fro, waywardness"; the sense of "to vomit" is not an accidental meaning to t^y^w^b, as far as I can tell from cross -comparison with other Aramaic dictionaries [Syriac, etc.]; it seems patent that the general sense of this word-- which almost certainly is the expression Joh-Baptizer used-- is closer to the modern notions of existential-nausea/angst/dread than to the comparatively healthy complete-transformation-of-the-mind implied by metanoia [ Greek: meta-- "beyond"---nous--"{this} mind.]

MATTHEW 3:9

"Say," Greek: legein, verb, infinitive, active, present; CAL= the list here is only two pages long, and passim in Aramaic -- and in many Semitic languages-- the primary word for for "say" is )^m^r, cf. Jastrow p. 79, Sokoloff p.63, with meanings "they say, it is said; to praise, proclaim; to say, state, recite."
"Have," Greek: echomen, verb, indicative, active, present, 1st person plural; CAL= the print-out from CAL is 15 pages long, and has many irrelevant entries, and Syriac witness is much-in-evidence; one universal Aramaicism of all these words-- which does not exactly mean "to have" but rather "to acquire"-- is q^n^y, cf. Jastrow pp. 1391-1392, Sokoloff p. 497, with meanings: "to create; to acquire; to own; to take possession"; Sokoloff mentions noun-form q^n^y^y^n, "ownership"; it may be that all these Aramaicisms come to bear on this point.
"Father," Greek: patera, noun, masculine, singular, accusative; CAL= only one Aramaic word really means "father," and that is )^b, or-- more vocatively-- )^b^), cf. Jastrow p. 1-2, Sokoloff pp. 31-32, with meanings "father, ancestor, progenitor, teacher, chief, leader, author, originator, forefather."
"Stone[s]," Greek: lithOn, noun, masculine, genitive plural; CAL= the CAL-generated list is 8 pages long, this time with several possible usages; we find-- at the least-level-of-probable-usage, r^g^m, which refers both to the "stones used in stoning-people," and "stoning-as-a-form-of-execution"; next in likelihood comes )^b^n, which denotes stone of all types, including construction-stone, cast-off stone, pebbles, marble, measuring-stone, and black-marble; since John-Baptizer was unlikely to imply that the people he was railing against in this passage were 'gems' or even people of moral value, we can pass over this word; so we come to g^l^l, the likeliest word, because it means "rubble, cobble, lump, untrimmed stone" yet also "wave, consequence"; cf. Jastrow p. 250; this last word-- the word for cobblestones and 'rubble'-- seems to be the best choice by far for the context into which we much fit its semantic domain.
"[To] Raise-Up Children," Greek: word 1. egeirai, verb, infinitive,active, aorist; CAL= of the 8 pages in the CAL print-out, we are really to find one good entry for "to raise children," and fortunately it is a universal Aramaicism; this word is r^b^y, cf. Jastrow,p. 1441, relates to Hebrew cognate, both meaning "to be much, to be many, to grow, to increase" with pa'el "to rear, raise, produce"; "to raise to dignity, elevate, anoint"; "to lend or borrow on usury"; af'el "to increase, add."

MATTHEW 3:10

"Axe," Greek: aksinE, noun, feminine, nominative singular; CAL= there are several axe-like tools listed in the two-page print-out from CAL for "axe," including two for adze-like appliances, x^c^y^n^) and n^g^r; whereas the primary word for axe in Jewish Aramaic--as used in the Targums-- is n^r^g^); therefore I shall choose this word as most-appropriate in the semantic context.
"Root," Greek: rizan, noun, feminine, accusative singular; CAL= the CAL list is three pages long, with the sole best choice for a Jewish Aramaic word appearing to be (^y^q^r, cf. Jastrow p. 1075, with meanings "root, essence, reality, main-object, principles-of-faith"; also "orignally, at first"; also "a castrated animal"; from this broad-spectrum of semantics it is quite apparent that IF John-Baptizer were speaking in Aramaic at this usage, he would be implying much, much more than indicated simply in the Greek text, or for that matter in the English, no matter whether the text is 'metaphorically' interpreted given the usual spectrum of association in our language.
"Tree," Greek: dendrOn, noun, neuter, genitive plural; CAL= the 'print' from CAL is 5 pages long, but most of the entries are for kinds of trees or parts of trees; only one nearly-universal Aramaicism stands out-- and is a Jewish Aramaic word-- for "tree," namely, )^y^l^n, cf. Jastrow pp. 49-50, Sokoloff p. 50; Jastrow relates this word to a Hebrew cognate for "oak," but it is quite apparent that generally in Aramaic it is the non-specific word for "tree."
"Cut," Greek: ekkoptetai, verb, indicative, passive, present, 3rd person singular; CAL= the print-out from CAL is-- not surprisingly by most standards--- a 'biggie,' totalling 13 pages in all; it illustrates several words for "to cut" with varying degrees of viability for the linguistic context; least likely are g^z^r, whose central meaning is "to cut around, circumcise"; next in likelihood we find x^r^c, which basically means "to cut-into"; more-likely-germane for our context is q^c^c, cf. Jastrow p. 1404, Sokoloff p. 501, with the basic sense "to cut off, cut down, stipulate [a fee], mutilate"; to my thinking, however, the most-plausible Jewish Aramaic word for this context is found on page one of the print-out, i.e. g^d^d, cf. Jastrow p. 210, with Hebrew cognate ditto, meaning both "to cut, to cut off"; q^c^c simply has too many side-associations that detract from the simple sense of "to cut-off," which is implied exactly in the Koine Greek... not a sure-fire indicator of what lies at the bottom of Q but-- unfortunately-- the only indicator we have at our disposal!
"Fire," Greek: pyr, noun, neuter, accusative singular; CAL= there appears to be just one Jewish Aramaic word for "fire"; the CAL list of 6 pages does mention one word as an alternative, but on closer inspection it turns out to mean "fireplace"; this word for fire in Jewish Aramaic is d^l^y^q^h, cf. Jastrow, p. 310, "fire, conflagration."

REFLECTIONS ON THE SOCIOLINGUISTICS OF "THE BAPTISTS" IN COMPARISON WITH THE "JESUS MOVEMENT" AND THE PREVAILING CULTURE IN 1ST-CENTURY PALESTINE GIVEN THE ABOVE:

I am not privileged to understand the inner workings of the scholarship which led to the inclusion of S3 [and the other Kloppenborg entries about John-Baptizer] into Q; I feel certain given Kloppenborg's profuse annotation that he acts in concert with a great 'choir' of authorities on the subject of Q, the study of which goes back now more than a century-and-three-quarters. I know therefore that to link the utterances-in-text of John-Baptizer with the logia of Jesus of Nazareth invites some social interpretation that goes well-beyond the mere text of Q, whether or not Jesus or the Baptist spoke Aramaic/Hebrew as a first language, but many predictable social forces at the time would synergize with this occurence between the 'we' of the 'Little Flock' and the "they' of the Ethnoi, "the Nations, the Gentiles," who were not the first target-audience of Jesus' ministry. This point cannot be pushed too far, for obiously Jesus and the Baptist could understand the scribes, Pharisees, and Sadducees, but railed against them as opressors.

But we sometimes must come to some uncomfortable thinking about Jesus, and no doubt John-Baptizer the more: if they were opposed to such people as the scribes, Pharisees, and Sadducees, largely these indigent preachers were opposing people who could read and write! This to the Sadducee was implied by close adherence to the Torah, for the Pharisee by codifying the corpus of Tannaitic laws that were the Halakah, which ultimately made up the great work or Rabbinical scholarship known as the Mishnah. And-- in fine-- when Jesus castigates "the scribes" [Greek: grammateus; Aramaic: s^p^r], he is excoriating the only people in the village society in which he lived who could read the Scripture and interpret it, thus serving for all notary-public and copying purposes. It seems inexorable not to conclude that what Jesus criticizes about the religious power-elite is its very literacy, or at least he speaks with a kind of envy that comes from those who are powerless to be literate.

Contextual reading of the Babatha Archives, cf. The Documents from the Bar-Kokhba Period in the Cave of Letters, Israel Exploration Society, Jerusalem, Israel, 1989, reveals much by way of the sociology-of-language for the proposition I just presented in the paragraph above. It is quite clear, from the letters found in the 'Cave of Letters,' that even rather well-to-do people in Palestinian society during the Tannaitic period: 1. used vernacular Aramaic as their first language; 2. depended on 'scribes' to pen important documents into either Aramaic-- which was the language of the synagogue and people-- or Greek which was the language of commerce and most of the Empire-- or sometimes Latin-- which was in Palestine occasionally the language of the rulers. If Jesus ever had a problem with the "Scribes" as witnessed doing the work in the Babatha Archives, one would almost have to call into question whether Jesus had a "beef" with writing-itself; for here from the Cave of Letters we witness occasional evidence of usuary by a public official, but the "scribe" who records the deed of the transaction just seems for the most part to be the town 'intellectual,' the one who can pen down in Hebrew script the business at hand, and especially to be valued if he can translate Aramaic into Greek, and vice-versa.

For some, it may not be pleasant to recognize this anti-intellectual trend in the Jesus Movement, which in turn may have been unfortunate baggage from the 'Baptist' Movement-- we simply do not know and on this point must resort to 'guessology.' But it is clear that the stress on belief-alone as the basis of real salvation, "If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impssibe unto you" Matthew 17:20...amounts to a tall challenge to rational thinking, and throughout its big, long history Christianity has had its solo fides devotees, who at the bottom do not seem so much to be believers as blind-bunglgers. I do not think I would trust such a grain-of-mustardseed person, ultimately, any more than I would trust a baby in the crib to do my bookkeeping.

