> Jack Kilmon wrote:
>
> > Tendentiousness of any form is an obstacle to scholarship.
>
> Tendentiousness is human and inevitable. You base your views, etc.,
> on the
> feelings that reading the text in a particular language gives you--the
>
> "voice" Jesus has in Aramaic. This is neither less nor more
> tendentious
> than other rationales. It's circular and subjective, but no more so
> than
> other views. And you have the grace and sense to honestly describe
> the
> rationale for your preferences.
>
> The true obstacle to scholarship is when someone has so much emotion
> (or
> ego, or career, or whatever)
> invested in their views that they cannot see themselves, their views,
> or
> their methods critically or with a modicum of clearheadedness.
Yes, I fully admit that the metallic thunder of the Aramaic sayings
of
Jesus give me goosy bumps (g). Having said this, however, I have no
"sacred cows" to protect and fully invite challenges to my paradigms for
the
first generation origins of the NT source material. I find the evidence
of
Jeremias and Fitzmyer compelling but am always prepared to alter my own
constructs based on evidence. The sudden appearance of an Aramaic
idiom,
upon retroversion, that makes sense of some Greek renderings is
compelling.
I view the discussion of those Aramaic renderings in the context of
discussing
the Greek suitable for this forum when it can shed some light on
difficult readings.
This is not "b-Aramaic" but most admit that there are Aramaic
substrata to
contend with. The debt/debtors vs sin/sinners idiom of the LP are an
example.
When Luke felt it necessary to explain this idiom, he tells us 2
things. One,
that he was competent in Aramaic, and two, that the original rendering
of the
LP was in Aramaic. I therefore becomes informative to me to study the
prayer
in Aramaic as it underlies the translational Greek.
Jack
-- Dâman dith laych idneh dânishMA nishMA Jack Kilmon (jpman@accesscomm.net)