Aramaic Idiom in the AV

The roots of the King James Authorized Version are 4th. century Greek translations of the very earliest writings which themselves were compiled from the oral traditions of the apostles whose language was Aramaic which for more than 800 years had been the common language throughout the Babylonian and Persian Empires.

Aramaic was the source of all of the languages of monotheistic religions - Arabic, Hebrew, English, Italian, French, etc.

The oldest Bible is a 4th. cent. Aramaic codex in the British Museum.

When William Tyndale translated the NT from Greek, he used texts that had been passed down from earliest times, and they reflected the Aramaic idiom used by the apostles. And Tyndale made sure that in his translation into English that the Aramaic idioms and the Aramaic sentence structure were not violated. That’s one of the reasons that the King James Bible reads as it does. Now Tyndale couldn’t translate the Aramaic, because by then no-one in the world spoke Aramaic (or so scholars in England and Europe thought), so he either left the saying in Aramaic, or he included a translation that the Church Fathers had given as the traditional meaning. Sometimes they were mistaken, but we didn’t find this out until 1938, when the first Aramaic/English lexicon was produced. By then it was too late to amend the King James Bible which has stayed unchanged since 1792 by an Act of Parliament.

To read about Aramaic Idiom in the NT click on “Get the PDF file”, above.