Wednesday, July 07, 2010

Jesus and Aramaic in the Gospels

ARAMAIC WATCH: Mark D. Roberts posts another installment of his series on the language(s) Jesus spoke: Jesus and Aramaic in the Gospels. (Earlier installment noted here.)

This one simplifies a little but is substantially accurate, although surprisingly he fails to mention the word ephphatha in Mark 7:34, which seems to be a dialectal variant of the Aramaic word "Be opened!"

A while ago I published an article on the problem of retroverting Hebrew or Aramaic from a Greek translation: "(How) Can We Tell if a Greek Apocryphon or Pseudepigraphon has been Translated from Hebrew or Aramaic?" Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 15 (2005): 3-61. Despite the focus of the title, it also deals quite a lot with the New Testament material. Abstract:
This article explores a wide range of problems that arise when we try to retrovert a Hebrew or Aramaic original from a Greek text, or even establish that Semitic interference in the text proves it to have been translated from a Semitic original. These problems include the inadequacy of a bipolar scale of ‘literal’ vs. ‘free’ translation technique; the difficulty of distinguishing Semitic grammar from Greek grammar; the possibility of interference from the language of the LXX (including rare grammatical features made popular in liturgy and testimonia) or bilingual interference; and the need to determine, when possible, the language (Hebrew or Aramaic), dialect, and period of the Vorlage. Claims to have retroverted the original texts of lost Semitic documents from Greek texts are found unconvincing, but this article advances a methodology for establishing Semitic interference due to translation from a Semitic Vorlage.
That article requires a paid personal or institutional subscription to access, but you can read an earlier draft presented at a conference here. (Sorry for all the formatting glitches. They were introduced in our latest site "upgrade.")