George Lamsa

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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.

1 History and views
2 Scholarly views
3 Controversial translation
4 Other views
5 Footnotes
6 See also
7 External links

[edit] 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 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.

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.

[edit] Scholarly views

Few mainstream scholars accept Lamsa's hypotheses and many strongly believe his research to be pseudoscience. In particular, his translation has been found to be seriously flawed.

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.^[1]

Lamsa's view about the Old Testament, too is rejected by most conventional scholars, especially in light of the discovery and character of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

[edit] Controversial translation

A notable difference between Dr. 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. These are regarded by virtually all 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?" Where this similar to how the psalm appears in the Aramaic Peshitta Old Testament, it also 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 Dr. Lamsa's English version of the Bible explains Jesus's meaning as "This was my destiny."

Most Aramaic scholars, however, 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"^[2] 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?"

With this in light, serious Aramaic scholars believe that Lamsa, and many other Aramaicists who, like native speakers, extend the semantic areas of words to provide whatever meanings are needed, go beyond the evidence of existent texts.^[3]

[edit] Other views

The neutrality of this section is disputed.
Please see the discussion on the talk page.

Lamsa's revision makes more sense to some Christians, in that it shows Jesus Christ's understanding — even while he was in the process of "dying" – that as the Son of Man he was sent by his Father to be the final Passover lamb - the final sacrifice for sin. David R. Hawkins, a psychiatrist and mystic, writes in his books Power vs. Force (1995 / 2002) and Truth vs. Falsehood (2005) that his applied kinesiology research shows that Lamsa's version of the Bible is the most truthful available.

[edit] Footnotes

^ Casey, M. (1998) Aramaic sources of Mark's Gospel. Cambridge University Press.
^ The Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon at Hebrew Union College
^ Casey, M. (1998) Aramaic sources of Mark's Gospel. Cambridge University Press.