The Washington Post and Times Herald Mar 26, 1955
Book Is Written in Language Spoken by Christ
By Paul Sampson Staff Reporter
“…has been carefully preserved… originated in the ancient Assyrian Empire…was brought into this country when many members of the family came to this country after being driven from Assyria by World War 1…”
The Washington Post and Times Herald Nov 29, 1955
Bus Bearing Aged Bible to Start 48-State Visit
“A bus that will carry the oldest known Aramaic New Testament on a nation-wide tour was christened “The Spirit of Galilee” yesterday on the Capitol Plaza… The ancient manuscript, hand-written in Aramaic-the language spoken by Jesus Christ-has been called the most priceless document in Christendom…”
Aramaic New Testament Khabouris Codex headlines as “NT Time Bomb.”1
Reverend Frederick Brown Harris, Chaplain to the US Senate, in April 1955 wrote: “More profound in its final significance than the test of any instrument of deadly destruction on the Nevada desert was a recent April scene in the Capitol of the Nation… It is a record to make the heart leap with excitement. Somehow, it is like hearing the One whose birth broke the ages in two, talking to our modern age without a language barrier between. Here is not a translation of the words, but the words themselves of that One who under the blue sky of Israel2 declared, “My words shall not pass away.” They are spirit, and they are life… What treasures will be found as the very language of Jesus is studied can only be imagined.”
The NY Times article by Bess Furman goes on to say that a group of scholars had examined the codex on behalf of the Library of Congress and verified that it was authentic. They stated that the text was the “standardized (Peshitta) form of the Aramaic-Syriac version of the New Testament.”
The experts were convinced that a translation would clarify some New Testament expressions. Mr. Hatch pointed out an example of how the Aramaic clarifies things by offering the example that the words “camel” and “rope” were “similar in the language used at the time of Christ.”
The Yonan Codex was believed to have been stored for centuries in a church in Urmia, which is an Aramaic community located in Northwest Iran, but was uprooted by the Kurds in 1918.
It is believed that the Yonan family took the ancient New Testament codex and fled with it to Iraq, then they brought it from there to the United States of America.
Americans were discovering that the original New Testament Bible was written in Aramaic, but what happened? What blocked the viral interest in the Aramaic Bible? Perhaps after you’ve read the AENT Bible and compared it with other versions, you will understand why the ancient Aramaic New Testament wasn’t so well received by the religious mainstream.
1Quoted from: The Khaboris Manuscript; Enlightenment From The Aramaic, The Yonan Codex Foundation Inc., Published 1993.
2The Chaplain’s quote referred to Israel as Palestine.
3“The Khabouris Manuscript is a copy of a 4th- to 5th-century New Testament. Carbon dating, a scientific method used to determine the age of an object containing organic material, has found it to be about 1,000 years old.
The AENT has been discontined,
For more information visit: WWW.AHAVBIBLE.COM
