Bonus Teaching: Research Updates!

Those of you who have known me for a while probably know well that I normally do not take
about ongoing projects while they arewellongoing. However, there have been several
developments in my research on tracking the earliest origins of the Scripture and tracing it all the
way to everything we see today that are so stunning that I feel the need to share some of these
with you all here.
A lot of this research is highly nuanced and it is not a rare thing to go back and forth on the best
way to explain it all. However, there have also been occasions where new evidence comes to
light which forces me to account for things and recalibrate a few details if need be. Any good
researcher, like any good CSI for that matter, should stand ready to alter a theory when the
evidence calls for it, but what I am about explain has in many ways been a long standing part of
my own theories from the get-go, but the evidence has deepened and the methods for explaining
it, I believe, have improved. Here then is a list, in no apparent chronological or thematic order, of
all the developing new stuff:
1) Improvements to the current theory of NT transmission.
For many years being an Aramaic NT Primacist was a confining title, and one not as well
defined as it might otherwise sound. At its most basic level, of course, is an overall belief that
what we call the New Testament was first written down and is better understood within the
Aramaic language of first century CE Israel.
However, some of my critics pointed out I was not really dealing with either explaining where all
the Aramaic NT manuscripts came from or addressing ideas about Hebrew manuscripts of NT
books (mostly Matthew) in terms of either readings like Shem Tobs Matthew 23:1-2 or
historical references from Early Church Fathers. Some of these issues that I have improved on I
talked about on the road, but they have not yet found their way into an AENT or discussions
here, in part because a lot of these new avenues are still showing me to where I need to go next.
For one thing, I actually have a lot more Aramaic NT manuscripts than I used to, thanks to the
help of some dear friends of mine and the kindness and generosity of the British Library, which
holds the worlds greatest collection of the Aramaic NT. I cannot tell you all the level of joy
these acquisitions have brought me, especially one very special manuscript of the entire Eastern
Aramaic NT called 14,470 which I find myself looking at sometimes just to get in a better mood.
I am saving some of my comments on it though for a later time, but suffice to say for now,
14,470 is a game-changer and its related friends that I have also acquired from the British
Library are tremendous tools for helping document the history of the Aramaic NT much more
precisely than was possible before.
Also, more manuscripts have made it on online in the last year than in the previous two decades
and between these and the British Library microfiche images my library has greatly increased to
the degree that I can tell that the scholars who used these manuscripts to put together the 190520 Critical Edition left some key information out of their analysis, and in some cases either

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fabricated or deceptively recorded things as being in these manuscripts that I can prove are
wrongly stated.
If, for example, Manuscript A originally had Reading #1, but part of Reading #1 was erased so
that it could be seen as Reading #2, the scholars should not have reported that Manuscript A
originally had Reading #2, when they can easily tell it really only had Reading #1, but for the
interference of a later writer in a later script writing with a sloppier hand. I have other examples
of this phenomenon, and I am also using the selection of old vs. new readings in these
manuscripts to date them more precisely than has ever been done before. In short, I am building
my case carefully, slowly but very steadily, and when I am done I believe certain scholarly
opinions in the wider world are likely to change.
All of this however is part of a wider explanation that I usually summarize as eastern languages
go east and western languages go west. Using both Scripture and improved manuscript data, I
believe I have come much closer to tracing the development of both the earliest Greek and
Aramaic traditions. Additional help has also come to me from upgrading to BibleWorks 10,
which also allows me access to many of the best Greek NT manuscripts as well.
The end result of that process is that primacy of one tradition over the other is not helpful
anymore. Instead, I have focused on how the needs of different assemblies in different places
affected the development of the NT books they received, and in some cases apostolic activity
authored and transmitted books around the same time in both languages.
Heres what I mean: Lets say Im Paul and I am writing to my friends in Corinth. As a native
Aramaic speaker, Im going to definitely put my first draft in Aramaic, and I may also do one in
Hebrew to give to my buddy Yaakov ha Tzadik for his library in Jerusalem, though none of
those Hebrew versions have survived.
Now, as I work to complete my first letter to the Corinthians, I am travelling with any of a wide
variety of folks who speak and write in Greek much better than I do. Depending on the time and
place I have access to two Gospel writers (Mark and Luke) and also people like Silas, Timothy,
Tertius and the list goes on and on.
In any case, after I have labored for a while I finally have a complete Aramaic version of 1
Corinthians that I am happy with. I then make immediate arrangements for copies of that letter in
Aramaic to be made, then I add my distinguishing mark so the folks who get it know its from
me, and then I send those copies back to Jerusalem and Yaakov for their records, along with
other copies going assemblies in Israel (Caesarea), Syria (Antioch) and other places where
Aramaic dominates (Edessa, Babylon, Adiabene, etc.), most of which are directly mentioned in
Scripture I might add.
But what about the Corinthians themselves? Sure some of them may know Aramaic through my
Rabbi friend Sosthenes, but lets face it, most of the people there are former Greco-Roman
pagans with little to no Hebrew or Aramaic understanding, so my Aramaic version is useless to
them.

