Catholic scholarship and Aramaic
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byrnesey
Thanks for the quotes bar Khela. Shows even more the link from Aramaic to Arabic in the "great displacement". Greek wasn't involved.
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Was the New Testament Really Written in Greek?
oozeaddai
Paul Younan Wrote:
bar_khela Wrote: Heheheh.
Arabic has got nothing on Hebrew, let alone Aramaic....both of which were already highly developed by the time the Arabs became literate.
It's just the truth.
Well Islamic literature and culture owes its heritage to Aramaic Christians and Jews.
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oozeaddai Wrote: Well Islamic literature and culture owes its heritage to Aramaic Christians and Jews.
It's elementary....Arabic was the last of the Semitic group of languages to be written, it was most likely the last to be developed to any degree past simple grunts.
Think about it for one second. Arabic became a literary language in the 7th century A.D. Akkadian texts, written in Cuneiform, exist from the 3rd Millenium B.C. Think about that time period....OVER three thousand years of written civilization and linguistic heritage.
What were the Arabs doing all that time? Well, if they didn't come along till Ishmael (the first "Arab") was born, that wasn't until 1,800 B.C.
That leaves the Arabs with 2,400 years of illiteracy...chasing lizards in the desert.
What does Arabic have to do with anything? For Chrissakes, the Lebanese taught the Greeks to read 1,000 years before Arabic finally became written down. Even the Greeks were literate before the Arabs.
oozeaddai Wrote:
Not really. It was under the Islamic rule that Aramaic Christians and Jews were able to flourish, especially after the fall of the oppressive Byzantines. Christians were liberated from the Byzantines by Muslims.
When the Arab Muslims marched into Syria they were welcomed by the Syrians who saw the new rulers as saviors who freed them from the yoke of the Byzantines because the Byzantines tried by force to assimilate them into the Byzantine Church. This was the church of the empire and membership in it would have meant compulsorily acceptance of the resolutions of Chalcedon: that Christ had two natures, the human eating, drinking and feeling pain and the divine making miracles. This would have been a denial of the dogma of their church fathers. The Syrians were also able through the cooperation with the Arab Muslims to retain their ecclesiastical dogma, the Antiochian See, their churches, monasteries, ecclesiastical inheritance and their liturgy.
The Position of the Syrians Toward the Islamic Conquest >From the above it becomes clear that the religious conflicts in the Christian church, the attempts of the Byzantine powers to force the issues of the council of Chalcedon upon the other churches by force, to throw its members in prison, to kill them, to ban them and to drive them out alienated the Syrian Christians. All these unchristian deeds only sowed hate and aversion in the hearts of the Syrians against the Byzantine powers. The Persian powers in their empire oppressed both West and East Syrians in general to force them under tyrannical policies and Zoroastrian beliefs. Therefore the Syrians under the Byzantine and Persian powers saw the Islamic conquerors as liberators and not as occupiers. The Syrians put great hope in them, not only because the Muslims liberated them from their religious trouble but also because they relieved the Syrians of the burdensome taxes that were placed on their backs. They said, "Praise be to God, who delivered us from the unjust Byzantines and who put us under the rule of the just Muslim Arabs."http://www.syrianorthodoxchurch.org/libr...istory.htm
Arabic does owe the Assyrians its script. However, its literature and culture was influenced by many because of the translation of ancient manuscripts at the Bayt al-Hikmah (many of which were translated by an Assyrian Christian). In that sense, yes, you're right.
Hehehe. You're very humorous when it comes to the Arabs.
Actually, the earliest known Arabic forms are names that occur in Assyrian records of the eighth century BC, but the oldest texts, which are wall inscriptions, are from the Sinai peninsula and dated about the third century AD.
Writing and reading was rare amongst the Arabs, especially since writing materials was expensive and scarce. I suppose the Bedouins, whose memories were the written page, must pale against the glorious Akkadians to you. But they were able to constantly refine their language because of their intense poetic competitions.
Remember the Nabateans?
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What does Arabic have to do with anything? For Chrissakes, the Lebanese taught the Greeks to read 1,000 years before Arabic finally became written down. Even the Greeks were literate before the Arabs.[/quote]
Yeah yeah.
"The method of transmitting the Qur'an from one generation to the next by having the young memorise the oral recitation of their elders had mitigated somewhat from the beginning the worst perils of relying solely on written records . . .John Burton, An Introduction To The Hadith, 1994, Edinburgh University Press, p. 27.
Writing is not relevant to our present discussion
Both Constantine and Mohammad had distastrous consequences for Assyrians and all Aramaic-speaking Christianity.
There were times where Aramaic Christianity was allowed to flourish because of the tolerance of a Caliph. Under the Patriarchate of Timothy, for instance, the Aramaic Church reached its greatest extent - thanks to the Caliph who allowed them total freedom of worship and missionary activity.
Other Muslim rulers who were less tolerant, on the other hand, decimated the Church. I can name Tamerlane as the prime example. Wouldn't you agree Akhi bar-Khela?
The quote you gave from the SOC is only partly true. Yes, the Byzantines (Constantine) were brutal to us "heretics" and we sure were glad to be rid of them and the Zoroastrian pagans of Persia.
But at times the Muslim conquerers were no better, and sometime far worse (Tamerlane who wiped out 99.9% of the CoE in the 14th century, Ottoman Turkish Genocide which wiped out 2/3 of the remaining souls during 1915-1918, Simele in Iraq in 1933, today.....etc.)
