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.

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[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,[1] 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." [2]


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.[citation needed]

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.[citation needed]

[edit] Scholarly views

Few mainstream scholars accept Lamsa's hypotheses and many strongly believe his research to be pseudoscience.[3][4] 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.[5]

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

[edit] 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. These are regarded by virtually all scholars[who?] as a quotation in Aramaic of the opening of Psalm 22, which in English is "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" While this is 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 Lamsa's English version of the Bible explains Jesus's meaning as "This was my destiny."

Aramaic grammars and dictionaries,[6] 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"[7] 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.[8]

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ Lamsa, G. (1933) The Four Gospels According to the Eastern Version. A. J. Holman Company. Philadelphia. Trans. by George M. Lamsa. p. xvi-xviii
  2. ^ Lamsa, G. (1933) The Four Gospels According to the Eastern Version. A. J. Holman Company. Philadelphia. Trans. by George M. Lamsa. p. xv
  3. ^ Review of Lamsa's translation by Herbert G May, Journal of Bible and Religion, Vol. 26, No. 4, Oct., 1958 (JSTOR)
  4. ^ Review of Lamsa's translation by PAH de Boer, Vetus Testamentum, Vol. 8, Fasc. 2, Apr., 1958 (JSTOR)
  5. ^ Casey, M. (1998) Aramaic sources of Mark's Gospel. Cambridge University Press.
  6. ^ including CAL and Payne Smith
  7. ^ The Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon at Hebrew Union College
  8. ^ Casey, M. (1998) Aramaic sources of Mark's Gospel. Cambridge University Press.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links