87,000 Visits and Two Lists

Greetings, gentle readers. We recently passed the milestone of 87,000 visits to this poetry/writing/photography blog. It seems to me out of my control, and I never know what direction it will go in next. In other words, it is free. I have no explanation for anything, and the work will have to speak for itself.

Over the past month, the following were the top ten sources of visits:

USA              774
UK                185
Germany         86
Romania         84
Turkmenistan  66
Vietnam          66
France             61
Canada            48
Crimea            47
Reunion          44


For the same time period, the following were the most-visited posts:

Poet and Machine                                                          15 June 2020     43
uyelvha agadohvsdi 47*                                             5 January 2019     36
I Drink from the Well                                                    16 June 2020     28
This Body                                                                      20 June 2020     27
Do You Mind?                                                               30 June 2020     26
Let Me Tell You Gently                                                 27 June 2020     25
Synoptica XXIX - More Yet on the Beatitudes             12 June 2020     25
A Listing of the Synoptica Series and Related Posts    14 June 2020     24
Missa Aurea II - Fons Vitae, Calix Ignis                       25 June 2020     24
The Pater Noster: A Trajectory through Time - Part I     3 July 2020     24

* A frequent visitor seems to have bookmarked this post, and is using it as an entry point to the blog, which skews the totals.

As usual, I would like to thank you all for your continued interest and enthusiasm.

Text and image copyright © 2020 by Donald C. Traxler aka Donald Jacobson Traxler.

Further Thoughts on the Pater Noster

Sometimes studying is like meditation. You go deeper and deeper, and you become more calm. It has been this way for me as I researched the roots and development of the Pater Noster.

I think it was about six years ago that I first read the Gospel of Matthew in Hebrew. When I read the "Lord's Prayer" (probably in the nineteenth-century translation of Delitzsch), I could not help but be impressed by how Jewish it sounded, and how natural within the context of Judaism. This was especially true of such phrases as "yitqaddash sh'mecho" (may your name be made holy). It sounded familiar to me, but I didn't make the exact connection.

Here are the first words of the Kaddish, which is actually in Palestinian Aramaic:

yitgadal veyitkadash shemé rabá (may his great name be exalted and made holy).

If you read the rest of the Kaddish, you'll see that some of its other themes are also reflected in the Pater Noster.

But some say that the "Our Father" is a boiled-down version of some of the blessings of the Amidah. While I was researching that, I was struck by the similarity of the first part of the Kedushah (the third blessing of the Amidah) to that part of the Catholic Mass called the Sanctus:

SANCTUS, SANCTUS, SANCTUS, Dominus Deus Sabaoth. Pleni sunt coeli et terra gloria tua.Hosanna in excelsis.

קָדוֹשׁ קָדוֹשׁ קָדוֹשׁ יהוה צבָאוֹת מְלֹא כָל־הָאָרֵץ כְבוֹדוֹ׃

(qadosh qadosh qadosh adonai tz'vaot m'lo khol-haaretz kh'vodo.)

And when I was researching the Didache (perhaps the first Christian catechism), I found in it The Two Ways, a Jewish teaching document, a scroll of which was found among the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran.

Sometimes there is continuity even when you're not really expecting it, and that is surely the way Rabbi Yeshua would have wanted it.

Text Copyright © 2020 by Donald C. Traxler aka Donald Jacobson Traxler.

The Pater Noster: A Trajectory through Time: Part II

To review a little bit: The oldest version of the Pater Noster ("Our Father," "The Lord's Prayer") is apparently the shorter, Lukan version. We almost lost that shorter, Lukan version, but it survived in the Codex Vaticanus ("B"), the Codex Sinaiticus ("א"), the Sinaitic Palimpsest ("Syr-s") and in Papyrus 75. It also survived in the Vulgate, probably because Jerome used "B." It is significant that all of these sources are fourth-century, except P75, which is third-century. By the late fifth century, we see (from Syr-c, the Curetonian Syriac) that the shorter, Lukan version of the prayer had been swamped by a longer version intended to harmonize it with the Matthaean version. From there, the longer version got into the (Byzantine) Textus Receptus, and from there into countless other translations, including the KJV. Had the texts mentioned above not survived (most were either discovered or began to be studied in the nineteenth century), we would probably have lost Luke's original version.

