The Sun Revolves Around The Earth: Scripture Cannot Lie

Watchman1 said:

My eldest daughter when she got angry with me, accused me of thinking that the world revolved around me!

I have a tee shirt that I occasionally wear to the gym that says: "Actually, the world does revolve around me!"

Click to expand...

Are you Oscar with a new username? I recognize the adorable orange and white tabby.

Of course, saying the world revolves around you is an idiom, not to be taken literally. Big difference.

ChristianForCats said:

Are you Oscar with a new username? I recognize the adorable orange and white tabby.

Of course, saying the world revolves around you is an idiom, not to be taken literally. Big difference.

Click to expand...

Yep. That's me. I decided to have a change, and it was in relation that I felt like a watchman warning people against false prophets and teachers.

Watchman1 said:

Yep. That's me. I decided to have a change, and it was in relation that I felt like a watchman warning people against false prophets and teachers.

Click to expand...

It certainly is better than misspelling your real name on purpose. (r was Oscarr your cat's name?)

The Liturgist said:

The fact is, we don’t know what the Old Testament canon looked like before the destruction of Jerusalem following the Bar Kochba revolt in 130 AD, although a major clue is in the contents of the Septuagint, which was the Old Testament of the Early Church until the Peshitta and Vulgate were translated, and the Ethiopians with their more expansive Old Testament mostly converted in the 410s, around the same time as the Georgians.

Click to expand...

While this long comment does contain a lot of factual information, it's mixed in with alot of statements that are stated as facts, but which are not. The Peshitta was not translated. The Greek was translated from the Aramaic Peshitta. It is well known from historical documents that the Jews did not speak Greek as a mother tongue - they spoke Aramaic. Along with most of the rest of the Middle East.

EclipseEventSigns said:

The Peshitta was not translated. The Greek was translated from the Aramaic Peshitta.

Click to expand...

Not true.

It is well known from historical documents that the Jews did not speak Greek as a mother tongue - they spoke Aramaic.

Click to expand...

They spoke many languages, as evidenced by Acts 2

Not true? Well, you sure proved your point. You'll have to do a lot better than that.

EclipseEventSigns said:

Not true? Well, you sure proved your point. You'll have to do a lot better than that.

Click to expand...

I put as much effort into my response as you put into yours. Where is your evidence?

prodromos said:

I put as much effort into my response as you put into yours. Where is your evidence?

Click to expand...

lol. You first.

EclipseEventSigns said:

lol. You first.

Click to expand...

You made the claim first, you back it up.

Sorry, not into playing your childish games.

EclipseEventSigns said:

Sorry, not into playing your childish games.

Click to expand...

You made a claim and now refuse to back it up, which only confirms my understanding that you have no evidence to support your claim.

yeshuasavedme said:

The Hebrew people spoke Hebrew in Jerusalem, not aramaic. That is historical, biblical fact.

Click to expand...

If you mean they spoke Hebrew and not Aramaic in the time of Christ, its a total falsehood. Hebrew was by the time of Christ spoken only in a liturgical context. The names of Jewish people at the time of Christ prove this to be the case, as do the last words of our Lord before His death and resurrection as recorded in the Synoptics, and His other words.

There are three examples that provide proof that Galilean and Judaean Aramaic was the language predominantly spoken by our Lord and the people of the Holy Land during His lifetime:

1. Bar Abbas - in Hebrew this would be Ben Abbas, for Ben means Son, which is Bar in Aramaic.
2. Mark 5:21-43 records our Lord miraculously reviving, resuscitating or resurrecting an unresponsive 12 year old girl believed to be dead (Since our Lord said she was sleeping, I am not certain if this was a resurrection, like with Lazarus, but it could have been). This account is also found in Matthew 9 and Luke 8, but in Mark, the words our Lord actually spoke are recorded, “Talitha cumi.” This is Aramaic meaning “Arise, little girl” (the word Talitha is one of endearment and can also mean “lamb”).
3. On the cross, our Lord quoted Psalm 22:1 but did so in Aramaic, “Eli, Eli, Lama Sabacthani?” This, being translated is My Lord, My Lord, why hast Thou forsaken me? In Hebrew, in which Psalm 22:1 was composed by King David, to the tune Hind of Dawn , which is sadly lost, like the rest of the original music of the Psalter, the opening verse “My Lord, My Lord, why hast Thou forsaken me?” is transliterated as Lam’natzayach al-ayeles hashachar mizmōr l’dovid.