There are always at least two side to a story.
Now now, my friend. We mustn't blame Muhammad because of the horrendous acts of some.
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The bastard.
Ironically, Hulegu Khan destroyed Baghdad under the influence of his wife, who and whose mother were adherents of the Church of the East.
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You already know what they call pay-back <!-- s --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/wink1.gif" alt=" " title="Wink" /><!-- s -->
the Lebanese taught the Greeks to read 1,000 years before Arabic finally became written down.
Really do tell! Were the Lebanese at this Phoenician? I think I heard that Phoenician alphabet was the common denominator to both the Greek and the Hebrew and Aramaic script. As far as some of the common denominators of alpha/ alap, beta/bet etc.
Then by admission Arabic and Hebrew are really Aramaic-based, like English and Spanish are really Latin-based.
Partially. Arabic seems to retain more Akkadian features than both Aramaic and Hebrew, thus promoting it to the closest to "proto-Semitic" You don't see philologists racing towards Syriac, do you?
Very beautiful. If you ever read Kahlil Gibrans (an Assyrian) works in their original Arabic, it would bring a tear to your eyes.
But English is beautiful, too. And so is Chinese.
Not like Arabic though. Let's listen to Ali bin Rabban at-Tabari, a former Assyrian Christian, who converted at seventy to Islam:
When I was a Christian I used to say, as did an uncle of mine who was one of the learned and eloquent men, that eloquence is not one of the signs of prophethood because it is common to all the peoples; but when I discarded (blind) imitation and (old) customs and gave up adhering to (mere) habit and training and reflected upon the meanings of the Qur'??n I came to know that what the followers of the Qur'??n claimed for it was true. The fact is that I have not found any book, be it by an Arab or a Persian, an Indian or a Greek, right from the beginning of the world up to now, which contains at the same time praises of God, belief in the prophets and apostles, exhortations to good, everlasting deeds, command to do good and prohibition against doing evil, inspiration to the desire of paradise and to avoidance of hell-fire as this Qur'??n does. So when a person brings to us a book of such qualities, which inspires such reverence and sweetness in the hearts and which has achieved such an overlasting success and he is (at the same time) an illiterate person who did never learnt the art of writing or rhetoric, that book is without any doubt one of the signs of his Prophethood.Abdul Aleem, I'jaz ul Qur'??n, Islamic Culture, Op. Cit., pp. 222-223.
Now that's beautiful
Well, that's going a bit too far. Imitation is flattering, but those borrowing A-rabs didn't create anything that wasn't already in existence for thousands of years before they even existed.
True, but they sure did improve much of it.
Hebrew ceased to be a spoken language for 2,000 years. It has only recently been "resurrected." That the meaning of idioms and certain terms was "forgotten" can hardly be blamed on the Jews, who lived away from their homeland for 2,000 years in Europe.
Plzzzz. According to Saadia Gaon (Jewish scholar):
"It is reported," he says, "that one of the worthies among the Ishmaelites, realizing to his sorrow that the people do not use the Arabic language correctly, wrote a short treatise for them. From which they might learn proper usages. Similarly, I have noticed that many of the Israelites even the common rules for the correct usage of our (Hebrew) language, much less the more difficult rules, so that when they speak in prose most of it is faulty, and when they write poetry only a few of the ancient rules are observed, and majority of them are neglected. This has induced me to compose a work in two parts containing most of the (Hebrew) words.
It's their fault, not time's that Hebrew had to be resurrected by the usage of classical Arabic. According to Gaon, they were being lazy with the ancient rules. I'm sure the same happened to Syriac over time too.
Give Assyrians another couple of generations there in Los Angeles. They will forget Aramaic, too.
It contains things Arabic couldn't even express....trust me.
Hey pal, Arabic has eight hundred words for sword. Top that.
I don't believe you. Let Keefa jump on this one. Give me three examples, at least.
What about St. Habib? There are a few famous Arabic Christian saints like him. I know some languages like Armenian for instance didnot have their own written language until quite awhile in their history. They basically used the languages of their literate neighbors to do their wriiting.
Anyway I though this was the case for the Arabs too, they actually wrote mostly in Syriac, before the days of Islam.
What I meant on the Syrian heritage behind Islam besides all the Chrisitan transmission of the Classics, so much of the Islamic religion has its roots in the Syriac Chrisitianity and Judaism of its time. Things like the chanting and liturgics (like the low bow where the person is bent over) that most think of as uniquely Moslem.
Ancient Jews and Christians bowed as we do. Some still do. But we did not "borrow" the practice from them. Our directives were from the same God.
Islamic art using all the filigree and geometric patterns was a Syrian invention.
Maybe. If so, we refined it to perfection.
Even some of the doctrines found in the Koran, like that Yeshua didnot really die on the Cross can be traced to Syriac Gnostic Gospels like the Gospel of Thomas etc.
The truth is scattered like glass in the canonical books including those that unfortunately were not allowed status. But please don't suggest Muhammad knew Syriac (either orally or be pen) to have plagurized. Save yourself the absurdity.
so I don't know. I just see Mohammed as being the "Joseph Smith", of his day (As far as taking all the religious influences of his day and culture and formulating his own religion out of it).
Blind Orientialist imitation. Justify your position.
They adopted their script (Kufi) from the Nabatean cursive script, which was from Aramaic. If they were writing in Syriac, I'm writing in Latin.