In the previous part of this article, I gave a Syriac (Christian Aramaic) text (from the Oldest Old Syriac, Syr-s) of Luke's original version.

We have no version that short, or that old, for Matthew. The oldest that we have is that in Shem-Tob's Hebrew Matthew. It goes like this:

Our father, may your name be sanctified; may your kingdom be blessed; may your will be done in the heavens and on earth.
Give our bread continually.
Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us,
and do not lead us into the power of temptation but keep us from all evil, amen.

One notices that it says OUR father, and not just Father as in the Lukan version. It says "in heaven/the heavens, which the Lukan prayer does not. It says "heavens" (plural) because this word is always plural in Hebrew,  In common with all versions, it says "may your name be sanctified." It also says "may your kingdom be "blessed," instead of "come."  In common with all the earlier versions, it says "sins" instead of "debts." It says (uniquely) "the POWER of temptation" and it mentions "all evil" instead of "evil" or "the evil one" (or nothing at all, as in the Lukan version). It has no ending mentioning kingdom, or power, or glory (or all three, as in the Byzantine texts). Finally, it ends with "amen," as Jewish prayers should.

It is these variations that I want to track in this trajectory through time, I will condense the various points so that I can represent them graphically, as I did in the case of the Beatitudes. This will not be easy, but I'll try to do it in the following table.


Luke                 Shem-Tob               Didache             "k"                 Syr-s               Vulgate             .

Father               Our                          Our                    Our                Our                 Our
kingdom           kingdom blessed      in heaven          in heavens     heaven            heavens
daily bread       will done                  kingdom come  kingdom       [lacuna]           kingdom
forgive sins      bread continually     will done           will                                       will
temptation        forgive sins              daily bread        daily bread                     supersubstantial bread
no ending         power of temptation forgive debt      forgive debts                        forgive debts
                         evil                            temptation        temptation                           temptation
                         no ending                  evil one            evil                                      evil
                         amen                         power&glory   power                                  no ending






Syr-c                      "D"                        Canon. Gk. Mt.

Our                        Our                        Our
in heaven               heavens                  in heaven
kingdom                kingdom                kingdom
wishes                   will                        will
continual bread     continual bread      daily bread
forgive debts         forgive debts         forgive debts
temptation             test                        temptation
evil one                 evil                        evil
.kingdom&glory   no ending              kingdom, power, glory
                                                            amen


The above table is a graphical version of the Matthaean version of the Pater Noster. One can see the general tendency for the prayer to become more elaborate. There is doubt at certain points, notably with regard to the dating of the Didache. It exists in one Greek document, which is clearly from the Byzantine period, but it is believed to reflect Church practices of 40-120 CE. The Two Ways portion of the Didache is Jewish in origin, and a copy was found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. But in its Byzantine dress it can tell us little or nothing about the earliest history of the prayer.

To my mind, at least, the omission of "Our" in the Lukan version may indicate translation from Aramaic, and indeed it existed in that form into the late fourth century (Syr-s), as I showed in the previous part of this article. The form "our father" (avinu) would be more common in Hebrew. This has got me wondering whether Matthew IIa, from which (according to my Layered Matthew Hypothesis) Luke drew, may have been written in Aramaic, while the later IIb stage (the base text-type for Shem-Tob's Hebrew Matthew was clearly in Hebrew.

The earliest texts have "sins" rather than "debts," but "debts" predominated in the Matthaean version of the prayer by the late fourth century (Vulgate).

We see that the earliest texts had no fancy ending (kingdom, power, and glory). The earliest to have even part of such an ending would probably be "k," with only "power," which never made it into the Vulgate. The full additional ending was a feature of Byzantine texts, which became the basis of the Textus Receptus or Received Text. The ending appears to be a reference to 1 Chron 29:11-13, but it could not be called a quotation. The Byzantine texts, which were exceedingly numerous, became the basis of most Protestant translations. The Catholics, on the other hand, had the Vulgate, which had the benefit of better and more ancient readings, including those of "B" (Codex Vaticanus), which modern scholars consider to be the best of all, along with a few others such as "א" (Codex Sinaiticus).