Fortunately, most functioning Christians seem to find ways around the impasse of anti-smarts that is impled in solo fides living in the concrete, i.e. without any way to sublimate it or abstract it into living that can get you as far as a balanced diet, constructing superhighways, managing an entrepreneurship, rationally deciding for whom one should vote in an election, learning a foreign language, designing a piece of elctronic equipment, or making rational choices about one's demise and mortality. Much of the best in religion today simply has a way of critiquing what is irrational as "bad" and striving to do "better," i.e. "more reasonably." When Christians cease to do this they tend to cease to function, and the Word which is God is silenced.

2005-11-28T20:23:00.000-08:00

The First Entry on Q:
A Quasi-Systematic Comparison of the Koine Greek, English Translation,
And Putative Aramaic Reconstruction(s) Per-Significant-Word
In the Essential Text.

My plans for engaging the cut-and-paste potential of my computer and Internet for the purposes of pulling information from the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon [http://cal1.cn.huc.edu] per word of Greek from Q as translated in the Kloppenborg Q Parallels: Synopsis, Critical Notes & Concordance, Polebridge Press, Sonoma, California, 1988...has failed me in design and I must resort to more-thoughtful execution-- and longer timespan of project-- in getting this immense work from the place it is now [germination] to fruition!

Accordingly, I shall try to do the following, short of being unable to list all the Aramaic words comparable to a Greek expression via an English translation. I shall instead attempt a more-pragmatic effort, still amounting to a sequel of 67 entries pertaining to Q as designated by Klopenborg, trimming out all but the cognitive essentials. I realize that what these 'essentials ' are is essentially a matter of editorial judgment, but this will not have been because I have the very 'critical notes' [see the title of the book; better still, obtain the book and observe that Kloppenborg has better critical notes in Q Parallels than we find in The Critical Edition of Q...which to my use is a real 'white elephant' speaking three languages!] I shall try to summarize the point of the logion per Q entry for Matthew and Luke after a listing of where they may be found in the respective Gospels; then I shall zero in on the essential verse(s) for analysis, with a view toward going semantically-- with no particular endorsement of Dr. Eugene Nida's 'theory of semantic domains,' cf. COMPENENTIAL ANALYSIS OF MEANING: AN INTRODUCTION TO SEMANTIC STRUCTURES, Mouton Publishers, Paris, France, 1975-- from the Koine Greek words in Q to Kloppenborg's translation (or a translation that will 'fit' the requirements of the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon's English-to-Aramaic database)--in order to derive a choice-list of Palestinian [not Syriac in the first instance!] Aramaic words from which to reconstruct a lattice decision-tree for the vocabulary in Q.

That I simply cannot cut-and-paste increases the workload by orders-of-magnitude, but in reflection I know that the amount of time I put into thought on crafting good pieces on each entry on Q will in the end 'pay' for the strain of eye and hand and brain necessary in going through all the lists of Aramaic words from CAL and determining which would be the most-opportune for inclusion in the hermneutic Gestalt.

For it is safe to say that an over-easy reliance on CAL can quickly lull the budding scholar into not thinking about the linguistics behind what she/he is studying, which after all is a configuration of lexemes put together with thought and designed for communication...How quickly we forget those things when the simple fix is to grab a print-out from a computer and be-done with 'the hard stuff!' We shall see in this first wee example how I shift even into the Old Syriac Gospels for examplar material... not without some trepidation...for these Syriac translations come a few hundred years later than Jesus and their Aramaic is Eastern, not Western [read 'Palestinian'], but good for flushing out a root which may not be reflected well in the CAL print-out(s). Ditto for using resources like the Hatch & Redpath Concordance to the Septuagint, which ever gives the Semitic translation for a Greek expression that may not-- again-- surface when one quizzes the CAL database.

I THINK I HAVE DEVOTED ENOUGH TIME TO QUALIFYING AND EXPLAINING THIS FIRST ANALYSIS OF A 'Q' ENTRY, WHICH IN KLOPPENBORG'S Q PARALLELS NUMBER 67 OF 68 COUNTING THE 'INCIPIT' HAVING NO TEXT IN EITHER MATTHEW OR LUKE: NOW I BEGIN TO EXPLICATE UPON KLOPPENBORG'S 'S2'...MATTHEW 3:1-6 & LUKE 3:1-4.

The logia that comprise Q were originally said to be exclusively the sayings of Jesus; gradually however scholars 'pushed the envelope' to include 'sayings' that were not in Luke/Matthew but wholly part of other traditions. In deference to Kloppenborg and his masterwork, I am going with the 'S2' entry, with its parallels and commentary, pp. 4-7, as well as with almost every usable part of the English translation.

But the passage is about John-Baptizer, not Jesus, who in a certian time came to preach the Gospel of Repentance, for the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand; the text is accompanied with a proof text in both Matthew and Luke from Isaiah 40:3, LXX, "...the voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make the paths of our God straight," [Greek transliteration: phOnE BoOntos en tE erEmO. hetoimasate tEn hodon kuriou, eutheias poieite tas tribous tou theou EmOn.] The justification in Q Parallels for including 'S2' would seem to be mostly to Kloppenborg's liking, although he does marshall some sidelong evidence in the scholarship to support this entry. No matter! We shall use this as our reference-text!

Yet comparing Matthew 3:1-6 and Luke 3:1-4 together, we observe several things:1. Luke spends much detail on fixing the John-Baptist advent in history, while Matthew simply passes this off with, "now in those days..." 2.both Matthew and Luke cite the passage from the Septuagint (LXX) with fair accuracy and there seems little point in exegesis on that Scripture-in-duplicate as such; 3. Matthew has added embellishments to describe the ministry of John Baptist, such as his eating locusts and honey, wearing camel's hair and a leather girdle, and preaching and baptizing in the Jordan River for his proclamations in Judaea, while Luke has none of this.

We by semantic reduction are left with one key phrase, and for practical/practical purposes it is convenient: the sense in Matthew 3:2 and the corresponding verse in Luke 3:3.

Matthew 3:2b--"Repent, for the reign of heaven is [at hand; Today's English Version--'near']"

KEY GREEK WORDS:

Repent-- metanoeite-- verb.imper.pres.act.2 pers.pl., "to undergo a change in frame of mind and feeling, to repent; to make a change of principle and practice, to reform"
Reign-- basileia-- noun. nom.sing.fem., "a kingdom,realm, kingly power, authority, dominion, reign, royal dignity, the title and honor of a king, the reign or kingdom of the Messiah"
Heaven-- tOn ouranOn-- noun.masc.genitive. plural, "heaven, the heavens, the visible heavens and all their phenomena; the air, atmosphere, heaven-of-angels, the-abode-of-God"
Near ['at-hand'--Kloppenborg's translation]-- Eggiken-- from eggizo-- "to cause to approachm to draw near, to be at hand, impend"

KEY PALESTINIAN ARAMAIC WORDS PERTAINING TO THESE GREEK WORDS:

Repent-- t^w^b-- 1. "to go back, do again, return;" 2. "to restore;" 3."to bethink oneself, regret;" noun-form t^y^w^b^), 1. "vomit [this meaning is confirmed in Marcus Jastrow and Michael Sokoloff's Dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic (1992) and R. Payne Smith's Compendious Syriac Dictionary (Eisenbrauns, 1998)];" 2. "return to God, repentance;" 3. "answer, reply, refutation, argument;" 4. plural "going to-and-fro, waywardness." The other semantics from the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon are not plausible or are not germane for Palestinian application; t^w^b is the most-productive root-- iit would seem-- of the several CAL profers us. Reading Sokoloff suggests that the notion of 'vomit' directly ties into the notion of 'repentance,' and indeed that is the best reading of this root we get in Syriac. There is in an Aramaic sense, something quite valid about calling getting-right-with-God a matter requiring sickness-unto-death, as Soren Kierkegaard suggested!

Reign-- m^l^k^w^t^)-- same as Hebrew m^l^k^w^t-- 1."kingdom, government, office;" 2. "a benediction invoking God as King;" plural "the Musaf of the New Year's Day, the Section called Malkhiyoth;" Jewish Aramaic meanings include "kingdom, rulership."There are few other viable readings of 'realm/kingdom' from the CAL, which boasts of being comprehensive. Therefore I am inclined perforce to stick with this usage in the analysis at hand.

Heaven--$^m^y^), $^m^y^y^)-- relates to Hebrew $^m^y^m-- 1. "heaven," transitively "Heaven, God;" in Jewish Aramaic semantics include 1." "heaven," transitively "God;" 2. "arch; ceiling." Michael Sokoloff, p. 557, says $^m^y^y^n is noun plural masculine meaning "sky, heaven," stands for epithet of God in Fragments of Palestinian Targumim (Sources II) Genesis 15:1[08]; Pes 33a (56); Tan 64b(60); Yev 15a(37); AmGen 7:13. I think it most-noteworthy that CAL finds that there is Old Assyrian Palestinian Aramaic and Imperial Mesopotamian Aramaic that $^m^y^n is a configuration for "a divinity." This would imply that the Kingdom of God, as the exact Heavens we know as the sky where the stars and clouds and birds are... was for ages long Biblical thought to be the very abode of God.

Near ['at-hand']-- there are several approximations to this word, and a few in Palestinian Aramaic, but the one which for pragmatic reasons I shall choose for focus is q^r^b--1. "to be near, come near, touch;" 2."to intercede, protect;" 3. "to complain, sue;" 4. "to bring near, to offer." The pael means 1. " to bring near, to offer;" 2. " near, friendly;" 3. "to intercede, lead in prayer." In the afel (causative) mode, this word means, "to bring near, to offer;" in the ithpael (reflexive-intensive) mode it means 1. "to approach, to come near;" 2. " to claim relationship." Because of the richness of association in connection with the general sense imposed by the Greek Koine, I selected this word from the rest; the choice was really not difficult.

