Continued from the last post above ↑
Continuation of excerpts from the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:
To be continued...
Continuation of excerpts from the out-of-print third edition of An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1967), by Matthew Black:
The bearing of this discovery on our estimate of the value of Onkelos for the first-century Palestinian Aramaic is evident and of great importance: 'In the Onkelos Targum we have to do with an official . . . Targum . . . which was composed in a language which was never actually spoken, and which had to take account of the condition that it must be intelligible in Palestine as well as Babylon. For this neither the actual Palestinian nor the Babylonian dialect could be employed.' The Onkelos Targum, that is to say, and the Prophetic Targum which is modeled on it, were largely composed in the artificial Aramaic of the Jewish Schools. It is purely a scholarly product, even if its ultimate basis was a Palestinian Aramaic Targum. It can therefore be regarded as a secondary authority only for the language of Jesus.
To be continued...
Comment