After the 5th Century AD, when the Bible was compiled by the Ancient Church of the East theologians in Urhai, the serious distortion of the Scriptures began. The Roman church drove out the Ancient Aramaic theologians, who were the masters of the language. The Ancient Church of the East thrived in Persia, under the protection of certain Zoroastrians kings and they spread the Gospel to the East. They went to India and China and built many churches. To this day there can be found the inscriptions in the Ancient Aramaic language all along the path the missionaries of this church traveled.
Now that I'm translating the Old Testament, I've discovered that the distortions of the Scriptures by the modern churches have been consistent and deliberate. I asked myself why is that the Jewish theologians didn't maintain the Ancient Aramaic Scriptures more faithfully? Was it only that they didn't want the name of Jesus to be found in the Old Testament or was it another reason? It may have been that they switched to the Hebrew script and gradually forgot the Ancient Aramaic, as the language fell in disuse or diverged in another direction -- languages evolve over a period of two thousand years. Today's Hebrew, for example, has little resemblance to the Ancient Aramaic, in the way that it is written and spoken. There are common roots in vocabulary and the grammar is essentially the same, but the spoken language now would be incomprehensible to a person at the time of Jesus.
When the American missionaries discovered the Church of the East's existence in the old Ottoman Empire regions of eastern Turkey, they seized the opportunity to translate the Bible from the Ancient Aramaic, hand-written Bibles they found in use by this church; however, they didn't know the Ancient Aramaic and the Church of the East didn't have theologians of the Ancient Aramaic, especially anybody who knew English well enough, to assign to such a task The end result was a hodge-podge translation, incorporating the King James Version of the Bible into a new translation in the modern Aramaic or the Syriac Version, a language that was totally deficient in vocabulary and still is. Also the Pshitta was used as a source and not the 4th Century AD Urhai University compilation of the Scriptures.
This poor effort at translation took place in the mid-19th Century. The events of the Civil War in the US also interfered with this effort; however, there were a number of missionaries who came from the South to escape the War. These American missionaries found the opportunity to build a university in Urmia, today's northern Iran, and begin the process of proselytizing the Christian communities that lived in these regions of Iran and Turkey. One of these men was Dr. Joseph Cochran. There were three generations of Cochrans. The second one was born in Urmia. He became known as "Hachim Sahhab." And the third one was the Dr. Joseph Cochran whom I met in DuArte, California during the late 70's. I met him in person. He spoke the Aramaic language like a native.
Today we find a people who call themselves Atourayeh in the US (they're called Assyrians in English,) who are attempting to revive their language, the modern Aramaic, or Syriac as it's also called, by re-incorporating words from the Ancient Aramaic into the modern vernacular. These are arbitrary inclusions that are not done by scholars. These people are mostly self-taught, because there are no formal schools that teach the language. The modern Church of the East is starting to add some schools for primary grade children now. Also in Northern Iraq, there is an effort to teach the modern Ashurai language. They've in fact gone up to high school level already, teaching all the subjects in the modern Aramaic. There's an effort there also to incorporate the Ancient Aramaic into the language, because many of the old words had fallen in disuse and been forgotten.
All these efforts to re-introduce the Ancient Aramaic are undesirable from the perspective of maintaining the accuracy of the Scriptures, because the Scriptures have been preserved precisely because the Ancient Aramaic became obsolete as a spoken language.
The Abyssinian church, the Coptic church, and other Eastern churches, also have preserved the Scriptures in the Ancient Aramaic. For that matter, there are always archeological discoveries that unearth older versions of the Scriptures, such as the Qumran discovery, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and so on.
There are also many translators who are now translating from the Ancient Aramaic. These, for the most part are not native Aramaic speaking scholars. There's even a new dictionary of Aramaic-English that's funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. This dictionary will continue the distortions of Scriptures. All these efforts to retranslate the Scriptures by modern translators, whose native language isn't Aramaic, will lead to the further falsification of the Bible.
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