The basic sense in Matthew 3:1-6 @ 3:2 is that one need 'turn-around' the self because the Rule of The Divine is almost-touching-now...That is the common-denominator between the Greek, English, and possible Aramaic reconstructions. Yet there are diferences between the Greek and the chosen Aramaic (which represents the best-possible fit to the Greek!) Here are some of the variations:

The Greek metanoeO is a matter of metamorphosis and transformation, while each dictionary of Aramaic spells out connotations that t^w^b^) is closer to sickness-unto-death or 'existential nausea.'
The Greek basileia lacks much of the sacerdotal implication of the m^l^k^w^t, which is a benediction invoked in the Jewish Prayer Book lifting up God as King, as well as the Kaddish, which beckons the coming of the Jewish Messiah with Jahweh as King.
While it is true that Ouranos was a Hellenistic god-- the Heavens to the Palestinian had layers of meaning associated with them going back many centuries, and we have evidence that Jesus read 'signs' in the skies [see Matthew 24:24;Mark 13:22; Luke 21:11,25; Matthew 16:1.] From the sound of the dictionaries, 'heaven' included everything from the ground to what we would now think of as infinities of space-time beyond earth and the atmosphere, subtending the realm of the stars, and somewhere, 'out there' Jahweh and the angels are supposed to reside and rule. What is different between the pagan Greco-Romans and the Jews (including Jesus) is a radical monotheism which also believes in signs and portents from One God Jahweh Whose Throne is Skyward. The gradual shift from a literal notion that God lives 'in Outer Space' to a God who lives 'in Spiritual Space' must have been gradual for both Semitic and Indo-European cultures and must be counted as a great humane achievement.

The Greek eggizO--'to come near' varies semantically from its closest Jewish Aramaic fit, q^r^b--as the latter has meanings including 'to intercede,' to offer [e.g. as a sacrifice!],' 'to complain, to sue.' And this is the closest expression we have that will go-the-distance toward translating this 'to come near.' All I am trying to point up is that at least on the level of speech communities, on the level of differential sociolinguistics, on the level of impinging sociology-of-language variables, we must be quite careful imputing a "correct Koine Greek Q" as long as we hold the distinct option that there MAY have been a Jesus or a John-Baptizer who spoke Jewish Aramaic (or perhaps some form of Hebrew!)

ANALYZING LUKE 3:1-4 @ 3:3 USING THE SAME CRITERIA AS ABOVE:

Greek Words Corresponding to Kloppenborg's Translation:

Preach-- kErussOn-- verb.participle.active.present.nominative.singular.masculine, "to publish proclaim [as a herald], to announce openly and publicly, to noise abroad, to announce [as a matter of doctrine], preach, inculate."
Baptism-- baptisma--"immersion; baptism, ordinance of baptism."
Repent[ance]-- see above at metanoeO and t^y^b^).
Forgive[ness]-- aphesin--noun.accusative.singular.feminine,"dismission, deliverance[from captivity]; remission, forgiveness; pardon."

Sin-- hamartiOn-- noun.genitive.plural.feminine, "error; offense, sin; a principle or cause of sin; proneness to sin; sinful propensity; guilt or imputation of sin; a guilty subject or sin-offering, expiatory victim."

Palestinian Aramic Words Corresponding to Luke 3:1-4 @ Luke 3:3 Using Criteria as Above:

Preach[ing]-- two words have some attractive power in this reconstructive picture. The first is d^r^$, from which the word 'midrash' is derived; it means 1. "to examine, question;" 2. "to expound, interpret;" 3. "to teach, lecture." While these are admirable qualities they do not seem to be what John Baptizer is doing in the Jordan area consistent with the Greek notion of kErussO--proclaiming openly and publicly abroad; seems to be what a Rabbi or Sage might do. But we have another Aramaic word k^r^z--which is witnessed at Syrus Sinaiticus and Syrus Curetonianus in the Old Syriac Gospels at Luke 3:3-- and in Jastrow and in Machael Sokoloff A Dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic (1992, 1990) as well as in Marcus Jastrow's Dictionary... at page 665, meaning "to call, to announce." A Syriac definition has "to preach," while a Samaritan Aramaic meaning [close to Galilean!] has "to proclaim" which is close to the gist of kErussO. On the balance, therefore, I am inclined for various good reasons to choose k^r^z as the first lexeme to consider in the mix here; I can only be right or wrong as linguistic reconstruction permits educated guesses!
Baptism--the words for 'baptism' are mostly all Christianized in Aramaic, with hardly any suggestion at all of a precursor state in Judaism. Therefore on the CAL search for the word 'baptism,' little of value was discovered. Here is what was learned: in Syriac and Christian Palestinian Aramaic, two different words for the baptismal font are identified with baptism; also-- euphemistically-- the general word for 'taking a stand'--q^b^l--in Syriac had come to mean 'consent to be baptized.' One would have to look elsewhere for a good root for 'baptize/baptism.' So I looked in the Hatch&Redpath Concordance to the Septuagint at bapteizein and with luck not only found the word but found that it translated Hebrew T^b^l-- which as I checked in Jastrow was identical! T^b^l means 1."to dip;" 2. "to immerse, to bathe for purification;" "to season;" "to take luncheon;" to be immersed, made clean." Clearly, this is the word we are looking for.
Repent[ance]-- see Matthew 3:2 above for metanoeO and t^y^b^).
Sin-- several remote expressions in Aramaic turn up in CAL for 'sin,' but the strongest one with much-witness in Palestinian Jewish Aramaic is x^T^y, "[to miss] to fail, to err, to sin" with afel [causative mode] "to cause to sin;" and ithpael [reflexive-intensive] "to be tempted;" while noun-form x^T^y^) means "sinner." Other expressions for 'to sin,' e.g. "to be lost," "to injure," "to incur debt," etc., etc. simply seem loosely-connected and this usual word for sin will just 'do.'

Comparison of the Greek and Aramaic Components of Luke 3:1-4 @ 3:3 Using Criteria Above.

The general sense of 'preaching' in the Koine Greek is not of homiletics or of exegesis, but of proclamation of the nearness of the Realm of God; both the words kErussO and k^r^z get at this sense of 'public announcement,' unlike d^r^$, which corresponds to the Greek hermEneuO--i.e. " to interpret, translate."
The Q of Matthew 3:2 and Luke 3:3 is identically cognate on the notion of 'Repent[ance].' It is the reduction-of-all-reductions into which this semantic linguistic reconstruction of 'S2' takes place.
The Christian baptismal practices quickly got caught up in nomenclature that forgot Jewish origins. In reading Jastrow's Dictionary... on T^b^l we quickly learn that ablution had usage for many purposes, including seasoning, food and body cleanliness, sacrament, and simply to indicate that one had 'dipped' something into a fluid. This breadth of dimension is perhaps missing by the rather myopic Christian 'glasses' we still use in examining 'John's Baptism,' which may have had many more of the connotations included in Jastrow's Rabbinical listing of meanings than we would like perchance to admit.
The 'Forgive[ness]-- Jewish Aramaic $^b^q to a Synagogue worshipper was a term that had currency in divorce proceedings. It was not so much that the sinning wife was unforgiven by divorce but rather the very fact of 'letting go' the wife ipso facto constituted forgiveness! It would have to be said-- from the Rabbinical perspective-- that the Christian notion of forgiveness involves 'remission' of an entirely different sort than that of Judaism. What seems to be different is the notion of 'sending away,' i.e. 'letting alone' that was consistent with forgiveness "seventy times seven times" with Rabin Jesus.
Sin--the essential notion of 'missing the mark ' is the same in both hamartia and x^T^y; the usual Aramaic word is a 'natural' for the somewhat-unusual [by comparison with the rest of the Greek-speaking world of the time] expression.

SUMMARY OF NOTES ON LUKE 3:1-4 @3:3...The Q of this verse is much-abbreviated, and seems to be a paraphrase of the more-accurate Matthean version. But I am not well-versed on Q scholarship, and do know for example that the terse renderings tend to be regarded as the-more-original. At any rate, there is no 'saying' in Luke 3:3, and to posit a Q logion therefore seems far-fetched. I think Kloppenborg and the host of authorities he brings to bear on 'S2' see Q not as a simple collection of sayings, but as an edited document, with extra text having zero doing with the sayings of Jesus. This simple hypothesis now explains much about the nature of this reference-text, which is nonetheless, a beautiful work, a beautiful work.

SUMMARY OF THE ENTIRE EFFORT ON 'S2':

This literary and scholastic work will take time and strain on all-systems as I try to think through each facet of Q. I cannot say I shall do better than 'take notes' on Q in the process, but what glorious notes they might promise to be! This practice-piece has taught me that it is likely better to thoughtfully pore through a pericope of Scripture than to use blind cut-and-paste techniques without thought to what one is inserting into text. Good text always requires good thought!

As far as 'S2' itself is concerned, I determined that much extraneous material fills around the essential detail(s), all of which focuses on John-the-Baptist preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, saying "Repent, for the reign of heaven is [near]!" The one key concept, the irreducible nugget, is 'repent[ance],' which has a radically different semantic shift in Jewish Aramaic than in Koine Greek. A second notion, something like a leimotif, is the Soveignty-Reflected-in-the-Sky, now imminent. Another motif is forgiveness as 'letting-go, divorce.' Anecdotes are that baptism means all kinds of things to a 1st century Jew and only one thing to a 2nd century Christian.

We are not close to the 'mind' of John Baptizer, let alone to the mind of Jesus of Nazareth in this excursus. Layers of polished hand-me-down from church-folks has left out much of John Man-of-Locusts-and-Honey and we are not even on the threshold of Jesus. Still, I would have to guess that the 'layers' are rather identifiable, and if we are--as now -- given one word ['Repent!']-- for certain, then at least with some honesty I can say that for all my deliberation that one word sounds a powerful greeting!

