Continued from the last post above ↑
Continuation of excerpts from the "The Aramaic Targums and the Language of Jesus" section of 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 "The Aramaic Targums and the Language of Jesus" section of 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 controversy centered mainly on the exception Kahle has taken to Kutscher's methods of determining the date of the Genesis midrash: he accepted Kutscher's conclusions that this text, composed in a literary Aramaic (of the type we find in Daniel, Ezra, etc.), was Palestinian, belonging to the first century B.C. or earlier. Kutscher's attempt to show that the language of the Palestinian Pentateuch Targum was not one of our best representatives of the spoken language of the time of Christ was unconvincing. It is true, the view that Onkelos is a purely Babylonian composition is doubtful, but the fact that it may have had its origin in Palestine does not mean that its language is, therefore, a pure spoken Aramaic of the time of Jesus: it is, in fact, as Kahle held, an artificially literal translation of the Hebrew, composed in its present and final redaction in a form of 'literary' Aramaic which is neither pure Palestinian nor pure Babylonian dialect.
To be continued...
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