The Bible has been translated into hundreds of languages. A new translation and the intellectual significance of the project is based on the literary considerations of providing a truly authentic translation of Scriptures...." This is what I wrote in the summer of 1997, when I began to publish my New Testament translation over the Internet. Little did I know what the implications were. It would turn out that it wasn't a matter of proving which was the more authentic version of the Bible. Religious beliefs have nothing to do with proof, reality or truth.

First, I shocked a lot of people when I said that the New Testament was written in the Ancient Aramaic and not Greek. Then as I continued translating, I discovered that there was a reason why the modern churches insisted, and still do, that the New Testament was originated in the Greek language. The "Greek Original" was itself a translation of the words of Jesus Christ; therefore, it was easier to freely interpret what Jesus said. This freedom was appealing to the Roman church, a church that was going to become the Holy Roman Empire.

The Greek Septuagint Old Testament, translated three centuries before Christ came, had already thrown out the name of Jesus from its pages. Those Jews who rejected Jesus Christ during the Apostolic Age would come to agree with this decision. They didn't believe in the Kingdom that Jesus brought, they wanted a kingdom of this world. The Jewish disciples, apostles and converts to Christianity, however, did believe in the Kingdom of Jesus Christ. In the Ancient Aramaic Scriptures there was no discrepancy regarding their acceptance of the Kingdom promised by the Old Covenant.  However, the Greek and Roman converts had another agenda. They wanted to dispossess the Jews, and in fact all Aramaic speaking peoples, from their faith in the Lord, because of racial prejudice.  Therefore, by claiming that the New Testament was originated in Greek, the modern-day churches could now go on to claim that God took the kingdom from the Jews and gave it to the Gentiles. They introduced the word "Gentiles" to represent themselves as the people of the New Covenant. The word "Gentiles" is a total fabrication. There is no such word in Scriptures.

As for the Aramaic speaking followers of Jesus Christ, their name was virtually eliminated from Scriptures. They were Easterners and the Greeks were classified as Europeans. The battle lines were drawn, East versus West. The Westerners proceeded to make Christianity their own private domain and began distorting the New Testament. Almost wherever the New Testament mentioned "Aramaeans," the name was changed to "Greeks."

The New Testament, however, survived in the Ancient Aramaic throughout the ages. In the 4th Century, the University in Urhai (in today's Turkey) was the center for Christian studies. The Ashurai theologians were prominent in the early Church. Working with the Jewish converts of the Christian faith they produced the Bible as we know it today. They put it together from the different manuscripts they had collected and copied by hand from the apostles. Then the persecution of the Aramaic speaking people began by Rome and the Ashurai theologians, priests and deacons were driven out of the region towards the Persian Empire. Many of them were killed. Ironically, driving out the Ashurai Church of the East from the Roman sphere of influence was the key factor in the preservation of the Ancient Aramaic Scriptures.

The Old Testament, on the other hand, was written during the Babylonian Captivity by the Jews. The language they used was the Ancient Aramaic, or as the Jewish scholars call it, "Ashurit." Despite that the official Torah of Judaism today is translated from the Greek Septuagint. The Septuagint is said to have been translated from the Hebrew in 270 BC by seventy theologians in the Greek language. In other words, the New Testament and the Old Testament of the modern-day churches and the Torah of modern Judaism have all been translated from the Greek language. These facts are mind boggling. They imply that God's original words did not survive in the language they were recorded, and that the words of Jesus Christ did not survive in the language that He spoke. This is what the modern-day churches claim.

The Jerusalem and the US Rabbinates have explained their choice of the Greek Septuagint as the source for their Torah by stating in their introduction to the Hebrew Torah the following points. The first is that even though the old manuscripts of the Torah originated in the Ancient Aramaic, they have not survived because the materials they were recorded on had disintegrated and that the scribes had not managed to maintain them in the original. The second is that the Septuagint was a linguistically good translation of the original into Greek, a language that was easier to understand than the Ancient Aramaic. The modern-day churches by comparison have a much poorer explanation. They claim that the New Testament was recorded in the Greek language because Greek had supplanted Aramaic as the language of trade at the time of Jesus Christ and that Paul knew the language well.