Copyright © 2020 by Donald C. Traxler aka Donald Jacobson Traxler.
 

The Pater Noster: A Trajectory through Time - Part I

This is not the first time I've written on this subject, and you might wish to consult a previous blog post, A Listing of the Synoptica Series and Other Related Posts in this Blog (Revised) June 14 2020, for further background information. In particular, Earlier Forms of the Pater Noster, posted on May 30 2019, might be helpful.

In this article I intend to show the development of the Pater Noster ("Our Father," or "The Lord's Prayer") through time.

This beloved and ancient prayer has survived in three editions: that of Matthew, that of Luke, and that of the Didache. Somehow, the canonical (Greek) text grew out of this development, and that is what we want to shed light on.

So far as I can tell, the oldest version is that in Luke. According to my Layered Matthew Hypothesis, that is because Luke used an older edition of Matthew's gospel (Matthew IIa) for the material that he got from Matthew. Here is Luke's version (Lk. 11:2-4), according to modern scholarship:

Father,
hallowed be thy name,
thy kingdom come

Give us each day
our daily bread,
and forgive us our sins,
for we ourselves forgive
everyone who is indebted to us;
and lead us not into temptation.

I happen to believe that the original of this prayer was taught in Aramaic, and such a version has survived in the Sinaitic Palimpsest. I'll show it first in Hebrew letters, easier for me to write than Estrangelo (classical Syriac script):

אבא נתקדש שמך ותאתא מלכותך ׃ 2

והב לן לחמא אמינא דכליום ׃ 3

ושבך לנ חטהין ואף אנחנן שבקין אנחנן לכל דחיב לן ולא תעלן לנסיונא ׃ 4

 This sounds something like:

abba netqaddash sh'mak watite malkutak

wahab lan lahma amyna d'kulyum.

wash'buq lan n'tahayn 'ap ennahnan sh'baqn l'kul d'hayyabin lan w'la ta'lan l'nesyuna.

But we should not suppose that this minimalist, Lukan version was widely known or available to all. It did survive in the Vulgate:

Pater sanctificetur nomen tuum
adveniat regnum tuum
panem nostrum cotidianum da nobis cotidie
et dimitte nobis peccata nostra
siquidem et ipsi dimittimus omni debenti nobis
et ne nos inducas in temptationem.

This was fine for Latin-speaking Christians in the West, but in the East, Luke's shorter version was replaced just a hundred years later (in Syr-c, the Curetonian Syriac). The replacement text was full of material intended to harmonize it with Matthew's longer text. The replacement text became canonical in the new Greek translation, as also in the Syriac Peshitta. We inherited the longer text in Luke (although it was more Matthaean than Lukan) in the (Byzantine) Textus Receptus, the Received Text, and from there it went into, for example, the King James Version. All this served to obscure the textual history of the Pater Noster.

(to be continued)

Copyright © 2020 by Donald C. Traxler aka Donald Jacobson Traxler.

Do You Mind?

Do you mind if I piss light across the earth?
May I sing the songs of birds until their echo
returns from another direction?
Do I have your leave to make allies
of the planet and its speechless creatures?
Do you mind if I make myself at home
where I've lived for thousands of years?
I, of course, shall do the same for you.

Cela vous dérange si je fais pisser la lumière sur la terre?
Puis-je chanter les chants des oiseaux jusqu'à leur écho
revient d'une autre direction?
Ai-je votre permission de faire des alliés
de la planète et de ses créatures sans voix?
Ça vous dérange si je me fais à la maison
où je vis depuis des milliers d'années?
Bien entendu, je ferai de même pour vous.

¿Te importa si orino luz sobre la tierra?
¿Puedo cantar las canciones de los pájaros hasta su eco
regresa desde otra dirección?
¿Tengo tu permiso para hacer aliados
del planeta y sus criaturas sin palabras?
¿Te importa si me hago en casa
donde he vivido por miles de años?
Yo, por supuesto, haré lo mismo para ti.

