For Those Inspired By Mel Gibson Friday, December 02, 2005

I never cease to be amazed at what shows up on the Ars Magica mailing list. Many thanks to Michaël de Verteuil for posting a link to Peshitta.org, where you can find an interlinear, Aramaic-English New Testament online in PDF format. If you want to see a quick example, here is a link to John (Yukhanan) Chapter 3. Remember, Aramaic, like its descendent, Hebrew, is written right to left, and so the English will appear jumbled, but that's only because it's correlating English phrases to the Aramaic in the order of the original. If you want to know more about the Aramaic-Syriac language, check out Wikipedia's excellent article.

It's worth mentioning that while an historical Jesus could have spoken Aramaic and there is a possibility that some of the original Gospels were written in Aramaic as well, there is no extant Gospel literature in Aramaic, and these Aramaic texts are re-translations from the Greek. Some Biblical scholars even question whether any of the Gospels were written in Aramaic at all. But it seems likely that even if all of the modern Gospels were written in Greek, they were at least informed by the presence of either a Hebrew or Aramaic source. This is the most widely-accepted solution to the so-called Synoptic problem: that an older source document called "Q" (from the German Quelle, meaning "source") informed some or all of the synoptic Gospels, thereby accounting for their striking similarities. Some good, general information about the different hypothetical solutions to theis problem can be found here.