2005-11-23T01:44:00.000-08:00

2005-11-23T01:32:00.000-08:00

2005-10-30T23:04:00.000-08:00

Master Plan for Studying Potential Aramaic Substrate
In the Koine Greek "Q" Using Kloppenborg's Q Parallels
As Strict Template and Critical Edition of Q for Additional Information.

In the last entry I introduced my preference for John S. Kloppenborg's Q Parallels: Synopsis, Critical Notes & Concordance, Polebridge Press, Sonoma, California, 1988 as my choice for model of all pragmatic discourse in this monograph concerning "Q" and the language of Jesus generally; do refer to the prior entry for that rationale for specifics rather than expecting me to hash-over old ground.

What I want to propose as an academic game-plan in this entry, for the sake of several economies necessary to do the work of one scholar acting alone... not doing committee work, is to operationally regard Q Parallels as a kind of reference text while using The Critical Edition of Q -- which is far less useful and more-ponderous on almost every level-- for back-up information here-and-there as gaps may derive in my contextual understanding of the 'reference' text.

I feel certain that Dr. Kloppenborg would not approve of this approach; he would-- as he has expressed to me in e-mail-- prefer that I use The Critical Edition of Q exclusively. I would do so if I were blessed with the resources of a great theological/linguistic/historical library such as he might have at the Religion Department at the University of Toronto. But I am a practical person, and for pragmatic reasons only [the fact that I keep over and over and over and over referring to Q Parallels, finding everything I want in it for quick reference and all else] Q Parallels is by far a more-workable tool than the other tome for what I want to do.

And there is the matter of the assumption that no Aramaic substrate for Q exists as found in The Critical Edition of Q, not a word of which is uttered-- as far as I can detect-- in Q Parallels. But I have already referred the reader to the prior entry for my discussion of that topic....

What I wish to do with Q in Q Parallels will be extensive; Dr. Kloppenborg counts out 68 entries in this reference work as Q, but I shall omit 'Incipit,' which has no text in either Matthew or Luke; this leaves me with a daunting 67 Q citations upon which to explicate, as I shall describe.

I shall use Q Parallels as a kind of 'Bible,' not admitting any authoritative text--for the sake of operating definition-- but the text here at hand. Certainly my choice is outdated by the later Critical Edition of Q, but as I have indicated this critical edition is not a very practical book and my choice of Q Parallels is still for a very fine book, the choice for a 'Cadillac' instead of the 'Mercedes' one actually has on one's lot.

Q Parallels has Greek entries for Matthew and Luke, as well as English translations; ditto for parallelisms from the Nag Hammadi Library, Hebrew texts, Church Fathers, etc. According to linguists like Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, language imposes metaphysical assumptions. Therefore, I wish to examine the metaphysical assumptions of the Greek semantic and syntactic and grammatic constructions in the Q presented in the reference text vis a vis the Koine Greek.

The careful reader will observe that the English translations will also have metaphysical assumptions in semantics, syntax, and grammar; it will be jolly to note differences between the translation and the original Greek! But my sense is that the translation in Kloppenborg is clear, accurate, terse, useful for what I am about to say I wish to do with it with regard to hypothetical Aramaic reconstruction(s).

Quite early in the development of this web-log (blog), I cited the "Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon Project" at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.A. Its Website is: http://cal1.cn.huc.edu; what I wish to do is take as many words as pragmatically viable from the Kloppenborg translations per Q entries and insert the in the English-to-Aramaic translation component in order to get a sense of the Aramaic semantics corresponding to the English word, corresponding to the Koine Greek word in Q. My object is to get a great number of Aramaic words, specifically Palestinian Aramaic words, and to piece together a sense of the variance of semantics implied across the broad swath of word-meanings.

Linguistic reconstruction on this level-- where the very original language is absent and we have-- on the one hand a semantic record in one language family-- and on the other hand rich embodiment of the language from which to reconstruct the utterance(s) given the semantics--should be utterly conservative and on a word-per-word basis: cf. Linguistic Reconstruction: An Introduction to Theory and Method, by Anthony Fox, Oxford University Press, Oxford, U.K., 1995, passim. While it is true that Dr. Maurice Casey's An Aramaic Approach to Q, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, U.K., 2002; and Dr. Matthew Black's An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts, Hendrickson Publishers, Peabody, Massachusetts, 1967, 1946 violate this principle of linguistic reconstruction remarkably, so do The Critical Edition of Q, Q Parallels, and indeed the same criticism can be leveled against Nestle-Aland and all who would try to scientifically reconstruct the Bible without having the actual original texts before them.

My only saving grace in reconstruction will have occurred by way of "the Law of Large Numbers," for with a number of words making multiple comparisons from essentially three languages -- Koine Greek, Modern English, Aramaic and in great abundance on all language variables using Q Parallels as my template... I think I shall be able to: 1. ascertain common structures in each particular language, including metaphoric metaphysical assumptions; 2. deconstruct into component parts these metaphoric metaphysical assumptions and examine for 'narrative,' i.e. historical-projection content; 3. using known social science including psychology, sociology, biology, and esthetics, derive an assessment of the Sitz im Leben of Jesus; 4. recommendations derived from the above, more-or-less a personal note.

Use of the Syriac texts will be of more than small help in assessing the relative value of derivative offerings from the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon for a particular word. By this I mean the Old Syriac Gospels, but also the Peshitta; I lack the Harklean but I am informed in Dr. Casey's book that the Harklean Syriac N.T. is literal and useful... I simply lack it for reference purposes!

This should be a long, long 'slog.' Sixty-seven entries, carefully worked out if done well, deriving possible vocabulary in Aramaic, then metaphor, then deconstruction of metaphor, from as much of the Koine Greek in a Q Parallel Greek entry as I can force. I am up for that long, long, 'slog.' And I think a worthy, worthy reader who wanted to really derive some of the excitement of the 'slog' would not despair in this long journey!

One final detail. It is public information that two world-class scholars on Q and its relation to the language of Jesus, Dr. Maurice Casey of the University of Nottingham, and Dr. John S. Kloppenborg of the University of Toronto, both have publicly listed e-mail addresses.

These addresses are:

Dr. P. Maurice Casey, University of Nottingham; maurice.casey@nottingham.ac.uk
Dr. John S. Kloppenborg, University of Toronto; john.kloppenborg@utoronto.ca

I think Dr. Casey has more to say about Jesus speaking Aramaic, but he seems to be a busy academic; on the other hand, Dr. Kloppenborg answers his e-mails within just a few hours. Do not disparage what either of these two great academics have to say!

2005-10-30T01:01:00.000-08:00

The Contents of 'Q'
According to John S. Kloppenborg's
Q Parallels: Synopsis, Critical Notes & Concordance.

For reasons plural, I would like to hold up the exemplar of Q Parallels: Synopsis, Critical Notes & Concordance, by John S. Kloppenborg of the University of Toronto [presently], Polebridge Press, Sonoma, California, 1988-- when I wish to model most-useful Q studies... as comes the case now when I intend to cite the entire contents per Matthew and Luke of Q. I know that Dr. Kloppenborg himself prefers the great work The Critical Edition of Q, edited by James M. Robinson, Paul Hoffman, and also Dr. John S. Kloppenborg, Augsburg Fortress Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2000. Nevertheless, for myself and my own scholarship, pragmatically speaking, I find myself referring to Q Parallels 25 times and on the 26th time to the Critical Edition of Q; I like Q Parallels broad use of additional sources from the Nag Hammadi Library and from Hebrew and the Apostolic Fathers, etc.; I like the bibliographic information and simplifying diagrams; I like the trimness and crispness and comprehensiveness that somehow seems lacking in the Critical Edition of Q. But most to the point is this: as long as it is assumed by the run of scholars that Jesus' first language was Semitic [Aramaic/Hebrew], then I have trouble with the very first logical premise of the Critical Edition of Q, which is that it lacks an Aramaic/Hebrew substrate.

For these reasons I have chosen Q Parallels-- over top of Dr. Kloppenborg's preference-- to represent the best of what I want to say on Q. Really, mutatis mutandis there is little difference between one scholar's inclusions as to what is in Q and what is not; and besides I am looking for structures of thought which may lie in another language than the one presented, which to my thinking impies that I shall have to do much digging in a 'molar' way in order to deconstruct the 'metaphors of speech' implied in Aramaic vis a vis Koine Greek.

Here is my list from Kloppenborg's Q Parallels of the Q citations in Matthew and Luke:

