Aramaic Original New Testament Hypothesis
The hypothesis of an Aramaic original for the New Testament holds that the original text of the New Testament was not written in Greek, as held by the majority of scholars, but in the Aramaic language, which was the primary language of Jesus and his Twelve Apostles.
The position of the Assyrian Church of the East, per Mar Eshai Shimun XXIII in 1957, is that the Syriac Peshitta (which is written in a cursive form of Aramaic), used in that church, is the original of the New Testament. Variants of this view are held by some individuals who may argue for a lost Aramaic text preceding the Peshitta as the basis for the New Testament.
This view is to be distinguished from higher criticism and text-critical transmission theories such as the Hebrew Gospel hypothesis of Lessing and others. The Hebrew Gospel or Proto-Gospel hypothesis includes either Aramaic or Hebrew source texts for Matthew and possibly Mark.
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