That may be true, but the Gospel of Jesus Christ was not recorded by tradesmen. It was recorded by Hebrew scribes whose scribal language was the Ancient Aramaic. Paul was a prime example. He had the entire Scriptures in the Ancient Aramaic. He was a master of the language and until Jesus Christ commissioned him, he was one of the leading scribes of the Pharisees.

It's amazing that the Greek Septuagint, the official Hebrew Torah, the Latin Vulgate, the English language Old Testaments, and all the translations of the Old Testament in every language, neither mention the name of "Jesus" in their pages, nor the word "Trinity." In fact, the word "Trinity" doesn't appear in any of these Bibles. However, when you consider that Paul had preached the Gospel to the Arabs and that the Bible was translated into Arabic after the Muslims conquered the Fertile Crescent, you'll find that there is another reason why the name of Jesus is changed in the Old Testament and why the concept of the Triune God is completely missing. The faith of Islam grew out of the failure of the Greek and Roman versions of the Bible that did not recognize the name of Jesus and the concept of the Trinity in the Old Testament. That's why there is no discrepancy between the "Greek Original," the Latin Vulgate, the Protestant versions and the Arabic translations of the Bible. They all exclude the name of Jesus and the Trinity from the Old Testament. Only the Ancient Aramaic retains the original words intact, because the Ancient Church of the East martyrs gave their lives just so the Scriptures would be preserved.

This was the secret of the ancient Church of the East. This is how the authentic Scriptures were preserved. It was a secret kept at the cost of their lives. For centuries they didn't allude to it, except in quiet prayer. Reduced in number by the many conquests that swept over the Crossroads of Civilization, the Ashurai people barely survived. The true reading of the critical passages were forgotten over the centuries and Eastern Christianity was left alone by the conquerors. Ignorance is bliss sometimes. They still maintained the original Scriptures in the Ancient Aramaic by copying it verbatim, even as few of them understood it.

Ironically, during the heydays of Islam, Eastern Christianity was protected by the Arabs against the Crusaders. When the Crusaders attacked Jerusalem in the early years of the 1st millennium, they killed the Ancient Church of the East priests as they were celebrating Mass in their churches. The Arabs drove out the Crusaders from the Holy Lands a few decades later and allowed the Eastern Christians to return. The Ashurai didn't return to Jerusalem, however. They moved North and hid in the mountainous regions of their homeland. That's where the Ancient Aramaic Scripture was preserved. It didn't emerge until the 19th Century when the Englishman Henry Austen Layard and the Frenchman Henry Botta began their archeological digs in the land of Ashur.

Suddenly, there was a tremendous hunger for the authentic Scriptures, as the Westerners discovered that there were Christians still in this region of the world who had retained their faith from the times of the apostles. The Protestant missionaries rushed to see how their King James Version stacked up against the Ancient Church of the East Bible. When they found out that the Ashurai people didn't understand the liturgy being read or sung in their churches in Turkey, Persia and Mesopotamia, they decided this was a deplorable state of affairs. They learned the modern vernacular and translated the Aramaic Scriptures to modern Syriac, conforming it as they went along to the Protestant Bible. The Ashurai at this point didn't know the Ancient Aramaic well, except for a handful of priests and deacons, none of whom were utilized for the task. The modern language had evolved and changed, incorporating many foreign words. The resulting translation was a mishmash of Eastern and Western theology.

Until the arrival of the missionaries, the small nation that had enjoyed autonomy under the Ottoman Turks lived a peaceful life in their ancestral homelands for the most part. There were occasional persecutions and genocides, but nothing like what happened later. The Ashurai villages were in Eastern Turkey, North Persia and Mesopotamia. The interest of the West in the Christian minorities enraged the Muslim population. To make matters worse, the Ashurai threw their lot in with the Allies in World War I, against Turkey and the Axis Powers. They ended up losing half their population. After the victory, the Allies reneged on their promise to give them their independence and statehood, and gradually abandoned them.