Matthew 3:1-6 Luke 3:1-4
Matthew 3:7-10 Luke 3:7-9, 10-14
Matthew 3:11-12 Luke 3:15, 16-17
Matthew 3:13-17 Luke 3:21-22
Matthew 4:1-11 Luke 4:1-13
Matthew 5:1-2 Luke 6:12, 17,20a
Matthew 5:3-12 Luke 6:20b-26
Matthew 5:38-47; 7:12 Luke 6:27-35
Matthew 5:48; 7:1-2 Luke 6:36-38
Matthew 15:13-14; 10:24-25 Luke 6:39-40
Matthew 7:3-5 Luke 6:41-42
Matthew 7:15-20; 12:33-35 Luke 6:43-45
Matthew 7:21-27 Luke 6:46-49
Matthew 8:5-13 Luke 7:1-10
Matthew 11:2-6 Luke 7:18-23
Matthew 11:7-11 Luke 7:24-28
Matthew 11:12-15 Luke 16:16
Matthew 21:28-32 Luke 7:29-30
Matthew 11:16-19 Luke 7:31-35
Matthew 8:18-22 Luke 9:57-62
Matthew 9:36-38; 10:1-16 Luke 10:1-12
Matthew 11:20-24 Luke 10:13-15
Matthew 10:40 Luke 10:16-20
Matthew 11:25-27 Luke 10:21-22
Matthew 13:16-17 Luke 10:23-24
Matthew 6:7-13 Luke 11:1-4
Matthew 7:7-11 Luke 11:5-13
Matthew 1222-30; 9:32-34 Luke 11:14-23
Matthew 12:43-45 Luke 11:24-26
[no parallel] Luke 11:27-28
Matthew 12:38-42 Luke 11:16, 29-32
Matthew 5:14-16; 6:22-23 Luke 11:33-36
Matthew 23:1-39; 13:34-35 Luke 11:37-54; 13:34-35
Matthew 10:26-27 Luke 12:1-3
Matthew 10:28-31 Luke 12:4-7
Matthew 10:32-33 Luke 12:8-9
Matthew 12:31-32 Luke 12:10
Matthew 10:17-20, 23 Luke 12:11-12
[no parallel] Luke 12:13-21
Matthew 6:25-34 Luke 12:22-32
Matthew 6:19-21 Luke 12:33-34
[no parallel] Luke 12:35-38
Matthew 24:42-44 Luke 12:39-40
Matthew 24:45-51 Luke 12:41-48
Matthew 10:34-36 Luke 12:49-53
Matthew 16:2-3 Luke12:54-56
Matthew 5:25-26 Luke 12:57-59
Matthew 13:31-33 Luke 13:18-21
Matthew 7:13-14; 22-23 Luke 13:22-27
Matthew 8:11-12; 20:16 Luke 13:28-30
Matthew 8:11-12; 20:16 Luke 13:28-30
Matthew 23:37-39 Luke 13:31-35
Matthew 12:11-12 Luke 14:1-6
Matthew 23:6-12 Luke 14:7-12;18:14
Matthew 22:1-10 Luke 14:15-24
Matthew 10:37-39 Luke 14:25-27; 17:33
Matthew 5:13 Luke 14:34-35
Matthew 18:10, 12-14 Luke 15:1-2, 3-7
[no parallel] Luke 15:8-10
Matthew 6:24 Luke 16:13
Matthew 11:12-13; 5:18, 32 Luke 16:16-18
Matthew 18:15-17, 18:21-22 Luke 17:5-6
[no parallel] Luke 17:20-21
Matthew 24:23-28, 37-42 Luke 17:22-37
Matthew 25:14-30 Luke 19:11-27
Matthew 19:27-29 Luke 22:24-30

...This is virtually identical to the list in Q Parallels: for unclear reasons Dr. Kloppenborg includes a passage he calls 'incipit,' material not in Q but relevant as an introduction, but with no text in either Matthew or Luke.

I do hope the material assembled herein is useful for the reader. Since Q Parallels is out of print, reference to the material information listed in this entry should prove useful to a Q scholar as we progress in our studies.

2005-10-03T21:09:00.000-07:00

Explorations in Q:
The Groundwork for Analysing the Putative Sayings-Material of Jesus
'Common' to Matthew and Luke.

In this introductory entry, I wish to begin a series on "Q"-- from the German word Quelle ["source"]-- utterances of Jesus which in a very rough way may be said to be found in common in Matthew and Luke. This first statement is to function as an overview, highlighting two contrasting perspectives on Q scholarship that prevail today in the field, concluding with my own predilections for approaching Q.

In the next entry, I shall divulge all the hypothetical inclusions that are said to make up Q; this listing will promise to be length and-- for some-- tedious. My present design in this entry is to assay to outline Q and to describe some of the scholarship leading up to the present dominant views as to its composition, etc.

German scholarship inspired the great inaugural work in New Testament studies. Early among these scholars was Friedrich Schleiermacher, who hypothesized that the sayings of Jesus were perpetuated by an Aramaic original which was subsequently translated into the Koine Greek Gospels that we know. Later, Christian Hermann Weisse in 1838 published a masterwork Die Evangelische Geschichte Kritisch und Philosophisch Bearbeitet, which argued for the first time that Matthew and Luke worked from a basic text of Mark, yet also employed additional sayings material of Jesus.

In the year 1863, Heinrich Julius Holtzmann, another German scholar, published a modifed version of Weisse's hypothesis in a work entitled Die synoptischen Evangelien: Ihr Uhrsprung und geschichter Character, in which he argued that there had been a primitive version of Mark which he labelled Urmarkus; this is the gist of the so-called Two-Document Hypothesis.

Bernard Weiss (1827-1918) was the first person to call the common source of sayings-material of Jesus-logia "Q." This he did in a great work entitled Die Quellen des Lukasevangeliums, which appeared in Berlin in 1907. Weiss should be noted for having included several passages in Q from the Gospel of Mark, and was known as an exegetic conservative.

Adolf von Harnack (1850-1930) was an illustrious New Testament scholar in many areas; his contribution to Q scholarship includes Sprueche und Reden Jesu, published in Leipzig in 1907. This last-mentioned work was the first true construction with analysis of Q.

Rudolf Bultmann needs to be mentioned in passing for his History of the Synoptic Tradition and other clear writings about Q, yet it is fair to say that Bultmann did not systematize any more about Q than was already assumed at the time; his gift seems to be mostly by way of analysis and commentary on Q.

Burnet Hillman Streeter and Thomas Walter Manson are names that should be mentioned honorably in discussion of Q scholarship. Streeter proposed a "Four-Document Hypothesis," Mark, Q, M, and L-- to account for the synoptic Gospels. Manson made a full-length reconstruction of Q into English.

John Kloppenborg of the University of Toronto has published widely on Q, and after some time of reticence on the subject, in 1987 published a work The Formation of Q, whose thesis was that Q is a Greek document which needs to be studied without reference to a putative Aramaic orignal source. In subsequent correspondance at my attention, I have proof that Kloppenborg essentially believes that Jesus spoke Aramaic, Hebrew, or some combination thereunto as his first/mother-tongue(s), which perforce leaves us with the conclusion that some written textual sociolinguistic factors must be implicated in the shift between the language of Jesus and the very first members of the Jesus Movement and that of the Evangelists, who may exhibit Semiticisms in their writing but express themselves in perfectly understandable 'fishmongers' and 'homeopaths'' Koine Greek.

The dialectical balance to counter Kloppenborg's position-- now the prevailing position among Q scholars-- we find in the work of Maurice Casey of the University of Nottingham. I refer the reader to Casey's An Aramaic Approach to Q (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2002), which vigorously defends the older, traditional notion that Q had an Aramaic substrate.
Casey thoughtfully analyses all dimensions of the problem at-hand, and just as carefully attempts linguistic reconstruction of select passages in Q. Casey's comments thus constitute a worthwhile ballast to the press of Greek-only scholarship in Q research, whose chief characteristic -- as Casey is quick to point-up-- is on text-based redaction and not on source-criticism.

Here is where I begin to chime in with my editorial opinion. Something about Q research goes incredibly awry when it restricts itself to a Greek-only text for the simple reason that we have no extant Palestinian Jewish Aramaic texts of Q, especially when the prevailing view abides that the utterer of 'The Source' of Q spoke Aramaic, and this is altogether a complicating factor when we consider that Aramaic imposes an entirely different Weltanschauung [German: "world-view"] in its logical assumptions given the sociolinguistics of Benjamin Lee Whorf and Edward Sapir than (Koine) Greek. Do read the Whorf-Sapir Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis to which I just alluded into the contrast between Semitic languages (including Aramaic) in Thorleif Boman's Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek (W. W. Norton, New York, NY, 1970, 1960), whose gist is that Hebrew [and Aramaic] are 'psychological' and 'dynamic' languages whereas Greek is 'logical' and 'placid.' Semitic languages have only two tenses, basically, the perfect and the imperfect, and both are more or less a past tense; meanings are tacked upon verbs pronomially and adverbially in a way that does not compute at all in Indo-European languages like Koine Greek.

Only with the greatest circumspection can one make a shift from a Semitic tongue to an Indo-European tongue, and I ultimately lack confidence in the prevailing notion of confidence in the extant set of Greek texts of Q-- as long as the same prevailing wisdom still holds that Jesus uttered the thoughts behind Q in either Aramaic or Hebrew, with perhaps a word of Latin or Greek thrown in as loan-expressions gathered from the agora.

Still, precise linguistic reconstruction seems a task that will elude pat acomplishment. I greatly admire the formidable work Dr. Maurice Casey has done in An Aramaic Approach to Q, but for my rude part as amateur I think I shall try a broad-spectrum approach in my final product, semantically listing the concepts in Q, then listing the sundry expressions possible for defining such terms. Here the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio and Marcus Jastrow's Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerusalmi, and the Midrashic Literature (1903) and Michael Sokoloff's Dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic (1992, 1990) should prove to be of immense benefit.

My product will not resemble Dr. Casey's product, who has given us a precise 'retro-translation' of Q. Instead, my effort will be a word-list of germane Palestinian Jewish Aramaic words and variants (as known) having bearing on the text evidenced in Q-- it would for energic-expenditure purposes be too grandiose to stretch myself beyond those academic limits. Even within these restrictions-- which are conservative-- this piece of work will be a 'tall order' and may take the rest of my life-- I am 58 years of age and 'have several irons in the fire' besides Aramaic/Hebrew scholarship. But simply because the task is daunting I should not forgive myself of the opportunity to work at it!

2005-09-05T00:37:00.000-07:00

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.

2005-08-26T19:27:00.000-07:00

10:29 p.m.--8/26/2005.
Cultural and Sociolinguistic Implications of the Babatha Archive
For the Sociology of Language in the Earliest Christian Communities.

I have promised to examine closely the Babatha Library/Archive, as described in previous entries, with a view toward unraveling some of the mysteries concerning the properties of the language demographic in 1st-century Palestine, particularly as it might have bearing on the earliest Christian communities.

I have not divulged the inner structure of the web of social relations implied in the Babatha Archive, which in and of itself makes an exciting psychosocial reconstruction for the person inclined to what can be called 'the historical imagination.' My comments are restricted to language evidenced in the thirty-seven documents (actually, my volume has but twenty-six of this trove, still a major sample for scholarly purposes.)

