George Lamsa

George M. Lamsa (August 5, 1892 – September 22, 1975) was an Assyrian author. He was born in Mar Bishu in what is now the extreme east of Turkey. A native Aramaic speaker, he translated the Aramaic Peshitta (literally "straight, simple") Old and New Testaments into English.

History and views

Lamsa was a member of the Assyrian Church of the East. He was a strong advocate of one of that Church's beliefs: Peshitta primacy (a form of Aramaic primacy). His hypothesis was that for the New Testament, the Peshitta was the original text, and the Greek version was translated from it. In support of this, he noted that Aramaic was the language of Jesus and the earliest Christians, [Lamsa, G. (1933) "The Four Gospels According to the Eastern Version." A. J. Holman Company. Philadelphia. Trans. by George M. Lamsa. p. xvi-xviii] because of the historical fact that, according to Lamsa, "Aramaic was the colloquial and literary language of Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor and Mesopotamia, from the fourth century B. C. to the ninth century A. D." [Lamsa, G. (1933) "The Four Gospels According to the Eastern Version." A. J. Holman Company. Philadelphia. Trans. by George M. Lamsa. p. xv]

Lamsa further claimed that while most of the Old Testament was written in Hebrew, the original was lost and the present Hebrew version, the Masoretic text, was re-translated from the Peshitta.Fact|date=October 2007

Lamsa produced his own translation of the Bible in the form of "The Holy Bible from Ancient Eastern Manuscripts", which is commonly called the "Lamsa Bible".Fact|date=October 2007

cholarly views

Where many scholars hold that the sources of the New Testament and early oral traditions of fledgling Christianity were, indeed, in Aramaic, the Peshitta appears to have been strongly influenced by the Byzantine reading of the Greek manuscript tradition, and is in a dialect of Syriac that is much younger than that which was contemporary to Jesus. [Casey, M. (1998) "Aramaic sources of Mark's Gospel." Cambridge University Press.]

Controversial translation

A notable difference between Lamsa's translation and other versions of the New Testament occurs in the fourth of the Words of Jesus on the cross – "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani". This is regarded by more conservative scholars as a quotation in Aramaic of the opening of Psalm 22, which in English is "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" This is similar to how the psalm appears in the Aramaic Peshitta Old Testament and it appears in earlier Aramaic Targums. Lamsa believed that the text of the Gospels was corrupt, and that it is not a quotation but should read /"Eli, Eli, lemana shabaqthani", which he translates as: "My God, my God, for this I was spared!" An accompanying footnote in Lamsa's English version of the Bible explains Jesus's meaning as "This was my destiny."

Aramaic grammars and dictionaries, [including CAL and Payne Smith] contend with Lamsa's assertion about Jesus' last words, as the word שבקתני ["shvaqtani"] in Aramaic is the "perfect 2nd person singular" form of the verb שבק ["shvaq"] which means "to leave, to leave s.t. left over, to abandon," or "to permit" [ [http://cal1.cn.huc.edu The Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon] at [http://www.huc.edu Hebrew Union College] ] with the 1st person singular pronoun affixed. This would, in turn, cause the phrase to translate as "why have you left me?" "why have you let me be?" "why have you abandoned me?" or "why have you permitted me?" Where many scholars hold that the sources of the New Testament and early oral traditions of fledgling Christianity were, indeed, in Aramaic, the Peshitta appears to have been strongly influenced by the Byzantine reading of the Greek manuscript tradition, and is in a dialect of Syriac that is much younger than that which was contemporary to Jesus. [Casey, M. (1998) "Aramaic sources of Mark's Gospel." Cambridge University Press.]

Critics of Lamsa assert that he, like many native speakers Aramaic, extend the semantic areas of words beyond the evidence of existent texts. [Casey, M. (1998) "Aramaic sources of Mark's Gospel." Cambridge University Press.]

Footnotes

ee also

*Lamsa Bible
*Words of Jesus on the cross, section "Eli Eli lema sabachthani"

External links

* [http://www.aramaicpeshitta.com Lamsa Bible online]