275
early. (’Ido not see how such a source could have been
written later than c. 40 CE, when the Gentile mission was
such a great success that it would have to be taken note
of. A date earlier than this is surely more probable’,
p. 259.) Following on from this he proposes an early date
for Mark’s Gospel. (’The portrayal of this document as
flimsy post-70 fiction is the unsatisfactory consequence of
reading it in the light of literary theory which has
emerged from the study of modern fiction’, pp. 259f.)
Had Mark written as late as 65 CE, he would surely have
altered the text in the same way that Matthew and Luke
did. A date for the Gospel as early as c. 40 CE ’must be
regarded as highly probable’. He also sees his study as
providing further evidence for the priority of Mark, and
he manages to explain many of the ’minor agreements’ of
Matthew and Luke against Mark on the basis of his
reconstructed Aramaic.
This is a most important study, but I have several
questions and one hope. My questions are these. First, if
Mark was indeed written in 40 CE, and the other two
Synoptic Gospels somewhere around 70, how does he
picture the development of a Synoptic-type Christianity
during the intervening thirty years? If, as the canon
suggests, a Pauline Christianity quickly became
dominant, how did the religion of Matthew and Luke
survive? Second, at one point Casey claims that Mark’s
text was not revised after the translation was done, and
adds: ’This should be treated as part of the evidence that
his Gospel was never finished’ (p. 135). Presumably he
holds that 16:8 was not the intended conclusion of the
Gospel. I wonder what he supposes Mark would have
recounted had he completed his work. Third, Casey has
deliberately selected four passages where his method can
be effectively applied. What differences would it make if
it were applied to all the sayings of Jesus recorded in the
Synoptic Gospels? Can, indeed, it be done? Fourth, I read
the book in the light of his earlier study, From Jewish
Prophet to Gentile God (1991, see ET 103, 1991/92, 33f),
and I wonder again what, now that he has made these
studies of the Aramaic teaching of Jesus, he imagines a
Christianity that is a ’viable option for honest and well-
informed people’ today would look like.
And my hope? The large sections of unpointed
Aramaic make it difficult for readers who are not fluent in
the language. Transliteration is no answer (as Casey
rightly observes in relation to studies by some other
scholars), but pointing his reconstructions would have
helped those who know Hebrew but are insecure in
Aramaic. What we now need, however, is for Casey to
write a book which incorporates his findings but is tuned
to a more general readership - perhaps pursuing further
the quest of the historical Jesus which he mentions right
at the end of the book.
Because of the importance of this approach for the life
and teaching of Jesus I have asked Dr Casey to respond to
my questions.
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An Aramaic Approach to the
Synoptic Gospels
BY DR MAURICE CASEY,
UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM
The Synoptic Gospels are written in Greek, though Jesus
spoke Aramaic. Moreover, Jesus’s ministry was exercised
among Jews, whereas, by the time the Synoptic Gospels
were written, many of Jesus’s followers were Gentiles,
and both Mark and Luke show traces of Gentile identity.
It follows that the change in language from Aramaic to
Greek was part of a cultural shift from a Jewish to a
Gentile environment. Shifts of this kind are very familiar
to scholars whose field is Translation Studies. In that
field, it is axiomatic that language is a significant part of
culture, and this main point now goes unquestioned
because of the mass of evidence on which it is based. The
quest of the historical Jesus has, however, proceeded as if
this were not the case. Scholars usually study the text of
the Gospels in Greek, and very few of them have troubled
much with the Aramaic level of the tradition. If we wish
to recover the Jesus of history, however, we ought to see
whether we can reconstruct his sayings, and the earliest
accounts of his doings, in their original Aramaic. This
should help us to understand him within his own cultural
background.
This task has traditionally been very difficult, since
very little Aramaic survived from the time of Jesus. This
situation has now been completely altered by the
publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls. In Aramaic Sources
of lvfark’s Gospel I have sought to lay down a methodo-
logy for this work, as it has now become possible.’ The
purpose of this article is to indicate briefly, in English,
what can now be done, and to respond to the questions
raised by Dr C. S. Rodd in his review of this book.