So obviously, unless you were talking about Jerusalem prior to the Babylonian conquest, possibly well before, such as during the reign of King Solomon and his successors, before the Northern Kingdom was conquered by the Assyrians, which would have resulted in an influx of Aramaic speaking refugees (probably Levites), merchants and diplomats, from then until Nebuchadnezzar invaded, it should be obvious that Aramaic was spoken by the Jews in Jerusalem, and by the time of Christ, it was spoken even in some parts of the Synagogue service (for example, the Targumim, which were Aramaic translations and interpretations of the Hebrew scriptures).

Pilate had Jesus' "crime", for which He was crucified, written in 3 languages,
HEBREW,
Latin,
and greek,
and nailed to the cross for all who passed by to read.

In Hebrew, all the Hebrew speaking, reading people passing by read the tetragram of His crime which spelled
Y
H
V
H.
it made the priests furious, and they complained to Pilate and asked him to change it.
Pilate said: "What I have written, I have written."

Click to expand...

Ok, firstly, not sure where you are getting that story, since that’s not what the Bible actually says. Lets open up John chapter 20:

21 Pilate also had a notice posted on the cross. It read:
JESUS OF NAZARETH,
THE KING OF THE JEWS.
20 Many of the Jews read this sign, because the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city, and it was written in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek.
21 So the chief priests of the Jews said to Pilate, “Do not write, ‘The King of the Jews,’ but only that He said, ‘I am the King of the Jews.’”
22 Pilate answered, “What I have written, I have written.”

Now that being said, Pilate may well have had it written in Hebrew, which many literate Jews could read, but spoke only in the synagogue or in the Temple. It was a liturgical language, and indeed had been for many centuries, most likely since at least the Persian conquest of Babylon (even before that time, however, Akkadian was dying among the Mesopotamians in favor of Aramaic, just as Sumerian had been displaced by the Semitic language Akkadian many centuries before, and just as many centuries later, Aramaic would be displaced by Arabic, another Semitic language).

Regardless of whether it happened prior to, during or after the Babylonian Captivity, this change to Aramaic as the vernacular language is why parts of the Old Testament are written in Aramaic, including substantial portions of Daniel and Ezra.

This resulted in a phenomenon wherein Greek and Roman literature commonly referred to both Hebrew and the Aramaic dialects used by the Jews, Old Testament Aramaic, Galilean Neo-Aramaic and Judean Neo-Arwmaic, as Hebrew, except in those rare cases when there was a need to know exactly which language was being referred to (St. Jerome’s writings concerning his translation into Latin of the Old Testament from the Hebrew and Aramaic text, to replace the original second century Latin Bible, which was translated from the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament).

This makes a great deal of sense, because both Hebrew and Aramaic were written using the same alphabet, and because the Imperial Aramaic alphabet had been superseded in Syria and Mesopotamia by what would become the Estrangelo script in which the Syriac Aramaic translation, Bible, the Peshitta, was written, starting with the Old Testament in the second century and finishing with the New Testament in the fourth century (with 5 books omitted from the initial translation, 2 John, 3 John, 2 Peter, Jude and Revelation, translated by the Syriac Orthodox by the 6th century).

Indeed, even in the early 1700s, Harvard University boasted of its prowess in teaching future Congregationalist ministers Greek and Hebrew, so they could read the Holy Bible in the original languages. But of course, in their Hebrew curriculum were courses on Aramaic, because of the various parts of the Old Testament, not limited to Daniel and Ezra, but even occurring in Genesis in the Masoretic text which was used by the Protestants exclusively until the 20th century for translating the Old Testament.

Around the same time that Aramaic became the vernacular language of the Jews, Imperial Aramaic script was adapted to replace Paleo-Hebrew as the primary form of writing Hebrew, and this modified “Square letter script” remains in use to this day. Indeed, the Jewish diaspora in Europe expanded its use, writing the Yiddish dialect of German in Imperial Aramaic, as well as the Sephardic Judaeo-Spanish dialect Ladino. And even though Hebrew has been restored as the language of Israel, because nearly all Jewish literature whether written in Hebrew, Old Testament Aramaic, ancient Judaean Aramaic, Talmudic Aramaic, certain Jewish Aramaic dialects spoken by small communities in Syria and the Holy Land prior to the formation of the State of Israel, Yiddish, or Ladino, is written in Imperial Aramaic.

