It's ALL Greek To Me

New Thought Christians have paid a lot more attention to the Bible in recent years. I'd like to believe it was because we have been doing a better job at educating our folks about the positive value of the Judeo-Christian scriptures, or because our people are reading the works of progressive authors, like the scholars of the Jesus Seminar--people like Bishop John Shelby Spong, Marcus Borg, Fr. John Dominic Crossan, and the late Robert Funk. But this renewed emphasis in biblical studies is probably more related to flights of fancy, like The DaVinci Code and assorted quasi-biblical archaeologically findings like the James Ossiaries. Regardless of how non-historical and poorly researched these works may be, they have nonetheless stirred popular interest in the biblical era again, just as the pop-religion, mini-hit book and movie The Secret has done for metaphysical thought in general.

One source of biblical enlightenment which has drawn wide attention in the small New Thought community has been the work of George Lamsa (1892-1975), a Turkish-born scholar who grew up speaking one of the many sub-languages which have descended from ancient roots in Aramaic. This modern version is part of a family of small languages and dialects, often tied to a religious community, which is growing smaller as tribal and villages versions give way to regional tongues such as Turkish, Arabic or Kurdish. Biblical Aramaic is a Semitic tongue related to Hebrew and Arabic, much like modern English has a common ancestry in German, with help from Latin, French and other European languages.

Jesus probably read Hebrew, spoke Aramaic, and perhaps knew some Greek or Latin. His boyhood home in Nazareth was only a short walk from the Greek-speaking town of Sepphoris, a trading and commercial center where Jesus and his father most surely marketed their carpentry trade. However, it requires a massive leap of faith for Lamsa to proclaim that the Aramaic he learned as a boy is the same language as Jesus spoke. Modern Aramaic is to the spoken language of Jesus as Spanish Salsa lyrics are to the Latin of Julius Caesar. Lamsa, however, insisted he grew up speaking biblical Aramaic, which he believed was the original language of both Old and New Testaments. This point of view is shared by virtually no scholar in the world, with the sole exception being Lamsa's direct disciples like Rocco Errico.

George Lamsa actually argued that the original OT text has been lost and the current Hebrew Bible is a re-translation back into Hebrew from the Aramaic. There is absolutely no evidence for this, a fact that Lamsa seems to have acknowledged when he claimed special insight rather than scholarly evidence as the basis for this conjecture. There are enormous problems with claiming the First Testament comes to us through the Aramaic, not the least of which is the fact that Judaism still retains its Hebrew Bible. The Dead Sea Scrolls seem to establish that biblical Hebrew, not Aramaic, was the original language of Jewish scriptures. Before the time of Jesus, Scribes had produced Aramaic and Greek translations of the Bible--known as the Targums and the Septuagint, respectively--for study and prayer use, but the ceremonial and liturgical scrolls used in the Synagogues of Israel remained in their original Hebrew.

In Second Testament studies, Lamsa and Errico claim that the text known as the Peshitta, written in an Aramaic sub-language called Syriac, is an authentic, preserved version of an original Aramaic New Testament. If this is a faith position, something akin to claiming the King James Bible is a divinely inspired translation, then no critical scholarly comment is possible other than a raised eyebrow. However, the NT Aramaic school opens itself to scholarly inquiry by asserting their position is verifiable by historical and textual evidence. And when applying the tools of critical analysis to their claims, the Aramaic NT fails several key tests.

1) The Peshitta is not old enough. The Aramaic of the Peshitta is much later than the NT-era Aramaic which Jesus would have spoken. Linguists can tell the difference in the progressive changes within a language, much like a reader today could readily distinguish between the writing styles of British authors Charles Dickens and J.K.Rowling. Also, the Peshitta shows evidence of influence from Greek Byzantine texts which came centuries after NT times.

2) Aramaic letters of Paul make no sense. Why would Paul, a Greek-speaking Jew, write to a Greco-Roman audience in Europe with the language of orthodox Judaism in Palestine? It would be like a Japanese scholar, who was educated at Harvard, writing letters to the New York Times in his native Japanese. Certainly, the Times could find someone to read Japanese, but why would an English-speaking Japanese author do that in the first place? Paul's purpose in life was to reach the Gentiles, and they did not speak Aramaic.

3) Certain gospel passages clearly indicate they were not written in Aramaic. For example, Mark contains this text:

At three o'clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, "Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?" which means, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Mk 15:34, NRSV)

Mark also reports the same statement-translation format when Jesus raised a child from the sleep of death:

He took her by the hand and said to her, "Talitha cum," which means, "Little girl, get up!" (Mk 5:41)

Scholars have rightly observed that translations of Aramaic passages in the text make no sense whatsoever if the text were written originally in Aramaic.

4) Lamsa's methodology is unprofessional. He is roundly criticized for making sweeping assertions with no foundations and for stretching the meaning of the text beyond the breaking point. The first step in biblical interpretation is to attempt to discover what the author was probably trying to say to his target audience, not to take favorable interpretations and insist the author really meant this or really meant that.

This is a crucial point for any interpretative system which looks to symbolic meanings: There are certainly passages which scream for allegorical/symbolic interpretations, the whole book of Revelation for example. However, it is an entirely different process when people try to discover a) what symbolic meaning the author may have had and b) what symbolism can be seen in that passage today. It is important to remember that the interpreter is probably not discovering some hidden, secret meaning in the text as much as co-creating new meanings with the long-dead author of the passage. Art, literature, music, drama--all these are interactive media. The creative process is not complete until the person at the receiving end makes the final adaptations.

Metaphysical interpretation is a process whereby we allow all persons, places, objects, and events to represent different phases or aspects of the growth of the individual soul. It is allegorical interpretation seen through spiritual growth lenses. And there are other lenses. Peace, justice, love, relationships, self-esteem, selfless service, and intellectual growth are other possible lenses through which we might view the words of a particular passage.

The fact that Lamsa's interpretations are favorable to much of New Thought Christianity should not compel us to overlook the problems with his scholarship. Unity, Religious Science, the UFBL and other New Thought churches have an uphill struggle to establish themselves as legitimate expressions of Christianity in the twenty-first century. Certainly, Lamsa's insights into Semitic idiom can be helpful, but to emphasize an Aramaic Bible in the face of overwhelming scholarly evidence to the contrary is to marginalize ourselves further and confirm the negative stereotype of New Thought as a vacuous assortment of religious dabblers who have no clue about the origins of the Judeo-Christian faith. We are better than that.