Greetings!

Hello to everyone on the forum,

My name is Larry. I live in Kentucky, USA. My favorite languages (other than my native American English) are Biblical languages, namely, Hebrew, Syriac, Greek and lately I've been struggling with the basics of Latin. Let me explain. When you hold certain Bible texts and manuscripts in very high esteem and some of the most scholarly works written about those texts and manuscripts are written in Latin, German or in any other language but your own, the temptation is to learn something about those languages as well. Well, that was quite a run-on sentence but I hope I got my point across.
A strong case in point would be a book by Johann Wichelhaus written in Latin but written in very great detail about the Aramaic (also called Syriac) New Testament known as the Peshitta and how he holds it in such high esteem for its great antiquity and accuracy. At least this is what I gather from a multi-lingual Peshitta enthusiast named William Norton who must have known some Latin or else his colleagues knew Latin well and translated some of the statements Wichelhaus made, particularly ones that expressed the most zeal for the Aramaic Peshitta (also called Syriac Peshitto) Text.
Some problems with Syriac are that before vowel points and other markings were used you had to determine whether an article was indefinite or definite or whether a noun was singular or plural by the context of a certain passage. Rather than weaken the testimony that the Peshitta is the original New Testament, it strengthens it. Allow me to explain. Where the New Testament says "no prophet comes from Galilee" the Greek translators must have read this with the indefinite article ("a" )in mind but Andrew Gabriel Roth of www.peshitta.org points out that at least four prophets came from Galilee and one of them being Elijah from the mount Carmel area of the Galilee region. So the question is "Did the Jewish authorities suffer from total amnesia concerning the history and geography surrounding their prophets or did the Greek translators choose the wrong article, namely "a" when it should have been "the Prophet" that Moses prophesied about who was to become the greatest Jewish prophet to have ever lived, namely, Jesus, or Yeshua as He's called by Messianic Jews? Oh well, maybe you can understand why I've gotten so hooked on this stuff. :-)

Shalom from Kentucky, Larry

Hi Larry, and welcome on the site. We have many biblical request here, mainly into hebrew, latin, greek, hindi etc...