The Roman Catholic Church had discovered the Ancient Church of the East during the 16th Century. They purchased many of the ancient handwritten manuscripts from the Patriarchs of the church and the titles of their sees. The Chaldean faction of the church split off and joined the Roman Church in 1553, becoming the Chaldean Rite of the Catholic Church. Most of the Ancient Aramaic manuscripts of the Bible have disappeared, but the secret of the Scripture's origin is in the knowledge of its decipherment.

Now that I've started the translation of the Old Testament and discovered that none of the translations have caught the true meanings of the Book of Genesis, I finally understand the way these distortions were introduced. In the Ancient Aramaic, it has been recorded that Jesus Christ is the God Manifest from the very first word of the Old Testament. Then the Text goes on to state that He created the universes and that He was the Beginning of Creation. By the end, of course, we learn that He is the Beginning and the End.

So then by rejecting the Ancient Aramaic Scriptures, the modern-day churches are losing sight of the fact that Jesus Christ is the God of the Old Testament as well as the New Testament. Jesus Christ is the God Manifest of all Scriptures. Nowhere is that clearer than in the Ancient Aramaic Scriptures, starting with the Book of Genesis.

When I first started posting my translations, I maintained that I was doing an idiomatic translation. I was afraid to make any major claims, because I hadn't translated enough at that point to reach any major conclusions. Of course, it took a few years before I realized that my translation of the New Testament was not just another translation and that I was discovering many new concepts that were misunderstood and discarded by the modern churches over the centuries.

Ironically, in these terrible times, the lukewarm modern Bibles are more diplomatic and practical, namely the Old Testament does not mention the name of Jesus and the word "Trinity" is nowhere to be found except as a "mystery" to be appreciated by the Christians in a symbolic form. With respect to the Trinity and the place of the Son of God, the Book of Genesis has been completely distorted to the point that it reads more like an allegorical tale, rather than the timeless Scripture that it is, with the Lord Jesus Christ as its central figure. What has happened?

I believe that the knowledge of the Creator of the universe and His Son the Messiah prophesied to come to the world was already distorted, misinterpreted and ignored by the great majority of the people in the ancient world a few centuries before Jesus Christ came. There were only a few people who knew or remembered anything about the coming of the Messiah and the various Scriptures preserved by the scribes of the Ancient Aramaic. So much so that by the time Jesus came, almost nobody recognized Him. The scribes and Pharisees thought that He was an imposter.

Interestingly, there is not too much in the Bible about Jesus teaching the Scriptures either. He quoted only a few passages in the Ancient Aramaic relating to Himself. Also, Jesus didn't choose to come as a Greek, so neither the Greek Septuagint translated in 270 BC could ever be a part of His teachings, nor any other non-Aramaic manuscripts discovered by archeologists in the last century. He taught in the Ancient Aramaic and His scribes recorded everything in the sacred language of Scriptures that He also learned as a child.

Today we find the same situation to be true. The modern-day churches don't recognize the authentic Scriptures. Young Christians are looking toward new archeological discoveries of more authentic manuscripts, discrepancies and contradictions in the compiled books of the Bible and the interpretations of established churches. They are tired of the "old stories." They want something new, little realizing that what they were taught as "the Bible" has been totally distorted to begin with. Church goers in the West, however, don't want to deal with the Ancient Aramaic Scriptures. They see it as another Gospel. They want to interpret the Bible according to their own traditions. Some modern churches talk of receiving the holy Spirit and talking in tongues. This way the entire Gospel is up for grabs. Anybody can manipulate it according to their own liking. Many sects have gone off the deep end, denying the Trinity or following new prophets. However, the living word doesn't mean everyone can interpret Scriptures their own way.

