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Languages of the Bible and their speakers | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| dmaddock1 Senior Member United States Joined 5419 days ago 174 posts - 426 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, Esperanto, Latin, Ancient Greek | Message 25 of 53 26 March 2010 at 7:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
The Dead Sea Scrolls did not contain the book of Esther so they obviously differed from what eventually became the Hebrew canon. That said, the "Torah" refers only to the first five books (Gen.--Deut.) and I have no specific knowledge of the level of variation exhibited there. Given that they were 1000 years older than any known manuscript wouldn't you consider 99% the same pretty damn good? But at around 500,000 words that's 5,000 differences! ;) Depending on one's a priori bias, one may consider the relative variation or lack of variation in the text significant or insignificant. Secular scholars may highlight the former while religious ones may stress the latter without either necessarily being wrong... That said, if someone claims that no manuscript variations exist that effect common doctrinal passages they are flat wrong. I'd point you to Ehrman's The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture which is a very scholarly exposition of said variations in New Testament manuscripts. (One can of course debate their interpretation but not the fact that they exist.) His Misquoting Jesus is a very over-simplified reduction for a popular audience and is a decent introduction to the subject. I haven't studied text criticism of the Tanakh, but if someone knows of a similar book covering it please let me know. Now, the Bible Code is a different animal than textual variation and I won't comment on it here except to say that people often see what they want to see. I can say though that if you are interested in these sort of issues AND languages, then text criticism is right up your alley.
Multilingual religious resources are much easier to find than secular ones in my experience (in the US anyway). Interlinear greek/hebrew/english bibles aren't too hard to find stocked in bookstores or online. Here's one you can also download for free in pdf. I don't like the interlinear format though as I rely too much on the English. I personally am using this Greek New Testament which is very good and has an apparatus documenting variations along with this companion commentary on why one variation was chosen over others. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| dmaddock1 Senior Member United States Joined 5419 days ago 174 posts - 426 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, Esperanto, Latin, Ancient Greek | Message 26 of 53 26 March 2010 at 7:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Forgot to mention, I stumbled upon this set of introductory lessons in Biblical Aramaic:
http://www.introlessonsinaramaic.com/ 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| cordelia0507 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5824 days ago 1473 posts - 2176 votes Speaks: Swedish* Studies: German, Russian | Message 27 of 53 26 March 2010 at 10:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
Agree about the dumbing down, but that's another story.. Here in the UK I have seen bilingual bibles around, definitely in the large European languages. I don't actually know what anyone would want them for though, unless they are a language learner. But trust me, if you are not a native English speaker, the King James bible is very inaccessible. Nowadays I get it, but a few years ago it was hopeless. http://www.biblegateway.com/ This lets you check any passage in several languages at the same time; or you can compare several versions of the bible in one language. There are 50 languages, just tick the ones you want. Edited by cordelia0507 on 26 March 2010 at 10:15pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| pohaku Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5637 days ago 192 posts - 367 votes Speaks: English*, Persian Studies: Arabic (classical), French, German, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 28 of 53 26 March 2010 at 10:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
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My JPS (Jewish Publication Society) Hebrew-English Tanakh just arrived yesterday. I got it because after six months of reading Arabic (1001 Nights--decidedly non-religious and a great deal of fun), I thought that it should be fairly easy to learn a little Hebrew. I started simply, learned the block-form and handwritten alphabets, and began working through just one or two verses of Genesis per day using library books. I made it to the creation of Adam and decided to order the whole Tanakh (basically, the Old Testament) in a parallel column Hebrew-English format. The book seems very well made and the scholarship is recent. Mine is a "student edition," not super-scholarly and not liturgical, either. The cost was reasonable, about $25 as I recall.