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Thats where my friends come in. Guys like Silas and Timothy would often write letters with me
(1 Thessalonians 1:1, 2 Thessalonians 1:1) because my Greek is not as good as theirs.
Translating from my Aramaic version, they look at what I try to do for a phrase in Greek and
often they improve it and then ask, Is this what you meant, Paul? so we can get down to the
best readings there. When completed, I put in my distinguishing markin this case an Aramaic
phrase Maran atha (Our Master comes)and the congregation in Corinth receives their
original version of 1 Corinthiansin Greek.
In short, and this example is typical, depending on the perspective of the writer or the receiver of
a letter, both Aramaic and Greek were written under apostolic tutelage and both are original to
the New Testament as a whole.
However, in places where Aramaic dominated, it is equally likely that Greek versions of say
Matthew, Yaakov, Yehuda and some others would not see Greek translations for some time,
perhaps even after Paul was deceased. So the issue of primacy must be filtered through
considerations of the culture and the language of a place receiving an NT book; it is not a simple
case of one versus the other.
But where Aramaic Primacy or Greek Primacy can seem to fail, other considerations replace
these labels. I am still working on some of that terminology as titles are very important to me and
I dont have everything nailed down yet, but for now lets just say that I am more inclined to
address matters of Aramaic superiority or Aramaic dominance moreso than a strict primacy
argument, and in doing so I am also free to put the Greek back into the original Hebraic context
it never should have been taken out of.
2) Has Old Syriac made a comeback?
One of the most long-standing controversies between me and the wider Aramaic NT community
at large has been over the role of what is called Old Syriac in the overall history and tradition
of how the NT came to be in its current form.
I will admit to all of you at the outset that I am very inclined to the tradition of the Church of the
East, in which I have many friends and had the honor of being baptized in Aramaic, in Chicago
of 2003. There are members in that assembly which, Torah observance issues notwithstanding,
are long term friends of mine and whom I greatly admire. The AENT has also in several cases
been very warmly received by them in return. I am therefore privy to many of their traditions on
the Peshitta that are not widely known to the rest of the world, and this makes me a staunch
defender of their eastern traditions.
Therefore, when both the Church of the East and the Syrian Orthodox Church declare the Old
Syriac manuscripts of Sinaiticus, Curetonian and Codex Phillips 1388 have no place in their
traditions, I believe them. When they offer testimony to me personally that proves such is the
case, I take their testimony over that of some modern scholars who dont pay attention to ancient
eyewitnesses.

