Aramaic primacy

Aramaic Primacists believe that the Christian New Testament was originally written in the Aramaic language, not Koine Greek as generally claimed by Churches of the West. The Assyrian Church of the East and other Aramaic speaking churches have historically claimed the Aramaic Peshitta was the original language New Testament.

George Lamsa's translation of the New Testament from the Aramaic brought the Aramaic Primacy issue to the West, though still few are familiar with it. With the rise of the internet, Aramaic Primacists began to pool arguments in favor of their case. Current advocates include Paul Younan, Andrew Gabriel Roth, Christopher Lancaster, and others.

Methods of Argument

Aramaic Primacists cite several supporting evidences. Polysemy or "split words" are words with two distinct meanings in Aramaic. When different Greek manuscripts contain two different words in a text that could be translations of an ambiguous Aramaic word, Aramaic Primacists argue this is evidence of translation from Aramaic. Other evidences that are argued are Semitic idioms, Aramaic word-plays, and Aramaic poetry which are in the Aramaic New Testament but not as clearly in the Greek.

On a basic level, one argument of the pro-Aramaic scholars is that the language of Jesus Christ, his Apostles and the Authors of the Gospels was very likely Aramaic not Greek. Another is that the first Christian comunities may have come into existence in modern Lebanon and Syria, not in Greece.

Internal Disagreements

Aramaic Primacists are divided over which Aramaic text most properly represents the original New Testament, either the Old Syriac or the Peshitta. Some prefer a critical approach just as many Greek Primacists take a critical approach to determining which Greek text better represents the original. The Aramaic speaking churches have argued for the Peshitta. Dr. James Trimm has argued for the critical approach.

Counter Arguments

Mainstream and modern scholars have generally had a strong agreement that the New Testament was written in Greek. They acknowledge that early Church Fathers said that Matthew and Hebrews were written in Aramaic or Hebrew. However, even this is doubted in part with an argument that the literary quality of the Greek of these books indicates that the Greek would be the original. This argument extends to the other books where the Church Fathers accepted Greek as the original without debate. The Greek New Testament's general agreement with the Septuagint is also counted as evidence by Greek Primacists.

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