Amerika

This is very exciting:

Authorities in northern Cyprus believe they have found an ancient version of the Bible written in Syriac, a dialect of the native language of Jesus.

The manuscript was found in a police raid on suspected antiquity smugglers. Turkish Cypriot police testified in a court hearing they believe the manuscript could be about 2,000 years old.

Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic – the native language of Jesus – once spoken across much of the Middle East and Central Asia. It is used wherever there are Syrian Christians and still survives in the Syrian Orthodox Church in India.

Reuters

Fundamentalists should all try to understand Syriac grammar and Jewish culture at the time of the Biblical stories if they want to get accurate about what’s in the Bible.

However, if they left this task up to philosophers, those philosophers would point out that the Bible is a distillation of borrowed Greek and Hindu knowledge, as filtered through the middle eastern focus on the individual — which is necessary for trade, in which you pander to the customer.

Tags: aramaic, bible, judeo-christianity, syriac