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The basic facts on the earliest of these three manuscripts, known as Old Syriac Siniaticus (OS-S),
have not changed for me in more than 20 years of research, which are:
1) OS-S on its manuscript is called The Separated Gospels, which is an utterly unique title of
a work done by an early 5th century bishop known as Rabulla of Edessa. His own biographer,
who is an eyewitness to the production of this work says: By the grace of Elohim, he
translated from the Greek into Aramaic the Separated Gospels, because of its variations,
exactly as it was. OS-S therefore is not the ancestor to the Peshitta as some have claimed but
a translation from the Greek, most likely a manuscript called Codex Bezae.
2) Rabulla was a hated enemy of the Church of the East and we know the COE had the Peshitta
text in use centuries before Rabulla was even born, so Rabulla cannot be the Peshittas
author. Instead Rabulla himself, in his own words, ordered that the presbyters in the
churches have the Separated Gospels readmeaning his translation which scholars call OSS.
3) The Church of the East would never accept as Scripture the work of a man they called the
devil and the great heretic.
These facts and some others mean OS-S, which is earliest of the Old Syriac Group, as a
manuscript could not have existed before Rabulla became a bishop in 411 CE. But, as it turns out
now, thats not quite the end of the story.
In addition to the variants in OS-S, I found that not a lot of attention was being paid to the
overwhelming majority of time that OS-S agrees with the Peshitta. When I catalogued these
similarities, I realized that proved some readings in the OS-S had to precede the production of
the physical manuscript. That understanding, in turn, opened me up to the possibility that some
of the variants in OS-S might too have been witnessed to in earlier sources, so I began to look at
it again.
For the readings that were in OS-S which were unique to it, I traced them back to their obvious
source, the assembly at Edessa, where Rabulla would eventually become a bishop or overseer to.
I also remembered that the same assembly at Edessa had been a hotbed of a heresy called
Monophysitism, or the belief that Yshua had no human aspect whatsoever, never a physical
birth or death. In addition to some vague references in Titus and 1 John, the genesis of this
heresy was recorded on the western side by one of the earliest Catholics, a guy named Ignatius,
who lived about 30 CE-100 CE. The thing with Iggy though is that he was a bit of a jerk, said
some not so nice things about my people and the Torah, and if was around in the first century I
might have called him outside to settle matters if I found myself in Rome. But that didnt mean
that Iggy couldnt be right about early heresies that affected both Catholics and early Messianics
alike for the worse.
The texts that were twisted to conform to the heresy are manifold, but they included a deliberate
shortening of the end of Marks Gospel (OS-S) that earlier Aramaic traditions did not support
and a general downplaying of Yshuas humanity in key texts such as John 17:11, Acts 20:28
and Hebrews 2:9, among others. And, like the Old Syriac variants I traced these to the same
exact place: Edessa.
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Then I became aware of other early Aramaic texts that hadnt been accounted for because they
werent classified as Biblical texts per se. Basically they were the writings of two Aramaic
saints Aphrahat (d. 345 CE) and Ephrem (d. 373) who wrote homilies and commentaries and
other literature that liberally quoted from ancient Aramaic NT texts that perhaps now are lost to
us. In Ephrems case, he wrote a terrific commentary on the Diatessarona late 2nd century
Gospel harmony done in Aramaicand for centuries it was believed this commentary which he
originally wrote also in Aramaic was lost.
However, it was found again in the 1950s and by the year 2000 a definitive English translation
with extensive notations of Aramaic words in the footnotes, was published by Oxford. Finding
Aramaic and English resources for both these saints helped me tremendously in my quest to
piece everything back together.
The bottom line was this: I found that the variant readings in OS-S and the other revised Peshitta
readings that reflect the heresy described, all came from Edessa and preceded their preservation
in OS-S and OS-C by as much as three centuries. So while the manuscripts cannot go further
back than the early 400s, some of their readings most definitely can be traced back much further
than I previously taught, but still not far back enough to be before the Peshitta traditions. I call
this older source now EVT, or the Edessan Variant Tradition, and it dates to the latter half of the
2nd century.
But for those of you who may hope that I will do the same thing for the so-called Hebrew
Matthews of Dutillet, Shem Tob and Munster, sorry to disappoint, but they remain the horribly
late and largely irrelevant witnesses they have always been.
On the other hand, I have had more success in tracing the history of the Hebrew NT canon as it
was preserved in Jerusalem (ca. 45 CE-135 CE). There is now a distinction made in my
chronology between what were likely Hebrew NT books that circulated only in Israel and their
Aramaic mirror-copies that circulated outside of Israel, and I think I can do a better job now of
distinguishing between the two in the earliest historical statements that we have about both
traditions.
3) The trail for the earliest Biblical manuscript with a date on it heats up.
In 2008, I reported in the first edition of the AENT the following:
A manuscript of the four Gospels in Syriac, bearing the date A.D. 78, is mentioned by J. S.
Asseman, in his Bibliotheca. The manuscript was preserved at Baghdad on the river Tigris; at
the end it had these words under written; "This sacred book was finished on Wednesday, the
18th day of the month Conun, in the year 389," that is of the Greeks, which was A. D. 78,
"by the hand of the Apostle Achaeus, a fellow labourer of Mar Maris, and a disciple of the
Apostle Mar Thaddeus, whom we intreat to pray for us." This prayer implies that the
statement was written after the time of Achaeus (who is probably the person called also
Aggaeus), and Dr. Glocester Ridley says that Achaeus died A. D. 48. For this and other
reasons J. D. Michaelis says that the statement "is of no authority." (Marsh's Michaelis, 1823,
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vol. ii., pg. 31)

