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glyn · 09-13-2007, 19:40 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ArmchairGeneral

Glyn, we've been over this one before. No, no, no, and again, absolutely no.

1) The Dead Sea Scrolls do NOT mention Joseph of Arimathea. He is mentioned in the New Testament. The DSS contain various writings, including parts of the Old Testament, not of the New Testament.

2)The vast majority of the DSS were written in Semitic tongues, mostly Hebrew. Not Greek, except for a few texts.

3) "Yussuf, rama Theo" is not Greek. It's not Hebrew. You might call it "Greebrew" or "Greemaic" perhaps. Yussuf is a Hebrew name. Rama? Well, it ain't Greek. IIRC, it's similar to an Aramaic word for love, or something. Theo is the root of the Greek for God. So the the phrase is half Semitic, half Greek. I highly doubt it is found in the DSS, or any ancient text.

A spectacularly incompetent monk, indeed: Mistranslating a non-existent phrase in a non-existent language in a non-existent text is quite a feat.

I have been unable to find any mention of this theory online except for some random Myspace page. I'm curious as to who thought it up- it's very ingenious, although completely nonsensical to anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of the Bible and Biblical languages.

I was recalling it from memory as I no longer have the particular book it came from. Not to hand anyway, but I will try to find it.
Perhaps I got the spelling wrong (not unknown for me!) but it should sound as I wrote it. Have read many books on the subject, but they don't all sing the same song as the matter is so subject to interpretation. The Jesuit priests who were in charge of the DSS (those that they had - it is known there are others) insisted that the books were a couple of centuries after christs ministry and were not as important as they had hoped. Other scholars disagree. The big move was when Jews were able to study them as the Jesuits wouldn't let them. The scrolls are not complete but have been the centre of a multi-disciplinary approach which has advanced our knowledge of those people and their times. I recommended the Thiering books to zraver and I think you would enjoy them too. Being a slave to the printed word on paper I haven't seen much about the subject online.