Only the Samaritans continued using a form of Paleo-Hebrew, the Samaritan script, in which Samaritan Hebrew, Samaritan Aramaic, and Arabic are written. However, some Dead Sea Scrolls written in Paleo-Hebrew dated from 100-200 BC have been found, suggesting a small community of Jews did try to preserve their ancient text, and this community I suspect probably lasted until some time between the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD and the Bar Kochba Revolt in 130 AD, events which led to the Essenes, Sadducees, and other Jewish denominations disappearing, so that among the former people of Israel, only the Rabinnical Jews, Ethiopian Jews and Samaritans survived (and later, the Karaite Jews would rebel against Rabinnical authority and were at one time quite numerous, even converting a Crimean tribe, the Khazars, who have since largely reverted to Paganism, in order to avoid persecution by the Nazis and the Soviet Union; this led to hatred for and discrimination against Karaite Jews in general, even though the Karaites living in Israel are from Alexandria and Syria, and are ethnically Jewish, unlike the Khazars of Crimea.

There are certain facts which are not well known. But once you do know them and understand their ramifications, the assumptions of how the New Testament was written come into a whole new light.

1. The Greek language was not well known to the Jewish population during the time of Christ. First, it had only been several hundred years since the time of the Macabean revolt which saw the Greeks have a pig offered in the holiest place in the temple. There would be no way that the Jewish leaders would allow themselves to be infiltrated with the language of that atrocity.
2. This is confirmed in the writings of Josephus. In his introduction, written in Greek, he states that he had a lot of difficulty in writing in Greek. First, he did not write his work first in Greek. He actually wrote it in the "language of the Hebrews" (Aramaic) and then sought to translate it into Greek. He states that the Jewish religious leaders forbade anyone to speak the Greek language - except for the religious elite for cultural exchange reasons. He had to actually travel to Rome in order to get a proper education in Greek since he could not do that in the Jewish homeland. And this is proven again in the account of the siege of Jerusalem. The Romans shouted to the inhabitants inside the walls to surrender - in Greek and Latin. But the Jewish population couldn't understand them - they didn't speak those languages. Josephus himself had to act as translator for them so that negotiations could happen.
3. So the New Testament writings were also written in the "language of the Hebrews" first and then translated into Greek. There is lots of evidence for this. Some evidences that I find particularly compelling include Bible codes, translation Greek and the text itself.
4. Bible codes are still somewhat controversial. However, the mathematical evidence is overwhelming that eqidistant letter sequences occur throughout the Old Testament. However, no one has ever found Bible codes in the New Testament. That is, none in the Greek text. But they have been found in the Aramaic New Testament texts. And they have found similar number, type and quality as those in the Old Testament. Truly amazing. This shows that God's words were recorded in the Hebrew Old Testament and the Aramaic New Testament.
5. It is a well known fact that the style of writing of the Greek New Testament manuscripts is very odd. It is not typical Greek - it is stilted and awkward Greek. No one spoke that way. In fact, they've invented a whole new term for this called "Koine Greek". They have not found many documents with this style of writing. But there is one very well known document that has this awkward Greek. The Septuagint. That work is a translation from Hebrew into Greek. In addition, experts in Aramaic and Greek have shown that if you back translate the Greek New Testament into Aramaic word for word what you find is that the text is in perfect grammatically correct and elegant Aramaic. The Greek is a translation and has been done in such a way as to preserve the exact word order - just as a diligent scribe would have done.
6. The New Testament text itself shows that it was originally written in Aramaic. Look at Matt 27:46. "And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” that is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Here the words of Jesus have been recorded in His original language - Aramaic. Since the Greek did not understand Aramaic, the text includes a translation into Greek (ie. "that is"). It is well known historically that scribes who copied manuscripts were extremely careful in preserving the text. A translation would be equally careful to preserve every word and phrase. However, the Aramaic text does not preserve this double phrase of translation. The Aramaic Peshitta says "And about the ninth hour, Jesus cried with a loud voice and said: O God, O God; why hast thou forsaken me ?" It does not include the "that is". Analysis of Peshitta verse 'Matthew 27:46'

This is very strong evidence that the Aramaic text came first since they did not have to translate the Aramaic words of Jesus in a document itself being written in Aramaic.

There are very many more evidences like this. Not many people even know about these. But once you do, you never look on English translations of the Greek manuscripts the same way again.

EclipseEventSigns said:

There are certain facts which are not well known. But once you do know them and understand their ramifications, the assumptions of how the New Testament was written come into a whole new light.

