Please mobilize intercessors. The distributor’s head translator is starting to examine the Aramaic English New Testament, its notes & appendices. If he approves, we can get all Africa! Yeshua, unveil his eyes! I am staying on in Nigeria a week extra to be available & to pray.
The above link brings you to the site to purchase the Aramaic English New Testament. Use this link when you purchase, and you’ll not only be edifying your own walk but helping others as well. We really really like this Bible!
Before I read this AENT Bible, I never knew the Mark 7:19 issues. Apparently the phrase “by this Jesus declared all foods clean” is NOT in the earlier Greek manuscripts OR the Aramaic. It’s just added in there mysteriously. At best, it should be in the margin. But it’s in there in many of our English translations (and other languages) because it’s in some later Greek manuscripts. Consequently this phrase has been used for centuries as a proof text to claim that God changed dietary instructions in the “New Testament.”
It takes courage to investigate the question “have I been somewhat misled all this time?” But we are called to be like the Bereans of Acts 17:11 who “received the Word with all readiness of mind, and searched the Scriptures daily whether those things were so.”
Readiness of mind: being prepared to receive the Truth, no matter the consequence or the personal inconvenience.
Searching the Scriptures: not being satisfied with the English or whatever translated language you read as a mother tongue – but searching, investigating, digging into the original languages.
In Titus 3:9 where the Greek says “law,” the Aramaic says “scribes.” Try reading that verse in your own Bible and substitute “scribes” back in there in place of “law” and you’ll see the different meaning that exists in the Aramaic. Yeshua always opposed the scribes and the Pharisees – and so does the epistle to Titus. Yet the Greek tries to make it seem as if any discussion regarding the Torah is superfluous and even heretical (v.10). I guess at least one of the Greek scribes took it personally – being criticized in the Epistles — as so often occurred in the Gospels (against Hebrew scribes). Well, he responded by doing the very thing Yeshua criticized – changing the Word.
To say that an Aramaic scribe must have copied the NT from the Greek, and changed “nomikos (law)” to “scribes (sapra)” is a bit ridiculous, don’t you think? Why would a scribe bring bad light upon himself in such a way?
Besides all this, many pastors and congregants are telling me that they just love the way the Aramaic English New Testament sounds when I read it out loud. It has a beautiful flow to it. The Aramaic vs. Greek primacy issue needs to be brought to the table and discussed, of course. But first we got to just read it prayerfully and in tune with the Ruach HaKodesh (Holy Spirit).
May Yeshua guide each one of you into more and more Truth.
And remember to pray for me as I seek to release these Bibles into Africa.
Teddy
Yerubilee