The Targums: A Critical Introduction

18. The Aramaic Retroversion of Jesus Sayings

409 18 The Aramaic Retroversion of Jesus Sayings In chapter 17, we studied how the Targums could help us understand the meaning of utterances associated with Jesus or of other remarks found in the New Testament. Here in chapter 18, we want to explore how the Targums and other Aramaic texts and inscriptions can assist us in identifying the language Jesus spoke and thus in delineating the way in which his remarks were formulated among his early followers. The previous chapter looked at what was said, while this chapter looks at how it was said. What were the words that would have been used? What sentence structure and grammar organized those words into semantic coherence? What were the linguistic and dialectical properties of the sayings’ formulation? Why is it important to study the language—and if possible, the dialect —which Jesus and his early followers knew and used? The New Testament Gospels are composed in Greek. But Jesus and his followers in Palestine did not communicate in Greek; they used Aramaic. The Greek Gospels provide no direct access to Jesus’ linguistic world except for occasional transliterations from Aramaic into Greek. If we want to understand the character of his speech—at least as it was preserved in the written Gospels—then we must work out an approach to get behind the Greek text. We cannot follow the position of fundamentalist Christianity, nor of the Jesus Seminar for that matter, and simply approach the Greek as if it gives us immediate access to the earliest layer of Jesus traditions. While it has long been recognized that Jesus spoke a Semitic language , there has been extensive disagreement about whether it was Aramaic or Hebrew. Centuries of scholarly analysis and debate have finally made it clear that Jesus’ language was Aramaic. The discoveries in the Judean Desert, such as those at Khirbet Qumran and Wadi Murabba’at, and of inscriptions in Jerusalem have brought a wealth of new knowledge about the two languages and their place in the linguistic milieu of 410 — The Targums: A Critical Introduction ancient Palestine. In this context, Max Wilcox’s 1984 review of the question essentially brought the debate to a close.1 His examination of the eight transliterated Semitic words in the Gospels drew upon a wide range of previous scholarship to show that five words could only be Aramaic (and not Hebrew), two were probably Aramaic, and one could equally be Aramaic or Hebrew. In other words, the evidence requires the conclusion that Jesus knew and used Aramaic. It is possible that he also knew Hebrew, but the evidence does not require that conclusion. How do we get to Jesus’ Aramaic wording? There are only two possibilities . Either we find an Aramaic source text on which a Greek gospel was based or we recreate through retroversion an Aramaic version of the Greek by (re)translating the Greek text into Aramaic. The former would provide the most sound knowledge, but the latter forms a means by which the question can be approached if the first approach is not possible. And since there are no Aramaic texts that have survived antiquity which can be identified as source texts for the Gospels, we must unfortunately turn to retroversion—acknowledging the degree of inference involved— as our only tool for extending our knowledge in this field. That is not to say that candidates for an Aramaic gospel source have never been proposed. Prior to the Second World War, George Lamsa used the Peshitta—a Syriac version of the New Testament (and the Old Testament)—as the basis for replicating Jesus’ teaching in Aramaic.2 His approach was taken up and popularized by Neil Douglas-Klotz in 1990.3 Modern practitioners of this approach perpetuate a basic confusion of language, since the Aramaic of Jesus’ time and the Peshitta’s Syriac dialect of Aramaic come from different centuries and geographical regions. In addition, the approach is based on uncritical treatment of the Peshitta’s version of the Gospels. The Peshitta Gospels were translated from Greek into Syriac (not vice versa) in order to counteract usage of the harmonized Diatessaron, a compendium of the Gospels that were used in worship in much of the Syriac-speaking world. For this purpose these “separated Gospels,” as they were called, stuck as closely as possible to the original Greek text of the Gospels. As a result, the Peshitta often introduces Hellenisms into the Syriac, producing exactly the opposite cultural accommodation to what retroversion aims to...