Você se importa se eu mijo luz em toda a terra?
Posso cantar os cantos dos pássaros até seu eco
retorna de outra direção?
Tenho sua permissão para fazer aliados
do planeta e suas criaturas sem palavras?
Você se importa se eu me sentir em casa
onde eu moro há milhares de anos?
Eu, é claro, farei o mesmo por você.

Text and image Copyright © 2020 by Donald C. Traxler aka Donald Jacobson Traxler.

Synoptica XXXI - The Beatitudes per Codex Bezae ("D")

So far there has been an elephant in the room, about which we have not spoken. If those early Christians (whether of Antioch or some other place) translated Matthew's gospel from Hebrew into an Old Latin version and an Old Syriac version, they must have also produced an Old Greek version. Indeed they did, and its best surviving representative is Codex Bezae Cantabrigensis, usually represented as "D." It is a fifth-century manuscript on vellum, but it certainly represents a text type that is far older, apparently approximately coeval with "k" and "Syr-s," with both of which it has many commonalities. Codex Bezae has all four Gospels and Acts, in both Greek and Latin, but the Latin, which is of the Old Latin type, is not a translation of the Greek, and is of far less interest than the Greek. All three manuscripts, "k," "D," and "Syr-s," are representatives of the "Western" or "Syro-Latin" type of text.

So now I would like to show a translation of the Beatitudes as they exist on the Greek side of Codex Bezae ("D"):


Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of the heavens.

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they shall be satisfied.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.

Blessed are the peaceful, for they shall be called children of God.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for justice's sake, for theirs shall be the kingdom of the heavens.

Blessed are you when they persecute and insult you and say all evil against you for justice's sake.

Rejoice and be glad for your abundant reward in heaven, for thus did they persecute the prophets who were before you.


And now, following the example of the table in my Synoptica XXX article, I would like to represent these Beatitudes of "D" diagrammatically, for easy comparison:


Bezae ("D")

poor in spirit
meek
mourn
hunger&thirst
merciful
pure/heart
peaceful
persecuted
you persecuted
rejoice-they-pr-b4u


As we can see, the order of "meek" and "weep/mourn" is inverted, as it also was in the Old Latin, represented here by "k," and as it still is in the Vulgate. But the innovation "mourn," of Syr-s, instead of the "weep" of all earlier versions (the "wait" of Shem-Tob is a scribal error due to the similarity of two Hebrew words, "wait" and "weep") has been accepted. We see also "peaceful," which is correct, instead of the "Syr-s" innovation "peacemakers."

We see, then that Codex Bezae, "D," is a mixed text, showing influences of both the Old Latin and the Old Syriac textual types. This Old Greek version, though, was not the model for the Canonical Greek texts. That model and translation source was the Old Syriac version, here represented by "Syr-s," as shown in Synoptica XXX.

While the Old Syriac and the Canonical Greek are extremely similar in the Beatitudes, there is a lot of diversity between the two textual types overall. This may have been due to a last round of revision that was afforded by the new translation. Such late revisions would then explain the suppression of the Old Latin and Old Syriac texts, to the extent that only two examples of the latter, one of which is a palimpsest, have survived.

Faced with a confusing diversity of readings, it is easy to see why the authorities of the institutional Church would have wanted to make a fresh start, Since the Church in the East has always maintained that their Syriac, being (except for dialectal differences) the language that Jesus would have spoken, is the most authentic, the Old Syriac would have been an obvious basis for the new translation into Greek. Since the new Greek version was not the same as the previous versions, the old had to be suppressed. This suppression was aided by the Vulgate, to replace the Old Latin, and the Peshitta, to replace the Old Syriac. All previous textual development was thus obscured.

Eventually the claim that the Gospels were originally written in Greek, and that the canonical Greek textual tradition is the oldest and original one, became universal. That any scholar accepts that claim today is absolutely stupefying.

Text Copyright © 2020 by Donald C. Traxler aka Donald Jacobson Traxler.

Synoptica XXX - Even More on the Beatitudes

In this article I would like to further explore the growth of the list of Beatitudes and, if possible, shed some light on the relationships among the Hebrew, Old Latin, Old Syriac, and Canonical Greek textual traditions.