1. The Greek language was not well known to the Jewish population during the time of Christ. First, it had only been several hundred years since the time of the Macabean revolt which saw the Greeks have a pig offered in the holiest place in the temple. There would be no way that the Jewish leaders would allow themselves to be infiltrated with the language of that atrocity.
2. This is confirmed in the writings of Josephus. In his introduction, written in Greek, he states that he had a lot of difficulty in writing in Greek. First, he did not write his work first in Greek. He actually wrote it in the "language of the Hebrews" (Aramaic) and then sought to translate it into Greek. He states that the Jewish religious leaders forbade anyone to speak the Greek language - except for the religious elite for cultural exchange reasons. He had to actually travel to Rome in order to get a proper education in Greek since he could not do that in the Jewish homeland. And this is proven again in the account of the siege of Jerusalem. The Romans shouted to the inhabitants inside the walls to surrender - in Greek and Latin. But the Jewish population couldn't understand them - they didn't speak those languages. Josephus himself had to act as translator for them so that negotiations could happen.
3. So the New Testament writings were also written in the "language of the Hebrews" first and then translated into Greek. There is lots of evidence for this. Some evidences that I find particularly compelling include Bible codes, translation Greek and the text itself.
4. Bible codes are still somewhat controversial. However, the mathematical evidence is overwhelming that eqidistant letter sequences occur throughout the Old Testament. However, no one has ever found Bible codes in the New Testament. That is, none in the Greek text. But they have been found in the Aramaic New Testament texts. And they have found similar number, type and quality as those in the Old Testament. Truly amazing. This shows that God's words were recorded in the Hebrew Old Testament and the Aramaic New Testament.
5. It is a well known fact that the style of writing of the Greek New Testament manuscripts is very odd. It is not typical Greek - it is stilted and awkward Greek. No one spoke that way. In fact, they've invented a whole new term for this called "Koine Greek". They have not found many documents with this style of writing. But there is one very well known document that has this awkward Greek. The Septuagint. That work is a translation from Hebrew into Greek. In addition, experts in Aramaic and Greek have shown that if you back translate the Greek New Testament into Aramaic word for word what you find is that the text is in perfect grammatically correct and elegant Aramaic. The Greek is a translation and has been done in such a way as to preserve the exact word order - just as a diligent scribe would have done.
6. The New Testament text itself shows that it was originally written in Aramaic. Look at Matt 27:46. "And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” that is, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Here the words of Jesus have been recorded in His original language - Aramaic. Since the Greek did not understand Aramaic, the text includes a translation into Greek (ie. "that is"). It is well known historically that scribes who copied manuscripts were extremely careful in preserving the text. A translation would be equally careful to preserve every word and phrase. However, the Aramaic text does not preserve this double phrase of translation. The Aramaic Peshitta says "And about the ninth hour, Jesus cried with a loud voice and said: O God, O God; why hast thou forsaken me ?" It does not include the "that is". Analysis of Peshitta verse 'Matthew 27:46'

This is very strong evidence that the Aramaic text came first since they did not have to translate the Aramaic words of Jesus in a document itself being written in Aramaic.

There are very many more evidences like this. Not many people even know about these. But once you do, you never look on English translations of the Greek manuscripts the same way again.

Click to expand...

Actually, Aramaic Primacy is fairly well known, but has been discredited. Philological analysis has shown that the New Testament is not a translation from Aramaic.

That being said, while Aramaic Primacy has been discredited, there is a related theory that holds up to scrutiny, and that is that there is an Aramaic Source behind the Greek originals. In other words, some of the dialogue can be translated into Gallilean Neo Aramaic and this offers insights into its meaning. The Apostles were native Aramaic speakers, and St. Mark may have been (for the Cenacle was in his house, which is located in one of two locations, either a sight selected by the Crusaders, where they built a Gothic church, which is presently disputed between Catholics, Jews and Muslims, because the Jews believe it is the tomb of King David, and I forget what the Muslims think it is; I believe it is the tomb of King David, because the Syriac Orthodox Monastery of St. Mark is the competing location for the Cenacle, and was rejected by the Crusaders because of its more humble appearance, but it has pretty much always been in the hands of Christians, likely even after most of Jerusalem was destroyed, and there is nothing in the Old Testament to suggest the Upper Room was in some Wagnerian locality), although St. Luke likely was not, but rather a Hellenic Jew. As the Greek New Testament was composed, dialogue was translated into Greek, so whereas the New Testament texts that have been handed down to us are not Aramaic translations, they contain the attempts of the Apostles and Evangelists to translate things said in Aramaic into Greek as clearly as possible. This was before the dichotomy between formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence existed.