In particular, I would like to focus in this entry on evidence of illiteracy among the common people of whom Dame Babatha was a representative. For it was written in one of the documents that a 'hand' [anamneutic, scribe] prepared a particular document for lady Babatha because "to autes me eidenai grammata," [Greek: 'she was not to know how to write-out'.] Of course, those having even scanty knowledge of the prevailing culture would quickly counter that women were not expected to be literate, were deliberately under-educated by the male-dominate system. This position would hold more currency if not for the demonstration, sometimes coupled with evidence of Babatha's illiteracy, of the general illiteracy of the male populace as well. We read at the end of "Document #15," after finding about Babatha's inability to write in Greek, we read this line in Aramaic by Babatha's husband Yehudah ('Judah') to demonstrate he nevertheless had skills, perhaps limited, in Aramaic: "Yyehudah son of Khtousian "lord" of Babatha: In my presence Babatha confirmed all that is written above. Yehudah wrote it." [Emphasis mine.]

The presence of Aramaic literacy suggests an education system in Palestine for common people, a notion in keeping with that held by Rabbinical scholars like Alfred Edersheim, whose Sketches of Jewish Social Life (Hendrickson Publishers, 1994, 1876) is a classic analysis of Rabbinical material to reconstruct life in Judaica during the lifetime of Jesus. Education seems to have been an extremely important aspect of Jewish cultural life, and was essentially available free-of-charge to every Jewish child. One may regard somewhat suspectly the rather rosy picture painted by Edersheim, but what is remarkable in the Babatha Archive is the relative vibrancy, on the one hand, of some literacy, and evidence that illiteracy was also common. It seems plain from the most-casual study of the Babatha Library that the 'plain' people by and large were not 'graphic' in Greek, let alone the true language of the Empire, Latin.

Nevertheless, what also seems clear is the penetration of Greek and Nabatean [this is really a matter of no surprising import, because Babatha lived part of her life in Petra, which was in the
Nabatean/Arabian Province] and while we do not see evidence thereunto, one may anticipate that such a complex set of documents as the New Testament could illustrate linguistic specimens of Aramaic, Persian, Latin, etc., etc. One with the least sense of 'sociological imagination' could envision a condition of all kinds of languages being spoken in Palestine during the period of the early Roman occupation, a condition known to Germans and linguists as Mischsprache, 'the mixing of several languages in one sociological environment.'

Now there is a great gulf between spoken language and text; the words of Jesus are still overweeningly believed to have been in Aramaic [although a close reading of the Babatha Archive makes the conscientious scholar speculate as to whether Jesus had at least 'pidgin' facility in Koine Greek, enough to get his point across but certainly no man for the 'middle voice' or 'pluperfect' or complicated 'passive-particple' constructions which the Evangelists must have interpolated into 'Q' through much editiorial working over generations of re-telling 'the good news.] Jesus may have known Hebrew enough to recite the Holy Prayers like Shema and Psalms like Hallel; indeed for all we know given the relatively enlightened educational system extant in Palestine for observant Jews we certainly cannot rule out the possibility that Jeus was completely literate in Hebrew.

I suspect this is about the 'box' into which we can cast the total state of knowledge on the matter of the language of Jesus. Therefore, in order to 'separate the wheat from the chaff' in all this, we can do no better than apply ourselves to a total study of the sociolinguistics of Palestine from the 1st century, learning everything one can about all forms of Aramaic (including Palestinian Jewish Aramaic, Biblical Aramaic, 'Dead-Sea-Scrolls' Aramaic, Syriac, Targumic Aramaic, Samaritan, and Palestinian Christian Aramaic), Hebrew (Rabbinical, Biblical, Mishnaic), Greek (Koine, Attic, Septuagint), Latin (as it has bearing on the syntactic formations of language in 1st-century Palestine.)

One also needs to heed cultural factors, as far as they can be determined from side-texts and from archeology and social studies. What is not often appreciated is that the language of a text itself can shed immense light on the cultural context. In this way, the Babatha Archive's brief collection of legal and business documents illustrates much about the context of the times, and fits like a key into the mysterious 'lock' of the New Testament and the Mishnah and the other Rabbinical and Apostolic writings.

Recently, I have read and have gained a grudging appreciation for a work which I shall cite now, Language, Context, and Text: Aspects of Language in a Social-Semiotic Perspective, by M.A.K. Halladay and Ruqaiya Hasan (Oxford Univrsity Press, 1989, 1985). In particular, I draw attention to the second part of this work by Dr. Hasan, the thesis of this section being that in linguistic utterances having meaning, text-and-cultural-context are intimately interwoven, so that the one cannot be seen independently of the other and each gives clues for comprehension of the other. Hasan's 'flow-chart' algebra is at first a little whelming to my eye, but once I understood the general principle that not only can history and social studies be used to ascertain the meaning of a text, but textual meanings can be used to explicate the meanings of social situations and culture. This interactive principle in exegesis and hermeneutics is pregnant with good science and possibility for the humanities!

I want to lift up this notion of finding out culture from text, for the simple, spare reason that the data bases I have at hand are weak in connections to rich sociology, archeology, and history.
This is true despite the New Testament, the witness of the Sages and Rabbis, Josephus, the archeological digs that have seemingly gone on without terminus in Palestine, and several quality post-hoc analyses of the Sitz-im-Leben [German: 'situation-in-life'] of the Palestinians living in the 1st-century Roman occupation. My point is that these works-- for all their mass-- at a particular point of analysis for a text usually 'break down' and 'wash out' into vapidity. One is left to figure out the cultural context--just as Ruqaiya Hasan asserts-- by considering both text and what is known of context-- including linguistic context-- a process not unlike solving a jigsaw puzzle!

The Babatha Library/Archive amounts to finding a key-piece in the jigsaw puzzle of fathoming the language scene of Jesus' time and place. I am learning to think that there was an Aramaic language tradition, part of which was written by the common people in Palestine. I also learn through the Babatha Archive that the common people resorted to Greek scribes to write 'important' documents as 'testaments.' This Greek does not appear to have been their first language, a language they had much facility in, perhaps no facility whatsoever. Then again, there seems to have been penetration of a number of languages in that one small geographic area, creating a condtion conductive to Mischsprachen and 'pidgins' and perhaps dialectical shifts unique to neighborhoods.

We shall continue our analysis of the Babatha Archive in subsequent entries for a time.

2005-08-21T21:25:00.000-07:00

12:25 a.m.--8/22/2005.
Further Elaboration on the Babatha 'Library:'
Positive Proof that Certain Aramaic Texts Were Translated into Koine Greek.

The premise of The Critical Edition of Q (Augsburg Fortress Press, 2000) is that Q-- the sayings-text common to Luke and Matthew and (exotically) to the Gospel of Thomas was in origin Greek and never had an Aramaic Ur-Text from which to generate permutations of logia. This impressive 581-page tome speaks with the authoritative editorial scholarship of James M. Robinson, Paul Hoffmann, and John S. Kloppenborg, world-renowned experts on Q, and with the critical endorsement of the International Q Project (IQP). The great weight of authority, in other words, on the basis of extraordinarily reasoned scholarship, is that every edition of Q and consequently mutatis mutandis the Gospels comes to us utterly in Koine Greek.

Yet I have introduced the Babatha 'library/archive' in the previous entry, and will for several more entries dwell on these important discoveries from a cave in Israel containing material from around the Bar Kokhba Revolt (132-135 C.E.), comfortably within the culture that Jesus witnessed.

I want to call attention that two of the items from The Documents from the Bar Kokhba Period in the Cave of Letters... (Israel Exploration Society, Jerusalem, 1989), Number 5 and Number 6, show clearly that they were translated from another language--almost certainly Aramaic given the near-total context of everything else linguistically-- into rough Koine Greek. A clear interpolation in 'Fragment a.,' 'column i' in the Greek is for ermEneia, which the commentators are quick to point out means "translation [or "interpretation".] The notes here go on to say that the original text may have been in Nabatean, but was more likely to have been in Aramaic.

In either case, if this reading implies that a translation of a Semitic document took place into Greek, we have sociolinguistic evidence demonstrating that 'important' Semitic documents were translated into Greek. That Semitc language almost certainly was Palestinian Jewish Aramaic common to the idiom of the 1st century...but not a universe away from Syriac Aramaic or so-called Babylonian Jewish Aramaic ('Chaldee' so-called.)

Document Number 6 from this volume, in the Outer Text, at line Number 25 again shows-- this time without interpolation of any kind-- ermEneia, demonstrating that this is a translation from a 'foreign' text, prsumably Aramaic. This gets further amplified in the next line with the phrase, upethEka akolouthOs progegragrammenois, "I.O.U. following the translation."
This is further amplification of the same point, that there was a tendency among Palestinian Jews circa Jesus' time to write important documents indeed in Aramaic, and then as need arose in Koine Greek before an appropriate scribe. That this might have occurred with the Evangelical Message or with Q is a facile cognition to entertain, given these precepts.

This is not the only evidence the Babatha Archive exposes revealing a possible substrate of Aramaic parlance if not documentation for the Jesus-logia and the other Church tradtions found in the Gospels including the Nag Hammadi Gospel of Thomas. I am led to conject on a possibility that comes to my mind in this connection that seems to have some bearing on the total 'Aramaic mix' to which we are indulging our research efforts, and by that I mean the elusive connection between the logia of Jesus and the Aramaic precursor hypothesized for the Diatessaron of Tatian, a 'Harmony of the Gospels' assembled in the earliest part of the second century, now known in Arabic and Latin, and fragmentally in Syriac commentary by Ephraem the Hermit. Kurt and Barbara Aland, in The Text of the New Testament (1989, 1981) attest to the seminal importance of the Diatessaron as influencing the Old Syriac Gospels, the Peshitta, and the entire Syriac tradition.