My initial response to this potentially explosive testimony was this: Make a joke about it and
move on. Seriously, thats what I did to my own regret. When I went to Israel in 2009 I
produced some teachings that were later released on DVD. At the end of one of the lectures that
talked about this I asked people to do me this favor: If you ever find yourself in Rome help me
out and knock on the Vaticans door and tell them to give us our stuff back!
Then my head cleared and the first thing I noticed was that I could not easily determine if the
refutation of the Vatican Librarian was by Michaelis himself or in fact by a later editor of his
named Herbert Marsh. The reference above quoted Marshs Michaelis and gave a publication
date of 1823, whereas JD Michaelis himself wrote in German and died in 1791. I knew Michaelis
to be in general a very powerful voice for Hebrew and Aramaic origins of the New Testament, so
the critique on this reference from the Vatican Librarian himself admittedly surprised me and I
began to suspect this was more Marshs doing, although my research into that matter in ongoing.
But whether the attempted discrediting of such a normally unimpeachable scholar like J.S.
Asseman was Michaelis or Marsh, I realized I had failed to do follow up research to question the
criticism against Assemani directly, and the stakes for doing thatin essence having a reference
from a leading scholar to what would be the oldest Biblical manuscript with a certain date on it
the world had ever knowncould not have been higher. An Aramaic Gospel text from the year
78 CE? How could I not investigate this further?
The first step was going through ancient sources to see what they might have to say about the
names mentioned on the manuscript: Achaeus and Mar Maris. It turns out these were the names
of two of the earliest patriarchs of the Church of the East. And these names have also been
confirmed as correct in ancient Roman Catholic records too, so unless these two churches that
basically hated each other from the get-go had some qumbaya moment that was not recorded, the
inescapable conclusion had to be the list of patriarchs was accurate and confirmed in multiple
sources.
Let me back up a bit though. The ancient Aramaic traditions tell us that the Church of the East is
the chosen assembly in Babylon mentioned by Peter (1 Peter 5:13), but originally founded by
the apostle Thaddeus, who had been trained by Peter. After Thaddeus died in 66 CE, he was
replaced by a man named Achaeus, one of the names mentioned on the manuscript. Achaeus,
who was also called Mar Aggai, died in 81 CE, so he was alive in 78 CE when the manuscript
was written. Right away I knew what this meant: Marsh was completely wrong in dismissing
Assemani; he may have simply confused one man named Achaeus for another, and the second
one was alive when the manuscript was written!
It is also possible that the first Achaeus was simply the old teacher of Mar Maris, the other name
mentioned on the manuscript and he may have died in 48 CE but it didnt matter because the text
only said he worked with Mar Maris, not that he had to be alive at the time the manuscript was
written.

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It turned out also that Mar Maris became patriarch also after his second teacher named Achaeus
died in 81 CE. Not only was Mar Maris alive in 78 CE, we know he lived to a very ripe old age,
dying in 121 CE!
Bottom line: Whether we are dealing with Achaeus #1 or Achaeus #2, both of them were colaborers with Mar Maris, just as the Assemani manuscript said, so if thats the basis on doubting
the word of the Vatican Librarian it has been proven false and Assemani has been proven right.
Therefore, at least by 1728, we know for a fact the Aramaic Gospels dated to 78 CE actually
existed at that time, and I am willing to wager a great deal that the Vatican still has it to this very
day.
As a result, this reference has gone from humorous aside to an actual fact, and somehow or some
way, Abba YHWH willing, I now have to look at how we might go about trying somehow to
restore this manuscript to the world.
4) Renewed interest and research in the Diatessaron.
I mentioned earlier the Diatessaron, which was a Harmony of the Gospels done in Aramaic by a
man named Tatian in about 175 CE. Tatian, who was branded a heretic in the west, was never
called this by his native church and people in the east who knew him best. Not that Tatian
doesnt have some serious problems in his theology from a Hebrew Roots perspective, but when
it comes to looking at him in the context of his time, we kind of have to grade on a curve. And it
is often the case that the people who call him a heretic are actually heretics themselves in other
areas.
In any case, because all the original Aramaic copies of the Diatessaron are believed lost and
because its relationship between ancient Aramaic and Greek versions has been difficult to track,
I largely gave up on trying to research it until once again new and stunning evidence about it
came to light in three areas.
First, Mar Ephrem was known to have written a commentary on it in Aramaic that has liberal
Aramaic NT quotes in it, but it was thought to be completely lost, surviving only in a later
Armenian translation. I have already mentioned however how that is no longer the case, and I
now have a definitive translation in English of the Aramaic original.
The next step was to look at the Arabic translation that was done in the 11th century, because it
claimed boldly that it was translated directly from the Aramaic original text. When I compared it
carefully, I found that 99% of the Aramaic NT quotes in it were direct from the Peshitta
traditions and only 2 could have possibly been from the Edessan Variant Tradition I also
mentioned earlier.
My excitement then increased exponentially as I looked at the high likelihood that Tatian himself
may have authored both Aramaic and Greek versions of the Diatessaron. However, unlike the
Aramaic, one single page of the Greek version was found that very likely came from Tatians
pen. The thing that was amazing about the Dura Europa fragment #24 was that it was found
buried in a city that we know with 100% certainty was destroyed and never rebuilt in 256 CE.
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That meant this Greek fragment had to have been written within 81 years of the Aramaic
Diatessarons composition in 175 CE, and though the text was minimal it told me something
very important: Its NT readings completely supported the Peshitta against the Old Syriac,
proving the former had to circulate in the first half of the 3rd century and proving once and for all
(like Ephrems and Aphrahats commentaries also did) that the Peshitta could not have been the
work of a 5th century bishop who wasnt even born when this fragment was buried!
In conclusion, I now have direct access to manuscripts and other primary sources that are sure to
refine the work I am doing in years to come and bring more evidence than ever to answer the
question: How and when did the earliest versions of the NT come together! Stay tunedfor as
long as Abba YHWH wills it this adventure is just getting started and there is far more to this
story that is still yet to be told.

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