Interesting statement from a world-class Orientalist

[librarylarry]

  Shalom to all,  I could barely believe my eyes when I first saw this! Joseph Simon Asseman mentions A MANUSCRIPT OF THE FOUR GOSPELS IN SYRIAC, BEARING DATE A. D. 78, in his Bibliotheca Orientalis Clementino-Vaticana. The manuscript was preserved at Baghdad on the river Tigris; at the end it had these words under written; "This sacred book was finished on Wedneday, the 18th day of the month Conun, in the year 389," that is of the Greeks, which was A. D. 78, "by the hand of the Apostle Achaeus, a fellow labourer of Mar Maris, and a disciple of the Apostle Mar Thaddeus, whom we intreat to pray for us." This prayer implies that the statement was written after the time of Achaeus (who is probably the person called also Aggaeus), and Dr. Glocester Ridley says that Achaeus died A. D. 48. 
    
     As it turns out, Aggaeus and Achaeus are one and the same, and Glocester Ridley's claim concerning Aggaeus' death in A. D. 48 is nonsense! His patriarchate was from circa 66-81. Fortunately the entire list of Assyrian Church of the East patriarchs are listed on Wikipedia. RIDLEY IS WRONG!!!!

  I emailed the Vatican Library for any information they might have on this ancient manuscript. They were very courteous. Surely they would know something about this because Joseph Simon Asseman was a collator and scribe of Oriental manuscripts under the watchful eye of Pope Clement XI. The Wikipedia entry has GIUSEPPE SIMONE ASSEMANI instead of JOSEPH SIMON ASSEMAN....

[alon]

Do you expect the Vatican will answer? They are typically not forthcoming with any documents that contradict their views or that predate any of their source documents in Greek. It took over 50 years for them to turn loose of the Qumran documents, and there is a lot of suspicion that many documents were destroyed or hidden by the Vatican appointees in that excavation.

Even then we'd have to take the time to stand the new document against to see if it is legitimate. There are many pseudepigraphic books out there, and with the apparent discrepancy with the date of the author's death this looks like it might be a good candidate. But I immagine that if this can be authenticated at least by date it would be an exciting find nonetheless.

Dan C

[librarylarry]

   Shalom Dan,  I had heard about the monopolizing going on by Catholic scholars. The whole situation reeked of not wanting their apple cart tipped over. I agree! 
Considering the biased nature of "Mother Church" as she's called and the likely condition of a document that's had its 1,939th birthday, I would be a fool to hold my breath and bite my fingernails while hanging on to the edge of my seat. LOL
 Every account I've read about concerning the tenure of Achaeus/Aggaeus is a crystal clear indicator that Glocester Ridley got some altered information. You can't be dead in A. D. 48 and be a spiritual leader circa A. D. 66 to A. D. 81.
Some have thought that A. D. 78 is too early for all four Gospels to be extant but this would be 45 years after the death of Yeshua. That seems like plenty of time for all of the Gospel writers to have everything collated and written. 

   The Aramaic Peshitta Text makes some very careful word choices that appear to be very -centric. A case in point would be Hebrews 3:1, where KUMREA is used instead of COHEN / KAHNA since Yeshua was a non-Levitical priest.
Add that with its affinity to Old Covenant Hebrew and you have an abundance of familiar idioms, parallelisms, smoother sentence structure, and cognates that gibe with each other really well. Many scholars believe that a considerable portion of the New Covenant Scriptures were translated from Palestinian Aramaic (sometimes referred to as the Syriac of Palestine) into the Assyrian Aramaic (sometimes referred to as the Syriac of Edessa), which would explain a host of anomalies such as the Greek having "EPHPHATHA" for "Be thou opened" whereas the Peshitta Text has "ETHPATHAKH" for "Be thou opened" in the passage where the deaf man is being healed by Yeshua. Once in a while you will run into a word or expression that is rare in Syriac but common in Hebrew. I'm not anti-Greek altogether. It's been called the most colorful, intricate language in the world for plenty of good reasons. Despite the awkwardness and things that somehow get lost in translation, the Septuagint Interlinear of Charles van der Pool is VERY IMPRESSIVE!!! His Apostolic Bible Polyglot is a rich resource. He shared his work with BibleHub which has oceans of resources. 

[alon]

There is a lot of argument over whether the so called "New Testament" was written in Greek, Aramaic, or Hebrew. All three camps have their evidences, with the Greeks losing ground. I am in the Hebrew primacy camp for one simple reason: that is to say it was written in anything else looks to me to be a part of the enemies plan to de-Judaize Yeshua. 

Christian scholars have painted the Galil as being mostly Gentile. So they can say Yeshua was brought up with Gentile customs, trained in Gentile schools, and so He was actually more Gentile than Jewish because He thought like a Gentile. Obviously if He spoke Greek as His primary tongue this would be true. But since Aramaic was the language of the traders passing through the region this too would have given Him a more worldly view.

The fact is He was a Jew, and wherever they went there was a synagogue and a yeshiva. Synagogue services were in Hebrew and the men had to speak Hebrew to read from . Archaeology in the Galil has debunked the pagan influences theory as well. The region laid pretty much empty until about 1oo yrs before Yeshua was born. Then it was resettled by the Jews. There were trade routes through the Galil and some major Roman construction going on there at the time Yeshua lived. But it was still predominantly Jewish. And the Jews loved their language, as everyone tends to do.

Then there is God:

Romans 3:1-2 (ESV) Then what advantage has the Jew? Or what is the value of circumcision?  Much in every way. To begin with, the Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God.

Nowhere is anyone else entrusted with becoming the holy language.

Yeshua may have spoken Greek, and He almost assuredly spoke Aramaic, but His primary tongue would have been Hebrew. All the shaliachim would have spoken Hebrew with at least some Aramaic. Rav Sh'ul eing well educated probably spoke Greek, Latin, Aramaic, and other tongues. But he was Jewish and so would have preferred Hebrew, especially when writing letters to other synagogues. Those letters did not go to just any or everyone in the synagogue. They would have gone to the leadership who would then read them to the congregation. And all the leadership had to speak Hebrew.

Those are just a few of the reasons I believe the letters which would become our B'rith Hadashah were written originally in Hebrew, probably copied into Aramaic and finally into Greek.

Dan C

[librarylarry]

   I see your point, Dan, and I'm not trying to rock the boat. I'm just trying to get behind the original words, idioms, Semitic poetry, etc., that would be naturally inherent in the various Semitic languages. As a case in point, the Crawford Codex of Revelation uses EPHOD in Revelation 1:13. The far more usual word in Syriac would be either PHEDLAW or PEDLAW (not sure because of the lack of aspiration marks on the Pe character). The codex uses a rare word in Syriac on purpose I believe in order to point directly to the ephod of the Old Covenant. The Crawford Codex and the standard Western Peshitto Text of Revelation also use Hebrew cognates like SHOFAR and MENORAH. 
  As an extra added comfort, the ancient scribes of the Aramaic Peshitta Text appear to have been strongly influenced by their Jewish neighbors because there are Peshitta exemplars that have every word of the text numbered to avoid scribal errors in future generations. My personal opinion is that they thought very highly of the "bulldog tenacity" and strict textual discipline of the Tiberian Masoretes. 

[librarylarry]

 Shalom Dan,  I found a prefatory remark to the quote in my first post translated from Latin to English by John David Michaelis... 'At Edessa was a written Gospel, ancient but still legible. Not a single iota was erased and it could more easily be read than many modern books, but by reason of its great age the ten first leaves had been lost.'  Asseman's Bibliotheca Orientalis was published in 1719. It was in remarkable condition 1,640 years after it was written and signed!!