The Scrolls now provide us with a core of Aramaic of
the right period and culture. Moreover, most of the words
in the Dead Sea Scrolls are used in other dialects too. This
means that they are not specific to the dialect of Judaea as
opposed to anywhere else, and can reasonably be used to
reconstruct the Galilean Aramaic of Jesus. Previous
attempts to use ’Galilean’ Aramaic suffered badly from
the late date and corrupt nature of the source material, and
invariably used a high proportion of material which was
not Galilean at all. Now, however, the problem of dialect
is much less serious than it seemed previously. It should
1
This book was written, and some of the other research
discussed in this article was done, in 1994-96, when I held a
British Academy Research Readership awarded for this purpose.
I am extremely grateful to the Academy for this award, which
enabled me to complete a major piece of research.
276
now also be accepted that Aramaic was a very stable
language, both before and after the time of Jesus.
Consequently, we can work carefully with words not
found in the Scrolls, especially those from an earlier
period. This Aramaic is not pointed, for pointing is a
system of vocalization which originated at a later date.
This is why I have so far refrained from pointing my
proposed reconstructions, though I can see that pointing
would make them more intelligible for New Testament
scholars.
Many of the Scrolls are written in Hebrew. We must
infer that some people knew both Aramaic and Hebrew
over a period of centuries before and during the time of
Jesus. Naturally, therefore, there are Hebraisms in the
Aramaic Scrolls. Hebraisms in the Gospels have often
been regarded as evidence that their sources were written
in Hebrew rather than Aramaic. This should no longer be
accepted. For example, at Mark 14:25, some manuscripts
have readings which may be literally translated on the
following lines: ‘I/we shall not add to drink of the fruit of
the vine ...’ This is a Hebrew idiom for ’I/we shall not
drink again of the fruit of the vine ...’ This Hebrew
idiom, however, occurs in Aramaic in 4Q 198 (Tob 14:2),
and it is implied at 1 I Q Targum Job XXV.8 (Job 34:32).
It is therefore perfectly consistent with Mark’s source
being Aramaic, not Hebrew. Its presence in a document
which uses the straightforward Greek word palin no less
than 28 times is also evidence that the translator was
suffering very badly from interference, so much so that
this is evidence that his source was written rather than
oral.
This is one of the ways in which the unchanged
evidence of the Gospels must now be seen in a different
light. This is the next major point. All the work on the
Aramaic of the Scrolls would be to no avail, if the
Synoptic Gospels were really Greek fiction, or if all of
them had been so heavily edited that Aramaic sources
were irrecoverable. There is, however, substantial and
decisive evidence that parts of Mark’s Gospel, and to a
lesser extent parts of Matthew and Luke, are literal
translations of written Aramaic sources. This follows
from an argument of cumulative weight. Firstly, the
Scrolls provide part of the evidence that Aramaic was the
lingua jranca of Jesus’s environment, the language which
he would have had to use in teaching normal Jews, and
the natural language for his first followers to use when
they reported his life and teaching. Secondly, there are
many reasons for supposing that some passages of the
Synoptic Gospels are generally accurate accounts of what
Jesus or his disciples, or both, said and did. They are,
therefore, just the sort of passages to be transmitted in
Aramaic, quite different from the secondary narratives of
the Fourth Gospel, many of which originated in Greek.
Thirdly, there are many details in such passages which are
explicable only if they are part of translations of written
Aramaic sources.
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For example, the story of Peter denying Jesus has a
perfectly good Sitz im Leben in the events of the time, but
the early church had no reason to make it up. Mark ends
this story by saying of Peter, ’And throwing, he wept’
(Mark 14:72). In normal Greek, the word which I have
translated ’throwing’ (epibalbn) is just as much nonsense
as it is in English. The explanation is to be found in
Syriac, a group of Aramaic dialects spoken later than the
time of Jesus, but with many words and constructions in
common with the Aramaic of his time. Here, a word for
’throwing’ is used for throwing threats and curses, much
as in English we may ’hurl’ abuse. Moreover, in normal
Aramaic script it differs by only one letter from the word
for ’began’, and these two letters (resh and daleth) were
often confused. We must infer that Mark’s source read
’And he began to weep’. It was slightly misread, so that
Mark reads ’And throwing, he wept’. This was not
however a silly mistake. It is the natural and normal work
of a bilingual translator suffering from interference. He
did throw threats and curses in his native Aramaic, and he
knew from his translation of the previous verse that Peter
had been doing just that. It was the influence of the
Aramaic text in front of him which made him assume that
you could throw threats and curses in Greek as well. This
is also a good example of how Aramaic extant later than
the time of Jesus can be fruitfully used. Finally, this is a
relatively simple example of a single word: this indicates
how complex a task this research is.