One of the most interesting recent translations of the New Testament is by Dr. David Bentley Hart, an Eastern Orthodox man of letters with who I greatly love and admire, who wrote a splendid rebuttal of Richard Dawkins The God Delusion, entitled The Atheist Delusion, which is simply devastating and exposes Dawkins to be the conceited dilettante of a philosopher (his ideas on genetics might be of merit; I am not a biologist, but the more Dawkins does that is unrelated to his profession as a scientist, the more of a clown he makes himself, more than a clown, an anti-Christ really, like Muhammed or Karl Marx, someone who promotes an ideology of hate, of antitheistic bigotry. At any rate, recently he completed a translation of the New Testament with the unique goal of communicating into English, as accurately as possible, the unique stylistic idiosyncrasies of each of the writers of the New Testament, to the extent of replicating, to the extent possible, grammatical errors and other idiolectic quirks. I strongly recommend it, and it can be freely downloaded as a PDF on scribd.

Please state your source(s) where Aramaic Primacy has been discredited. That is absolutely and utterly false. And my evidences that I give are such that they can not be proven false.

yeshuasavedme said:

That is totally explained and demonstrated in a video that Robert Sungenis, who co-wrote "Galileo was Wrong, the Church was Right" has put together.

Click to expand...

Not sure why Robert Sungenis has any credibility on this, much less how he answers my very specific question.

They demonstrate in animation the peculiar orbits of each of the planets and sun in the heavens as the heavens circle the earth. Nothing goes backwards but is in it's own orbit in the heavens as the heavens circle the earth.

Click to expand...

Anyone can make an animation of the motion just as anyone can observe this motion with their own eyes. My question had to to with explanation and prediction. The laws of Kepler and Newton predict this motion very accurately. Are you able to do this in your model? Can you provide your equations of motion? And why are the Kepler-Newton laws so accurate, not only for describing the retrograde motion of a planet like Mars, but of the motion of all celestial bodies?

EclipseEventSigns said:

Please state your source(s) where Aramaic Primacy has been discredited. That is absolutely and utterly false. And my evidences that I give are such that they can not be proven false.

Click to expand...

If by Aramaic Primacy, you mean the view that what is written in the Greek New Testament was originally spoken in Aramaic, and then translated into Greek in the composition of the documents we have, and furthermore, that there may have been now-lost Aramaic documents which influenced the Greek text, although not to the extent where the Greek text represents a translation, at least in the sense of formal equivalence, that view is valid.

Now, bearing in mind Syriac Christianity is one of my fields of expertise, although I am not on a par with Sebastian Brock, or Steve Caruso (who is unfortunately unwell due to “Long Haul Covid” and has had to slow down, so we should pray for him; he is a member of Christianforums.com but hasn’t posted since I joined the forum), I would be willing to, in another thread, if you link me to it, read a brief summary of your evidence, although I would note that you probably shouldn’t say it can’t be proven false, because logically, claims which are not falsifiable cannot be tested and therefore cannot be proven true. As someone who remains committed, although this is politically incorrect thanks to the Atheist Mafia that increasingly dominates Academia, to the historic belief that Theology is the Queen of Sciences, the use of the Scientific Method is important to me.

The Liturgist said:

If by Aramaic Primacy, you mean the view that what is written in the Greek New Testament was originally spoken in Aramaic, and then translated into Greek in the composition of the documents we have, and furthermore, that there may have been now-lost Aramaic documents which influenced the Greek text, although not to the extent where the Greek text represents a translation, at least in the sense of formal equivalence, that view is valid.

Now, bearing in mind Syriac Christianity is one of my fields of expertise, although I am not on a par with Sebastian Brock, or Steve Caruso (who is unfortunately unwell due to “Long Haul Covid” and has had to slow down, so we should pray for him; he is a member of Christianforums.com but hasn’t posted since I joined the forum), I would be willing to, in another thread, if you link me to it, read a brief summary of your evidence, although I would note that you probably shouldn’t say it can’t be proven false, because logically, claims which are not falsifiable cannot be tested and therefore cannot be proven true. As someone who remains committed, although this is politically incorrect thanks to the Atheist Mafia that increasingly dominates Academia, to the historic belief that Theology is the Queen of Sciences, the use of the Scientific Method is important to me.

Click to expand...

I'm not at all interested in getting into an argument. But you have stated "Actually, Aramaic Primacy is fairly well known, but has been discredited". So my question remains, what source(s) do you have to back up this claim? As far as I'm aware, scholars (even protestant scholars beholden to the very long unsubstantiated Roman Catholic tradition ) have opinions but no one has actually proven Greek primacy. They usually throw out the baby with the bathwater by discrediting Lamsa as if that proves anything.

And yes, the evidences that I have stated previously can not be proven false - or untrue. They exist in this present reality and simply are unassailable evidence.