But my query, I think comes prior to the Syriac tradition, rests squarely in the Palestinian Aramaic tradition. Now it should not be overstated that there were great differences between the dialect of Palestine and that of Edessa... the principal difference lay in the formation of the imperfect, with Syriac taking a preformative nun and Palestinian taking a preformative yodh for the imperfect...the rest is quite readable except for an idiomatic expression here and there.

Both the Syriac tradition and the Paletinian Aramaic Jewish tradition are strong bearers of oral culture; in song and legend the Syriac tradition is exceedingly rich, and with great accuracy it would seem the Rabbis recorded the stories of the Sages from earliest times into the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds. It does not at all seem implausible to think that 'Jesus-sayings' could have been preserved as had been the case for the Rabbis and passed into cognate Syriac and thence to 'Diatessaron-like' harmonies. Aland and Aland indicate just how 'impure,' let us say 'yeasty' the mix of Aramaicisms must have been prior to the suspension of the Diatessaron.

So much for speculation. What we do know is that there was a literary tradition in 'Jesus'' Palestine to write important documents in Aramaic; this demonstrates first of all that to some extent Aramaic was a literary language. Whether Sagely writings like sayings of preachers were ever recorded is only a little less certain, for we have the utter weight of the Dead Sea Scrolls to bear testmony to this possibility!

Therefore, whether one considers an oral tradition or a putative written tradition, the real possibility that a massive Aramaic substrate lies beneath the relatively placid text of the Gospels' Greek. We shall continue to examine the interface between the Greek and the Aramaic, using not the N.T. but the Babatha library as our first 'study example,' both for language analysis and for the view of cultural context this archive presents.

2005-08-13T10:02:00.000-07:00

The Bearing of Greek (and Latin) on Palestinian Language in the lst Century C.E.

There are several writings that attempt to illustrate the interface between Greek and Aramaic in 1st-century Palestine in a statistical way; I have already alluded to some of these. Recently I came upon a headliner of an example which makes good sociology as well as good sociolinguistics to illustrate the breathing relationship between these two languages.. and even a third, Latin, which after all was the tongue of the dominant Romans who governed Palestine and well into Arabia in those days.

The example, the text to which I refer, is the 'Babatha library,' most of which is found in The Documents from the Bar-Kokhba Period in the Cave of Letters (Israel Exploration Society, 1989). This 'Babatha' was a Jewess whose papyrus and goatskin documents were found in a cave in a wadi ('occasionally running stream') near the Dead Sea dating from the bloody Jewish revolt against the Romans between 132-135 C.E. From this fray, Babath probably took sanctuary in the wee cavrn now called the 'Cave of Letters' for her trove of legal documents left behind after what may have been her decimation at the hands of the Romans. By the documents and by the remains in the cave we surmise she may have been about 15 years of age at death.

Babatha married twice, had one husband die, and had an orphan Jesus whom she was accused legally--in papers in her 'library' of 37 letters-- of not caring for her orphan, whom she left under the tuteledge of a hunchback named Simon. She apparently was a woman of property, with some land, and an orchard, and fig crops.

But we are interested in sociolinguistics, the interplay of language communities here, in this case Aramaic [Babatha's language] and Koine Greek [the language of the business conducted in most of the documents.] This has direct bearing on the web of the New Testament, we shall see, in the way we find Babatha's documents put together. It is clear that the signatories to the Greek documents were first and foremost Aramaic/Nabatean writers, as their holographs indicate. The minority of documents are in Palestinian Aramaic characteristic of the Tannaic [early Rabbinical] Period writing, domestic documents declaring Babatha's husband 'lord' [adon] of the household and over her.

It seems abundantly clear that at that time and in that locale if important documents were to be issued, one went like Babatha or her associates to a 'scribe' who penned a document in the lingua franca of the Eastern Roman Empire, Koine Greek. In such a way, it seems inevitable that the Aramaic-speakers of the very first Jesus Movement would have wasted no time in getting to a scribe who-- be he called a grammateus or liblarios-- still functioned to interpret and render into Greek 'the news,' perhaps an evangelion ['good news.'] This Hellenistic tongue may or may not have been understood at all by the utterers of 'the word,' as seems to be the case with illiterate Babatha [who had to have a co-signatory] and her Aramaic/Nabatean counterparts.

This is not all we can infer. A further set of inferences has to do with the linguistic shift from Aramaic speech-- which in PALESTINE then had no literary value-- to the written text of sayings and traditions which became the Gospels in Greek. As far as I can intuit, in a culture as traditional as one valuing oral song and poetry, IT IS NOT AT ALL SAFE TO RULE OUT-- AS NOW SEEMS TO BE THE VOGUE (cf. The Critical Edition of Q, edited by J.M. Robinson, P. Hoffmann, and J.S. Kloppenborg [Augsbug Fortress Press, 2000]) the viability of Aramaic 'sayings' material by Jesus being preserved in a manner IDENTICAL to the way the Rabbis sayings were saved by the Jews. THIS IS AN ORIENTAL CUSTOM NOT IN KEEPING WITH THE WAYS OF THE WEST!

Clearly, however, though Aramaic was the peasant-language in Palestine, much of Jewry in Palestine and all the rest of the Eastern Roman Empire spoke some variant of Koine Greek, which was a vulgarized form of Attic ['Athenian' ] Greek with a generalizing and simpifying grammatical and syntactic trend. The Septuagint-- the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible deriving from Alexandrian Jews in the 3rd century B.C.E.-- became the first Bible of the Evangelists and Paul and to the Catholic Church.

The New Testament itself, in its first edition, is utterly Greek: anyone who tries to argue otherwise swims against a riptide of evidence. Yet it seems clear that Jesus himself spoke Aramaic, and the Babatha archive suggests that should the first 'Q' have been in Greek textually, it stood highest likelihood of having been polished and re-polished by subsequent redaction. A glance at a critical edition of the New Testament reveals how cunningly true this last statement rings (cf. Greek-English New Testament, edited by Barbara and Kurt Aland [Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1998, 1981]).

Latin seems to represent a minority influence in the N.T.; yet we find its influence in the Babatha library in foreshortening the frequency of the definite article, and in syntax. Occasionally in the New Testament, we come upon a Latin word. And of course we read that the 'sigla' announcing that 'This is Jesus, King of the Jews,' was in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin (Luke 23:38; John 11:8.) One does well to note that while the commercial language of the Eastern Empire was Greek, the Romans insisted on Latin, used a Latin calendar, held to Roman law, counted in the Roman system, worshipped Roman gods... at the very top of society hardly tipping into the world where Jesus lived and breathed until it was veritably too late!

This is my overview of Greek and Latin, and capitulates an overview of what I see in the domain of Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek and Latin bearing on the puzzle of the language of Jesus. This puzzle will be a link to the larger mystery of what made this epoch-shaking man think and sway people. Much of what I shall have to say as the puzzle leads more-solidly into said mystery about Jesus will be on the order of hypotheses (plural): BUT THIS INDULGENCE IS TO BE PERMITTED EVEN THE MOST-SCIENTIFIC WHO MUST CREATE AN ANALYTIC CONSTRUCT FROM 'CONTENT.'

2005-08-05T21:25:00.000-07:00

12:25 a.m.--8/6/2005.
Notes on Late Hebrew.

I have said that current thinking holds that Jesus knew a certain amount of Hebrew, or that the dialect of Galilee was rich in words which were more Hebrew than Aramaic in etymology and morphology. In this section I would like to mark off just what kind of Hebrew constituted this source material, at least hypothetically.

The degree to which peasants in Galilee could read Biblical Hebrew cannot be assumed to be very great; more likely is the case of learning Biblical Hebrew by association with the cultus at the Jerusalem Temple and in local synagogues. In this last instance learning would have been a matter of recitation not reading.

Still, we have record that Jesus read the Tanakh in Synagogue (Luke 4:18-19), and these need not be taken lightly. What we do not know is whether in this Old Synagogue the Septuagint [Greek translation of the Masoretic Text] was used, the Targum [Aramaic 'Version'], or the Hebrew text itself for Isaiah 61:1-2; 58:6...to this Luke is silent.

I am getting much of my material here from a chapter entitled, "Languages and Cultural Traditions," in a book by Richard A. Horsley entitled, Archeology,History and Society in Galilee: The Social Context of Jesus and the Rabbis (Trinity Press International, 1996), pp. 154-175. One of the reported findings from Galilean epigraphic remains reveals that 40% show Greek inscriptions, 40% report Hebrew, and more than 50% report Aramaic. This is said to support the notion that Aramaic was the most-widely-spoken language in Galilee during the second-temple period.

This chapter on language by Horsley also cites the literature from the 'Cave of Letters' deriving from the period of the Bar Kokhba Revolt (l32-135 C.E.): here we find less than fifty documents, most of which are in Greek, some in Aramaic, and a few in Hebrew. These seem to be cognate with the Bar Kokhba conspirators ideological work, plus the trove of a widow woman named Babata, who left in the cave a number of business documents. She apparently had sought refuge with the Bar Kokhba revolutionaries in the cave.

Of special interest--for Hebrew studies-- is the note that one epistle from the Cave of Letters suggests that: "...a desire has not been found to write in Hebrew" (Horsley, p.166). Horsley supposes that this relates to the fact that few people at the time may have spoken Hebrew.

A contrasting argument found in Horsley is a reference to a thesis that Mishnaic Hebrew amounts to northern "Israelian Hebrew" into which the Judean traditions were cast. The study to which Horsley refers for this thesis is: Gary A. Rendsburg, "The Galilean Background of Mishnaic Hebrew," in The Galilee of Late Antiquity (Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York, 1992), pp. 225-239. Horsley does much to denigrate this argument!

