George Lamsa
George Mamishisho Lamsa () (August 5, 1892 – September 22, 1975) was an Assyrian author. He was born in Mar Bishu in what is now the extreme east of Turkey. A native Aramaic speaker, he translated the Aramaic Peshitta Old and New Testaments into English. He popularized the claim of the Assyrian Church of the East that the New Testament was written in Aramaic and then translated into Greek, contrary to academic consensus. Life Lamsa fled from the Ottoman Empire during the 1910s during World War I, initially settling in South America. In the 1920s, he immigrated to the United States, where he lived for the rest of his life. He studied at the Episcopal Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Virginia and at Dropsie College in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. On September 22, 1975, he died in Turlock, California. History and views Lamsa was a member of the Assyrian Church of the East, a Syriac church that uses the Peshitta as its Bible. Some of the modern Assyrian people speak a modern form of the classical Syriac language called Northeastern Neo-Aramaic. The Peshitta was written in classical Syriac, a dialect of Middle Aramaic, which is in turn a Semitic language. The language spoken