In the last article of this series I listed the Beatitudes as they appear in canonical Luke, in Shem-Tob's Hebrew Matthew, in the oldest Old Latin ("k," Codex Bobiensis), and in canonical, Greek Matthew. What was missing from those lists was the oldest Old Syriac (Syr-s, the Sinaitic Palimpsest). I would now like to add the list of Beatitudes that appears in Syr-s:


Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are they that mourn; for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst for justice: for they shall be satisfied.

Blessed are the merciful: for upon them shall be mercies.

Blessed are those who are pure in heart: for they shall see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.

Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you and persecute you, and when they shall say against you what is evil, for my own names' sake.

But rejoice ye and be glad in that day: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted their fathers the prophets.


We now have a lot to consider, so I would like to show it diagrammatically, as follows:


Luke                     Shem-Tob                 "k"                            "Syr-s"                  Canonical (Grk.) Mt.

poor                     wait (weep)               poor/spirit                  poor/spirit            poor/spirit
hunger                 innocent/heart           meek                          mourn                  mourn
weep                   pursue peace              weeping                     meek                    meek
hate you              persecuted                 hunger&thirst            hunger&thirst       hunger&thirst
rejoice-fath.-pr.   persecute you            merciful                     merciful               merciful
                            rejoice-proph.           clean/heart                  pure/heart            pure/heart
                                                              peaceful                     peacemakers        peacemakers
                                                              persecution                persecuted            persecuted
                                                              you persecuted          hate&persec you   persecute you
                                                              rejoice-broth-pr-b4u  rejoice-fath-pr      rejoice-men-pr-b4u


I don't know about you, dear reader, but I find the above table extremely interesting.

What do we see here? First of all, there is the steady growth of the list of Beatitudes, from five to ten. In the first three columns, one of them is about those who weep/are weeping ("wait" in Shem-Tob is a scribal error for "weep," as I've shown before). "Mourn" in Syr-s is an innovation, based on a kind of reverse synecdoche by which "mourn" represents "weep." The canonical (Greek) textual tradition follows this innovation. We see that the order of "mourn/weep" and "meek" is inverted in the Old Latin textual tradition (here represented by "k"), an inversion that continued all the way into the Vulgate. But the order in canonical (Greek) Matthew is that of the Old Syriac (here represented by Syr-s). We also see the "those who pursue peace" in Shem-Tob's Hebrew (which we know to be correct because of catchword connections) is correctly translated in "k" as "pacifici," but suddenly becomes "peacemakers" in both Syr-s and canonical Matthew.

A word needs to be said here about the "Western" (Syro-Latin) textual tradition. As pointed out by Frederic Henry Chase, in his book THE SYRO-LATIN TEXT OF THE GOSPELS (1895), the Old Latin and Old Syriac textual traditions are closely inter-related, and should really be considered a single stream, one that is older than the Greek texts that eventually became canonical. He posits Antioch as their place of origin, noting that the young Christian community there would have included speakers of Syriac (Christian Aramaic), Latin, and Greek. Both of these textual streams were suppressed by the institutional Church in the fourth and fifth centuries, in favor of the Greek textual tradition, which they made canonical. The suppression was done so well that only about fifty examples of the Old Latin survived, and only TWO examples of the Old Syriac survived (both of which were discovered in the nineteenth century).

I mention the above because it is important to understand the "k" and "Syr-s" are OLDER than the Greek texts that eventually became canonical. In Latin-speaking countries, the older texts were replaced by the Vulgate; in Syriac-speaking countries, they were replaced by the Peshitta, sometimes called "the Vulgate of the East."

Returning to the table that I've included above, We see that the list of Beatitudes in canonical (Greek) Matthew is nearly identical to that in the Sinaitic Old Syriac (Syr-s), following its order and its innovations. I believe, therefore, that Matthew was first translated into Greek from Syriac (Christian Aramaic). Many have suspected that Greek Matthew had a Semitic substratum, probably Aramaic, and now we can see how that probably came about.

At the same time, it appears that Papias' statement that Matthew had collected the Logia (Sayings) of Jesus and written them down in the Hebrew language, and that the others had then translated them as best they could, was also correct.

Text Copyright © 2020 by Donald C. Traxler aka Donald Jacobson Traxler.