Comment by singlow
5 days ago
But the Peshitta is 300 years after the Septuagint and the verse you mention was written in Greek in a gospel, not the Hebrew Bible. I don't know how the translators of the Peshitta would have any special access to sayings of Jesus that predate the Gospels we have now. I don't know if there is any hard evidence that the Gospel authors had actual eye witness written sources in the language that Jesus spoke. So you have to assume that Jesus used Gamla in Aramaic and that the Gospel writer mistranslated it when writing in Greek but that the Peshitta gives special insight by retranslating it back to the ambiguous word. Then you have to make another leap to think that it is somehow possible to manipulate a rope to be the size of a thread. Sounds like a lot of histrionics to justify Abraham going to Paradise when the simpler explanation is that it's just a concept of difficulty rather than a logical word problem. This seems less plausible than the Eye of Needle gate theory which many Christian teachers often reference.
The Peshitta was over a few centuries. Have you never seen the threads of a rope becoming undone? To the rich man covered in wealth, it would be chaos if they love their wealth more than they love God. My point is that it makes way more sense and yes it is symbolic, but a camel never made any sense to me and to a lot of people for that matter.
Correct, the Peshitta translations of the Gospels were done in the 5th century ce. They were not closer to the Hebrew of the original as you suggested. If you like it better that's fine but it's not inherently better because it was earlier or had better understanding of original languages.
I'm saying they have less errors in some cases. What my theory is, and I'm no scholar is that there were other scrolls that are lost to time, including in Greek and Hebrew, and the Peshitta managed to capture detail from one or more of the right sources.