Beside historical inaccuracies and the deliberate manipulations of the text in the modern Bibles, there's the reality of the Ancient Aramaic Bible, written in an Eastern language with its own tone, texture, mood, phraseology, idioms, expressions and figures of speech. All that is lost in the modern Bibles, starting from the Greek all the way to the newest English language translations, and there are always new ones being researched and published, as if the Bible can be made more interesting or improved.

The origin of the Ancient Aramaic language comes from the earliest of times, around 7000 BC, according to Carbon-14 testing. The oldest settlement in north Mesopotamia that has been found so far is at Kal'at Jarmo. Two American archeologists, Robert and Linda Braidwood, did the research and wrote the book on it in 1948. In its earliest form, writing began as pictures carved into stones. Images of animals, plants and objects were drawn side by side and these images told stories or staked some territorial claim. There were property deeds, business transactions,  and religious concepts. Gradually the images became abstracted, as a form of shorthand that carried phonetic values. The images ended up representing a letter, a distinct sound. Finally, cuneiform writing was developed. This was a major breakthrough, the invention of writing in fact.

The first legends of Mesopotamia were recorded in cuneiform. The Jewish theologians incorporated these legends in the Bible. This was the beginning of Scriptures. These legends were recognized as the earliest form of contact between God and humanity. They were sacred, to be sure. I'm trying to preserve the authenticity of these ancient writings that emerged in the Scriptures as I begin translating the Book of Genesis, the first chapters of which are based on the Tablets of Creation and Gilgamesh. These tablets were found in Northern Mesopotamia by Hormuzd Rassam, the Ashurai archeologist who first worked for Sir Henry Austen Layard, then later was commissioned himself to carry out the work in the late part of the 19th Century. He discovered the Library of Ashurbanipal in the city of Nimrud. Ashurbanipal was the king of Ashur in the 7th Century BC. The entire library with its fifty thousand tablets were crated and shipped to the British Museum in England. The great majority of them have not yet been translated. They cover everything, from history and science to culture and literature of the ancient world.

After the Fall of Ashur in 614 BC, at the hands of the Medes, Mesopotamia was conquered by Alexander the Great, then subsequently by the Romans, Arabs, Mongolians, Tartars, Turks and finally by the Allies in the 1st World War.

In the last two hundred years of Ashurai rule in Nineveh, between 800 BC and 612 BC, the cuneiform language was superceded by Aramaic, a language that was totally alphabetized. Some of the proclamations of the kings of Ashur were made in both languages. Typically the tablets would be written in the two scripts. The formal cuneiform on top and the Aramaic below. It was the same language though, just different scripts.

In the subsequent six centuries after the Fall of Nineveh in 612 BC, the Ashurai people dispersed throughout the world, each tribe to a different region. They had been the most civilized and educated people in the world. Then Babylon became an empire for a few centuries and was later defeated by the Medes. The Greeks fought the Medes and the Persian coalition and won. The ancient world was in constant turmoil during the six centuries before the coming of Christ.

What was special about the Ashurai is that they were the first nation to believe in one God. Ashur is the name they used for God. Ashur was an invisible spirit. He had many titles. The pictograph of Ashur represents the Trinity. There is one God. Their kings were the servants of Ashur on earth. The Greeks were polytheistic. They had their own system of religion. The chief god was Zeus. There was a form of democracy between the gods. They all had their separate domains. The Greeks did not have a long reign. They borrowed the science, philosophy and literature of Ashur. They claimed everything to be theirs. Today the Westerners believe this. For example, the Pythagorean Theorem is considered to be a Greek invention. The Ashurai used that theorem of mathematics a few thousand years before Pythagoras was born. There are thousands of scientific discoveries that are claimed by the Greeks and other Europeans as their own, and the Western universities still teach them as such. Later the Arabs claimed the same and supposedly carried the learning of the Greeks to Spain and taught it at such universities as Cordova. Not only the knowledge was Ashurai, but even the teachers were for the most part Ashurai and Chaldean. For example, Bar Ibrayeh was called Assemani. Many names were changed out of fear and prejudice.