The results of studying four complete passages,
reported in Aramaic Sources ojMark’s Gospel, are quite
dramatic. Mark 9:11-13 has become fully intelligible for
the first time, and casts new light on Jesus’s
understanding of John the Baptist’s death. The difficulties
of Mark’s Greek text result from the work of a translator
who was landed with the translator’s nightmare, a passage
which, by the very nature of the two languages and the
differences between the source and target cultures, simply
will not go smoothly from the one language into the
other. The reconstruction of the other three passages
(Mk 2:23-3:6; 10:35-45; 14:12-26) also has dramatic
results. In each case, the whole passage emerges as a
unified whole. It has also become infinitely easier to
locate each passage in Jesus’s own culture, first century
Aramaic-speaking Judaism. New arguments for the
historicity of each passage follow. This is because each
passage so interpreted has an excellent Sitz im Leben in
the ministry of Jesus, whereas conventional arguments for
splitting these passages up and treating parts of them as
secondary are generally dependent on reading them in
Greek with Gentile assumptions. We find Jesus immersed
in detailed halakhic disputes over whether Peah may be
taken on the Sabbath, and whether healing is permitted
that day (Mk 2:23-3:6). We can understand better the
entirely reasonable nature of Jacob and John’s request to
sit on his right and left in his glory (Mk 10:35-45). At the
end of his ministry, we find him celebrating Passover, not

instituting the Christian Eucharist (Mk 14:12-26). It
follows that this work is essential if we are to end the
quest of the historical Jesus by finding him.
We can now approach Dr Rodd’s third question:
’Casey has deliberately selected four passages where his
method can be effectively applied. What differences
would it make if it were applied to all the sayings of Jesus
recorded in the Synoptic Gospels? Can, indeed, it be
done?’ No, it cannot. Some sayings are secondary, and
originated in Greek. For example, a comparison is made
between the days of Noah and the days (Luke) or parousia
(Matthew) of the Son of man (Mt 24:37-9//Lk 17:26-7).
This makes excellent sense in the Gospels as they now
stand. In both of them, the term ‘Son of man’ is a term for
Jesus alone. They both hoped fervently for his second
coming, which is anticipated here. They wrote for
churches which were small minorities between the Jewish
and Gentile worlds, and consequently were happy to
contemplate judgment on the rest of the world, as in the
days of the Flood. The saying therefore has an excellent
Sitz im Leben in the Gospel tradition, and was naturally
rewritten by both evangelists because it was existentially
relevant to their current situation. A satisfactory Aramaic
reconstruction cannot however be made, because the
Aramaic term bar I’)nash(d ) always has a general level
of meaning, which cannot be found in an Aramaic
reconstruction of this verse. At the same time, this
comparison has no Sitz im Leben in the teaching of Jesus,
who hoped for the coming of the kingdom and did not
look into the distant future for his own return.
There are, however, many other passages which can be
fruitfully studied by reconstructing their Aramaic sources.
My next contribution is planned as another book, An
Aramaic Approach to Q, which I hope to have completed
before this article is published. The present state of
research into Q varies from the chaotic to the
bureaucratic. At the chaotic end of the spectrum, there is
no agreement as to whether Q existed, nor as to what it
was, if it did. At the bureaucratic end of the spectrum, an
amorphous group of scholars have agreed that it was a
Greek document. It was produced by a Q community,
whose concerns can be worked out from it. Some of these
scholars suppose that this Q community did not have an
atonement theology, on the ground that Q has no passion
narrative. Many scholars who believe this also believe
that Q was the first Gospel, and that its picture of Jesus
was that of a sort of cynic philosopher. As we narrow
down the group of scholars to more detailed agreements,
we see an increase in the number of common judgments
made in the interests of a consensus of a group, with quite
inadequate attention to evidence or argument. We also see
the large scale omission of Aramaic, mostly by scholars
who cannot read the language Jesus spoke.