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| Johntm Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5408 days ago 616 posts - 725 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 29 of 53 27 March 2010 at 4:44am | IP Logged | |||||
Edited by Johntm on 27 March 2010 at 4:45am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| cordelia0507 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5824 days ago 1473 posts - 2176 votes Speaks: Swedish* Studies: German, Russian | Message 30 of 53 27 March 2010 at 12:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
But it's probably the most beautiful and poetic English text I know about. Whoever did that translation was a true master of English. I know that there are a fair number of Christians in the US who hold the view that it's the only legit translation of the Bible into English for some complicated reasons relating to what source material was used (although most likely they are simply very conservative). But that seems very strange to me and I simply appreciate it for what it is. I was really impressed to see how many differerent translations actually exist in English. I think in Sweden there are only two in use.. Maybe one more that I might not know about. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6754 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 31 of 53 27 March 2010 at 1:16pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Heh, I'm reading Misquoting Jesus right now, and the story of how the Textus Receptus (the rather poor-
quality Greek codex on which the King James Bible is based) came to be. The verse about the Trinity didn't even exist in the Greek manuscripts, but prominent theologians pressured its compiler, the Dutch humanist Erasmus, to insert it and even created a fresh Greek translation from the Latin Vulgate for him to use. The last part of Revelations was also translated to Greek from Latin because the only manuscript for it Erasmus had (borrowed from a friend) was missing its last page. Erasmus' aim was to produce the first printed Greek Bible, not the most accurate. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| BartoG Diglot Senior Member United States confession Joined 5433 days ago 292 posts - 818 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Uzbek | Message 32 of 53 27 March 2010 at 9:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I had a colleague who was an Assyrian Christian and who said that her people came as close to speaking the language of Jesus as anyone alive today. And if you look up "Lord's Prayer Aramaic" at Amazon, you'll discover books, CDs and MP3s purporting to offer you the Lord's Prayer as Jesus really spoke it. And let us not forget Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ, which made a (I believe unsuccessful) stab at retelling the story in the languages the principals would have used.
Clearly, there's a certain pull to the idea that the actual language of religious figures, as opposed to translations, has a special power. This is carried over in Muslims' devotion to the Koran in the original Arabic, Indians' reference to their script as the Devanagari - translated City of the Gods, according to some - and the idea that Odin gave an eye to be able to read the runes. But I think there's something to the Kabbalic notion that the Torah has all the right letters, but not necessarily in the right order: Our mystical language started out as spoken poetry, memorized by the use of devices that might not create the same exact story with the same exact words, but that would create rhythmic, rip-roaring tale at any rate. I've read some of Ehrman's stuff (author of Misquoting Jesus) and there's much to be said for the dangers of reading too much into the precise details of manuscripts that may have been passed down imprecisely. Yet looking at Horace's boast of his work, "I have made a monument more permanent than bronze," it's not hard to understand why the believers in a faith tradition would want to believe that their Torah, their New Testament, their Koran, should show at least the same resilience as the work of a pagan poet. The main irony here is that John, himself, appeared to be aware of the problems with badly copied or deliberately miscopied manuscripts, given his own warning to the copyists in Revelation. The big thing for me, though, is that original languages can bring us closer to the origins of the faith tradition, not just by figuring out what the original texts "really said," but also by getting a sense for how the language(s) of that tradition express things. On this forum, we're all aware of how slippery language can be. Even if you don't believe that New Testament Greek will let you read divinely inspired Scripture exactly as it was first written (spoken?), you can still get a better sense of whether John organized his thoughts and told his stories the way the King James suggests he did. Even if you can't really get a syllable by syllable exact rendering of how Jesus really told people to pray, you can get a feel for whether the careful, compact language of "Thy Kingdom come/Thy will be done..." represents an attempt to capture Aramaic-feeling sentiments in another language or sounds more like Aramaic ideas were put into what felt elegant and proper to speakers of Early New English. You can believe what you will about the accuracy of the manuscripts, the reality of the faiths and much more, but there's no question that peeking at the Greek of the New Testament, the Arabic of the Koran or the Sanskrit of the Vedas, to name just a few, gives a different perspective on why these text mean so much to those who believe in them. Likewise, taking it as given that a man named Jesus once lived in Israel, there's other food for thought to be found in how much power has been found in the words of a man who spoke Aramaic but who is mainly known to us through Greek, and how that contrasts with the idea that the Koran contains the Arabic exactly as Gibreel spoke it to Mohammad or with Panini's creation of a Sanskrit grammar (one of many) so that the Vedas would remain accessible in their original tongue. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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