The Romans, for example, used the Roman numerals in mathematics. There was no number zero. Roman mathematics suffered tremendously. They produced no mathematicians of note, and nobody remembers this backwardness today. The Ashurai used the decimal system thousands of years before. Also, what nobody mentions in the scientific world is the Ashurai development of the system based on sixty, from which we get the three hundred and sixty degrees of the circle and so on. This was extensively used for astronomy. The spherical shape of the universe was well known in Nineveh and Babylon a few millennia before the European scientists discovered it.

Another example is the arch, which is supposedly a Roman invention. You can still see the arch in the ruins of Babylon today. It was invented several thousand years before the Romans, yet you'll find courses in the Western universities still teaching that the arch was invented by the Romans.

So it's not just a matter of the Scriptures. There are a lot of inaccuracies in the history of the West. It's simply bigotry and racism. The Aramaic speaking peoples and Mesopotamia are in the Middle East, in Asia and not Europe, and that's what bothers everyone in the West. Greece is in Europe and therefore the modern Bible is translated from the Greek, and the claim that the Western Civilization is based on the Greek Civilization is also based on this fallacy.

The Ancient Aramaic evolved for six hundred years and was the language of trade for a number of centuries in the ancient world before Jesus Christ came. Then later, Greek became the language of trade in the Mediterranean region. When Jesus Christ came, the Ancient Aramaic had been the scribal language since the Babylonian Captivity. The Ancient Aramaic and the Hebrew of this period were the same language. There was a Hebrew dialect and a Chaldean dialect of course, but the language was written the same way. The Hebrew people also had their own script from the times in Egypt, but this was not the script that the scribes preferred as there were Egyptian letters that were representations of polytheistic gods of the Pharaohs.

The Ancient Aramaic is a beautiful language. I wrote this about it in the first project proposal that I made. "It is a very rich language, with profound twists and turns of expression, richly poetic, complex, exacting and flexible all at once. It is paradoxical, ironic and full of hyperbole, and yet ideal for presenting profound ideas."

In addition to all the political considerations, there's little chance that today's churches and theologians will learn the Ancient Aramaic language. There are no acceptable Ancient Aramaic scholars left to teach it. Ancient Aramaic is taught alongside Hebrew and Greek in the US seminaries and the Western world, of course, but there are no Ashurai teachers involved. In the US, the Ashurai people are not recognized and they are excluded from Academia. Without Ashurai scholars of Ancient Aramaic, the language cannot be pronounced properly and the meaning cannot be ascertained.

The Ashurai people have been called "Assyrians" in the English language. This name suggests that they are Arabs, which they're not. Many of them live in Islamic countries in the Middle East, but they're known in Arabic as "Ashuri." In Iraq they're known as "Athori." This name is used so that the Ashurai cannot claim their national rights in Iraq. The West is oblivious of these matters, and, frankly, I don't think they care. In America, people think that the "Assyrians" are the same as Syrians. None of this is helpful to an appreciation of the language of Scriptures, the sacred language called "Ashurit," the language in which the Ten Commandments were delivered through Moses and the scribal language of the time of Jesus Christ.

Furthermore, in recent decades the Catholic Church has provided the priesthood of the modern "Assyrian" Church of the East with free schooling for their clergymen, due to the latter church's severe shortage of seminaries. The student priests are now studying the Bible in its Western rendition and saying that the New Testament was originated in Greek and then translated to Aramaic. This is a sad situation. The two churches are striving to come together, but the old priests know that the Scriptures were originated in the Ancient Aramaic.

However, the ecumenical movement would've been more successful if all the churches interpreted the Scriptures the same way. Theoretically it should be possible, but in practice there are big differences. If the churches do agree on the origins of Scriptures, why can't they unite? I believe it's because the correct interpretation of Scriptures cannot be based on false translations.

Nov. 28, 2001