Translation Greek-17-30

Randall Buth ButhFam at compuserve.com
Thu Jul 25 00:22:53 EDT 2002


shlaom MIchael,

> was reading an old article [R. A. Martin "Syntactical Evidence of Aramaic
>Sources in Acts I-XV" New Testament Studies vol 11, no. 1 (1964):38-59.].
>Martin suggested  three characteristics demonstrate a probability that a
>text was originally translated from a Semitic source:
>1. A significantly greater frequency of the use of KAI instead of DE (at
>least a 2 to 1 ratio)
>2. A preference for EN to other prepositions
>3. The tendency to use the article without inserting anything between the
>article and its substantive.
>I wanted to see if it was possible to discern whether Paul was using
Hebrew
>source material in his works. I would appreciate some help because I am
not
>sure I trust my results. Using these criteria, it looks to me like most of
1
>Thessalonians is translated from a Hebrew source.  I was prepared to find
>sections of the text to be derived from a Hebrew source but not all. 
These
>leads me to question Martin's reasoning or my use of his criteria.
>I would appreciate your comments.
>Sincerely,
>Michael Abernathy

Ralph Martin's methodology is sound, as far as it goes. 
However, you will 
note from his books in the 80's and 90's that he uses a mesh of 
only 17 criteria. Even those 17 criteria do not give a small enough 
mesh to properly catch and distinguish everything, in my opinion. 

He needs to expand the list to about 30 criteria. And no criterion 
list will be absolute. Josephus' War or any highly stylized, 
reformatted translation should slip through. If it doesn't slip 
through then the translation wasn't good enough :-)

nevertheless, when applying the 17 criteria to known texts like
1 Maccabees versus 2 Macabees you get nice results.

ERRWSO
RAndall Buth
www.biblicalulpan.org




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