Boid on the Aramaic and Hebrew of the New Testament

You asked whether it would be useful to get the parallel Peshitta and Hebrew retroversion from the Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft. Yes, I think you could use this to overcome a longstanding difficulty. If you read intensively, and then later on extensively, your understanding of the two languages (Sprachgefühl) will go ahead in leaps and bounds. Go to www.dbg.de then to “Shop” then “Fremdsprachige Bibeln” then “Aramäisch/Hebräische Übersetzung”. I say this as someone with professional training in the methodology of language teaching, and also from my own personal experience.

When I bought the Old Syriac Gospels from Brill’s, the price was out of sight, though not dear considering the cost of production of the four volumes. I think it was about €600, which would be about eleven hundred Canadian dollars. This edition is now out of print. The editor, Anton Kiraz, now publishes the exact same text under licence from Brill’s through Gorgias Press, which is owned by him and his wife. This printing is much much cheaper. There is also a reprint of the first textual study by Burkitt, who first published these Gospels more than a century ago, also reprinted by Gorgias Press. The lists of readings with English translation would make this text accessible to you.

I will go over the readings of the Peshitta and the Old Syriac that you mentioned over the next few days.

Getting back to what I said about the continuous transmission of an Aramaic text, eventually re-edited in Babylonian Aramaic. If I’m right, we would have the explanation for the veneration of the Peshitta of the N.T. by the Churches that use it, which at times sounds like the claim that the Peshitta somehow embodies the original text. This might be an over-simplification of the truth.