If the Galilean spoke Hebrew, it is likely this Hebrew was of its own vernacular. It is said that Samaritan Hebrew has some bearing on the idiosyncracies of Galilean vernacular. One of the pergrinations this much-peregrinating web-log intends to make will be to explore the known connectednesses of Samaritan (as exhibited in the Samaritan Pentateuch ab originalis) to Mishnaic Hebrew and Palestinian Jewish Aramaic.

I have not touched upon two other great sources of Late Hebrew-- the Hebrew portions of Daniel (Masoretic Text) and the Hebrew portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls. And now that I am thinking about it, since Ecclesiastes was said to have been translated from Aramaic into late Hebrew (really Middle Hebrew), this could be a source of diachronic guidance as well. [A 'diachronic' analysis is one done-- particularly in linguistics-- on a chronological perspective.] [A 'synchronic' analysis is particularly a linguistic analysis done from one time perspective.]

This will be a great voyage, with numerous forays, just on a lark. I tire of the usual business of preparing for writing as one last great smorgasbord: I want to use this blog as my notebook-- a vast notebook open to anyone curious--about this great adventure to fathom the language of Jesus.

Aramaic was definitely in the language mix in this case;

Hebrew--as I have tried to illustrate and outline here, has some bearing;

And Greek (and even Latin) had some contribution as languages of Empire and as Koine.
Next I shall write notes about Greek and a few words on Latin as befitting this puzzle!

2005-08-01T23:11:00.000-07:00

2:11 a.m.--8/2/2005.
An Overview of the Forms and Varieties of Aramaic.

This entry does not profess to be original research; apart from my sidelong comments bearing on my studies, I get the 'stuff' of this entry-- still solid knowledge for the fledgling-- from the article entitled "Aramaic" from the first volume of The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible (Abingdon Press, Nashville, TN, 2000, 1962), pp.185-190.

Aramaic is a Semitic language, closely related to ancient Akkadian, classical Arabic, Hebrew; at one vast period of time it was the lingua franca of the greatest majority of folk from a span of countries from Egypt, south into Arabia, north into Kurdistan and Afganistan and Pakistan. It was the official and dominant language of the Assyrian Empire and one of the official languages of the Persian (Pahlavi) Empire based in Iran.

The 'roots' of Aramaic may be surmised with some certainty by archeological artifacts containing writings from the Middle East. Aram is mentioned in these records as a place name, peopled by individuals who were not Semites, this location besing designated as in the Northeast of Syria. The Assyrians seem to have derived from a tribe of Northern Arabians who spoke 'proto-Aramaic'; these invaders of Mesopotamia were called the Suti. The Interpretr's Dictionary of the Bible entry here takes note that every Jew recalls [at Passover]: "A wandering Aramean was my father," Deuteronomy 26:5, emphasis mine.

Since the Hebrew people were subjected to the Babylonian Captivity, it is not surprising to read that Aramaic had become the language of Palestine when Ezra returned-- and then Nehemiah--from shame to rebuild a shattered Israel; nor is it surprising to find that parts of the Old Testament are written in Aramaic. These passages include Ezra 4:8-6:18; 7:12-26; Daniel 2:4b-7:28, and a gloss in Jeremiah 10:11. Generally, the 'newer' texts of the O.T. show a trend toward Aramaic usage and vocabulary, and it is also true that the Aramaic of Daniel is closer to the lst-century idiom of Jesus putative tongue than would be the passages from Ezra.

With the coming of Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic Period, Greek gradually replaced Aramaic in much of the 'Western' world, but the East in Edessa, Syria, and at Babylon, and specifically in Palestine, Aramaic retained a stubborn allure... in no small part for the religious treasures not conveyed by Greco-Latin culture. In Palestine specifically, it was said that only a few, the elite of the elite, were literate, and that the language of culture was Greek. Mishnah Megillah 1:8 indicates that scripture could be written in Greek, and thus we witness the Septuagint (LXX), very much a Jewish product of Hellenistic times.

Yet while the upper classes, the ruling establishment, and certain bilingual peasants may have spoken Greek, the prevailing view of scholars is that the language of Palestine [read here 'Galilee'] was a peculiar form of 'Hebraized Aramaic,' which can perhaps be imagined by picturing a mixture of speech [same as German sense: Mischsprache] confounding Palestinian Jewish Aramaic (the stuff of M. Sokoloff's Dictionary along with careful use of Jastrow's Dictionary for Aramaicisms) plus Mishnaic Hebrew in a liberal conjunction. This Aramaic/Hebrew shows up in the N.T. renderings Maran atha ['Messiah come']; talitha cumi ['damsel arise']; ephphatha ['be thou opened']; and Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani ['My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?'].

This is a passing note, just my Kentucky hillbilly freethinking at work. In the N.T. and in LXX, 'Hebrew' is said to refer to Aramaic. Cf. ebrais @ Acts 21:40; 22:2; 26:14; also 4 Maccabees 12:7; 16:15. Should ebrais phOnE be thought to actually be a form of Hebrew, or rather this Mischsprache of Aramaic and Hebrew to which scholars now point as likely for 1st-century Palestine?

The answer to the musing just posed requires work I cannot now do, but by-the-by as these entries accrue, and as my knowledge of the scholarship takes shape (I suspect in the end much will always have to be left to surmise) my guesses will become, I trow, more confident.

2005-07-31T18:27:00.000-07:00

9:27 p.m.--7/31/2005.
The Method of Greek Transliteration Used Here.

The method by which I transliterate the occasional Greek word appearing in this web-log will be analogous to that for Aramaic and Hebrew, i.e. to use a 'common' or phonetic pronunciation and--in this particular case-- to transliterate when it seems germane to do so. The urgency to transliterate precisely gets softened considerably in this instance because Greek has a vocalized alphabet, minimizing the mystery of pronunciation.
At any rate, in the special instances when a transliteration is required after the use of a phonetically-spelled Greek word, I shall use a modified form of the transliteration scheme found in Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible.

MY SYSTEM OF GREEK TRANSLITERATION, WITH MODIFICATIONS:

a=alpha; b=beta; g=gamma; d=delta; e=epsilon; z=zeta; E=eta; th=theta; i=iota;

k=kappa; l=lamda; m=mu; n=nu; x=xi; p=pi; r=rho; s=sigma; t=tau; u=upsilon;

ph=phi; ch=chi; ps=psi; O=omega.

As I indicate, I shall only use an exact transliteration when a 'dictionary' pronunciation is suspect.

2005-07-31T05:21:00.000-07:00

8:21 a.m.--7/31/2005.
Aramaic/Hebrew Transliterations.

In this web-log, I shall for Aramaic and Hebrew transliterations into English first of all try to get a phonetic 'reading' from Marcus Jastrow (see last entry), followed in square brackets by a consonants-only transliteration based on the system employed by the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon Project at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio.

HERE IS THE CAL APPARATUS:

)=aleph b=beth g=gimel h=he w=waw z=zayin x=heth

T=teth y=yodh k=kaph l=lamd m=mem n=nun s=samekh

(=ayin p=pe c=tzade q=qoph r=resh $=shin &=sin

t=taw

For the simple reason that vowel-signs are historically of recent origin, coming centuries after the original Semitic texts, I include vocalization in the anglicization of a word, for smoothness of pronunciation; the consonantal spelling is more 'at' the original.
In my next entry, I shall specify what method I shall use for the more limited case here of transliterating Greek words into the English alphabet.

2005-07-28T18:07:00.000-07:00

9:09 p.m.--7/28/2005.
Making Introductions.

This must not be a long entry. Yet there are points I need to clarify to a reading public and to myself about this web-log.
I am struggling as a fledgling with the mother-tongue[s] of Jesus; I wish in this blog to document the in's and out's of those struggles. That is my understanding of what a blog glories in, and I suppose therefore one could call a blog a rough draft journal over-read by a potential audience. Being read is a consideration of mine, but I like also the thought of making notes and saving them publically, without using paper or printer.
I said I am struggling with Aramaic, here's how: I am learning the Palestinian Jewish Aramaic and the Mishnaic Hebrew which was common in Galilee in the lst century; I am learning the Syriac variety of Aramaic in which the early translations of the New Testament appeared; I am learning Old Testament Aramaic (there are essentially two varieties of it); and to the degree that it varies from Old Testament Aramaic I am reading the Aramaic portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
For the potential scholar who would follow after me, here are some valuable bibliographical resources:

--Wilson, E. Jan., The Old Syriac Gospels: Studies and Comparative Translations, Gorgias Pr., 2003 (2002).
--Smith, R. Payne, A Compendious Syriac Dictionary, Eisenbrauns, Winona Lake, In., 1998.
--Robinson, Theodore H., Paradigms and Exercises in Syriac Grammar, Oxford University Pr., London, U.K., 1954 (1915).
--Stevenson, Wm. B., Grammar of Palestinian Jewish Aramaic, Oxford Pr., London, U.K., 1962 (1924).
--Sokoloff, Michael, A Dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic of the Byzantine Period, Bar Ilan Pr., 1992 (1990).
--Thackston, W.M., Introduction to Syriac, Ibex Publishers, Bethesda, Md., 1999.
--Black, Matthew, An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts, Hendrickson Publishers, 1967 (1946).
--Jastrow, Marcus, A Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature, Pardes Publishing, New York, 1950 (1903).

Also, I would highly recommend that the scholar who has access to Internet-- which would include anyone who can bring up this web-log, to make full use of The Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon, http://cal1.cn.huc.edu--- a fabulous tool for all sorts of Aramaic scholarship for students at every learning level.
But in no wise regard me as an expert. I am down here in Louisville, hundreds of miles from an Aramaic tutor, trying to learn by the ready method of translation-then-comparing-my-translation-with-a-standard-translation. Hunt and peck. Making lots of mistakes. This will show. Those with expertise can 'comment'-- this is welcomed-- and they can snicker-in-print if they wish!
Yet I hope I am off to a good start. Help me, Aramaic/Hebrew/Koine-Greek scholars, should I err!