This situation is completely unsatisfactory, and should
be brought to an end by careful study of the Aramaic
substratum of the Q material. This is more fruitful in
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277
some passages than in others. We have already noted one
Q passage which originated in Greek. Paradoxically,
however, it is passages which are verbally almost
identical in Greek which are often easiest to reconstruct,
because these are passages which Matthew and Luke have
not edited heavily. Take, for example, Matthew
11:4-6//Luke 7:22-23, Jesus’s reply to John the Baptist’s
uncertain question as to whether he was the person whom
John expected to come. This has an excellent Sitz im
Leben in the ministry of Jesus, and an Aramaic source can
readily be reconstructed from the almost identical Greek
of the two evangelists. In this case the Aramaic source
does not cast a great deal of additional light on the
passage: the process of reconstruction simply adds to the
arguments for supposing that the words of Jesus are
genuine, by showing that they could be spoken and
transmitted in the language in which Jesus taught.
More can be gained from studying passages such as
Matthew 23:23//Luke 11:42, where Matthew and Luke
have made or used two different translations. Here
Matthew correctly has scribes and Pharisees tithe dill so
that the priests who served in the Temple would have
some. Luke, however, by misreading one letter, has them
tithe rue, which is ridiculous. It grows wild, and from
Luke’s perspective one sort of rue is not good as a spice
for food, and another is for making wicks. Luke
continued editing vigorously, replacing cummin with
’every herb’, which makes the Pharisees a bit silly too,
since the tithing of every herb was not necessary.
Matthew has Jesus complain that they overlook ’the
heavier things’, so he translated the Aramaic homerayya.
This has cultural ramifications which can only be
sketched briefly here. From our perspective the word has
two meanings, which we generally represent by two
different words, in English perhaps ’weighty’ and
’stringent’. So the heavy of heavies may be ’Honour thy
father and mother’, or ’Thou shalt not take the name of
the Lord thy God in vain’. These commandments are
obviously very important, so they are b 6merayy3 . On the
other hand, or equally, depending on our perspective,
Rabban Gamaliel’s house were said to be ’stringent’ with
themselves, and ’light’, or rather ‘lenient’, towards Israel.
This was because they let Jews in general bake large
loaves on festivals, the ruling of Bet Hillel, while they
themselves baked only thin cakes, the ruling of Bet
Shammai. It follows that orthodox Jews will have thought
they were ’doing the stringent things ( b 6merayyd 1’ when
they tithed mint, dill and cummin.
The Aramaic word ’do’ (-bad) also forms an
unavoidable pun with ’overlook’ and ‘transgress’(&dquo;bar ),
which forms an unavoidable pun with ’tithe’ (&dquo;sar ).
From the perspective of orthodox Jews, people who
overlooked (&dquo;bar ) mint dill and cummin, transgressed
(&dquo;bar again) the stringent things (homerayya) of the
Law. Jesus ordered them to look at matters the other way
round, by doing (&dquo;bad ) the important things
278
(I;õmerayyä), justice mercy and faith, and not
overlooking/transgressing (&dquo;bar ) the others, the tithing of
mint dill and cummin. Luke misread ’mercy’ as ’love’,
again a difference of only one letter, and edited
vigorously to give ’the love of God’ in place of both
’mercy’ and ’faith’. In this passage, therefore, a massive
amount of new knowledge can be gained by careful study
of the Aramaic substratum of Matthew and Luke. This
enables us to see Jesus’s teaching more accurately in its
original cultural context. Moreover, we can see Matthew
and Luke following translating and editorial procedures
which fit the somewhat different Christian environments
for which they wrote. Finally, the fact that this part of Q
was transmitted in Aramaic and is not found in common
order means that we must adopt a more chaotic model of
Q than has become conventional.
