Language Studies

Aramaic Thoughts

Resources available for the study of the Aramaic - Part 2

Jean Carmignac, The Birth of the Synoptics (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1987).

Carmignac’s work is short, with fewer than 90 pages of text devoted to his argumentation. In addition, it is aimed at a popular, rather than an academic, audience. However, there are a number of elements to the work that are worthy of our consideration.

A synopsis of the work is simple. It consists of six chapters. The first sets forth his hypothesis regarding a Hebrew (or perhaps Aramaic) original for at least Matthew and Mark. The second chapter contains a survey of Hebrew translations of the New Testament. The placing of this chapter struck me as odd. It does not move the discussion forward and would better have been placed as an appendix, The third chapter sets forth his arguments based on Semitisms in the text of the gospels. The fourth chapter deals with the significance of his conclusions for the origins of the synoptic gospels. The fifth chapter catalogs a number of comments from the early church fathers about the origins of the synoptics. The sixth chapter catalogs the modern developments in that same discussion. He ends the book with a brief conclusion, summarizing his main point.

Based on his work on the Qumran literature, in the early 1960’s Carmignac began working on a commentary on the NT in light of the Dead Sea Scrolls literature. Eventually this involved him in back-translating the gospels from Greek into Hebrew, beginning with the Gospel of Mark. He became convinced almost immediately that "the Greek text of Mark could not have been redacted directly into Greek and that it was in reality only the Greek translation of an original Hebrew" (p. 1).

As he sets forth his hypothesis over the succeeding pages, it becomes obvious to the reader that his hypothesis, at least originally, depended not so much on the data from the text as it did on certain assumptions he made about the original authors of the New Testament. One explanation for the apparently Semitic character of the Evangelists, for example is that "being of Semitic origin, they continued to think according to Semitic categories" (p. 3). Carmignac assumes that this means they expressed themselves in clumsy Greek as he, being French, expresses himself clumsily in English. This cannot be, he concludes, because the Greek of the New Testament is not clumsy Greek. Hence, "They [the Gospels] have been redacted by people who wrote well, but according to Semitic patterns which were translated into a very correct Greek by other people" (p. 3). He fails to grasp that the people who put the Gospels into Greek could very well have been those same Semites who wrote well. In other words, he assumes that the "original" gospel writers were Semites who were not sufficiently bilingual to have written good Greek of a distinctly Semitic character. In other words, he discards a very plausible explanation for the facts of the language of the gospel texts on the basis of mere assumption. We noted recently that Joseph Conrad, who was Polish, and whose native tongue was Polish, wrote very acceptable English, even though his English style was perhaps stiff compared to that of a native English writer. But Conrad wrote the books himself in English. He did not write them in Polish and then find some good translator to turn them into acceptable English.

A careful reading of this first chapter will show that almost the entirety of his argument rests on this sort of unfounded assumption. However, in the third chapter, he brings to light a number of Semitisms in the NT that, for him, prove his hypothesis. These Semitisms are sufficiently common, and sufficiently noteworthy that we shall spend a couple of weeks looking at them. However, they are perfectly capable of an explanation other than Carmignac’s that is more in accord with the known facts of the origins of the gospels.

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