Rodd ends his review by suggesting that I should write
a book incorporating my findings but tuned to a more
general readership, perhaps in quest of the historical
Jesus. This is indeed a major task to be undertaken at
once, and I have begun it. The great advantage of careful
study of the Aramaic substratum of the Synoptic Gospels
is that it permits a more accurate account of the life and
teaching of Jesus to be obtained. The result will inevitably
be the portrayal of a figure who is more immersed in the
Judaism of his time than is conventional.
This will raise very sharply Rodd’s fourth question.
Recalling my previous book From Jewish Prophet to
Gentile God (1991, reviewed in ET 103, 1991/92, 33f), he
wonders what I would imagine a Christianity that is a
Iviable option for honest and well-informed people’
would look like, in the light of this more recent work.
This is a more difficult question every year. The
Jewishness of Jesus has proved very difficult for many
Christians to come to terms with. There is moreover no
doubt that a more Jewish figure, more immersed in
Judaism than Christians generally like to see him, is
emerging from this work. From a theological perspective,
this might be thought appropriate if the Son of God were
genuinely incarnate among the chosen people. Even to
suggest that, however, is to distance oneself radically
from the Jewish community, who have maintained
through centuries of persecution that the deity of a man is
quite unJewish. Moreover, they seem to have done so
because they were conditioned by their existing adherence
to the oneness of God, and from a theological perspective
that may be regarded as God revealing his oneness to
them. Whatever we do, however, we should not respond
to the difficulty and profundity of these issues by
ignoring the results of historical research from which a
more accurate picture of the historical Jesus can be drawn.
Quite where that will leave honest and well-informed
Christians remains to be seen.
Rodd’s first question raises very broad general
questions about the development of Christianity in the
first century. If my proposed date for Mark, c. 40 CE, is
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right, then some questions will need rethinking. These
include the dates of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.
Rodd raises particularly the relationship between the
development of a Synoptic-type Christianity and a
dominant Pauline Christianity. His question arises
naturally from the bulk of contemporary scholarship, but
some minority views should perhaps be preferred in
response to it. Whereas the Fourth Gospel is a product of
the Johannine community, both Matthew and Luke
contain accounts of the life and teaching of Jesus which
may well have been read eagerly in churches some of
whose members believed in the main points of Pauline
theology too. We should not infer from the Gospels of
Matthew and Luke the existence of narrow Matthaean and
Lukan communities, who believed only in the contents of
each of these documents. Equally, Pauline Christianity
was more varied than is sometimes allowed. Corinthian
Christians may not have had too much need for
justification by faith, central though it was elsewhere.
Moreover, Paul quoted the teaching of Jesus as
authoritative ( Cor 7:10-11 ), and sought to control the
behaviour of the Corinthians by reminding them of Jesus
traditions transmitted to them long ago ( Cor 11:23-25).
In general, therefore, Christianity in the years
immediately after the writing of Mark was a quite varied
phenomenon in which the narrative accounts of Matthew
and Luke surely found the natural home which they have
enjoyed ever since, among Pauline Christians as among
others.
Rodd’s second question arises from an unexpected
aspect of the work which I have done. When Matthew and
Luke encounter peculiarities like ’throwing, he wept’
(Mk 14:72, above), they alter them, as any self-respecting
monoglot Greek would do. Both of them also omit the
incomprehensible, and edit for their churches. Mark has
not removed so many peculiarities, and has edited some
passages so little, as to imply that these passages are first
drafts of translations incorporated in an unrevised
document. This coheres with the lack of a normal ending.
Despite theories to the contrary, therefore, I would
interpret Mark 14:28, 16:7 to mean that Mark intended to
write an account of the risen Jesus in Galilee, as Matthew
did.
In sum, therefore, the publication of all the Aramaic
Dead Sea Scrolls permits us to do far more work on the
Aramaic sources of the Synoptic Gospels than was
previously possible. The completion of this work should
now be regarded as an urgent task which should be
completed within a few years. It enables us to raise
significantly the level of proof that Jesus and his disciples
said and did some of the things attributed to them. A more
Jewish picture of Jesus than is conventional, and indeed a
Jesus more immersed in first century Jewish issues than is
conventional, is emerging from this work. This may be
expected to have far-reaching consequences for our
understanding of his significance.