In this episode of Hebrew Voices #215 - Bias in India’s Hebrew New Testament? Part 1, Nehemia is joined by Dr. Miles Jones and Jonathan Felt of Benai Emunah Institute to continue uncovering the history of the writers and their intent behind translating the Cochin Hebrew New Testament.

I look forward to reading your comments!

PODCAST VERSION:

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Miles: Any Hebrew manuscript will be described as a translation, even by its author, and the reason for that is, the Inquisition lasted for 350 years, and for you to possess a Hebrew manuscript of the Gospel could get you burned at the stake.

Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I’m here today with Dr. Miles Jones of the Bnei Emunah Institute in Kerrville, Texas, who works on Hebrew New Testament manuscripts, and Jonathan Felt, who is the chief archivist at Bnei Emunah Institute. Shalom, Dr. Jones and Jonathan. How are you?

Jonathan: Hello!

Miles: Shalom, Dr. Gordon, one of the only people I’ve ever met who can pronounce the name of our institute, Bnei Emunah…

Nehemia: Ha, ha, ha!

Jonathan: And would know how to transliterate it.

Nehemia: Well, you know, it’s funny; there’s different transliteration systems. I once, more than once, had an article accepted to a peer reviewed journal, and they’re like, “Oh, you used the wrong system.” And I had to spend like a day, like every time; this is essential, use this symbol instead of that. I mean, really guys, that’s what we’re focusing on?

Jonathan: That’s why I’m relieved when there’s no nekudot on any of the manuscripts we’re working on.

Nehemia: Well, that raises some challenges, but… So, guys, I want to talk today about the Cochin New Testament Gospels. Those who are following my podcast, Hebrew Voices, just had two weeks with Mascha van Dort, or… I’m sure I’m mispronouncing her name, “fahn” Dort, who wrote an article in Revue d’Études Juifs, REJ, which is one of the legendary journals in Jewish and Hebrew studies. It goes back to the 1800’s; that’s what an important journal this is. And it was about the Cochin Gospels, of which we have two manuscripts. We’ll get into some of that, maybe. And I know you guys do some work on it.

And I said during the interview, “You know, I really want to hear what the other position is. I’m trying not to take a position here.” But she is of the belief that the Cochin Gospels, or the Cochin New Testament from Cochin, India, was translated by three different translators in the 18th century. And I want to hear your… let’s start with what your position is at the Bnei Emunah Institute. Maybe you don’t all agree, I don’t even know. I literally have no idea. But I assume you have a different position on this from the little we’ve spoken in the past offline.

Miles: We’ll have to get into what she’s saying, but the Cochin Gospels are really a set of five manuscripts. And that makes it a little more complicated. The Cambridge 132 is the entire New Testament, except for Revelation.

Nehemia: In Hebrew.

Miles: Yes, in Hebrew. And then the Gaster 1616, which was part of the Cambridge Collection… but it was loaned out to Rylands Library in Manchester, so we just kind of stumbled across that one because somebody had gone there and asked about their Hebrew manuscripts. We stumbled across the Cambridge Collection as well. I think we may have been some of the first to recover these manuscripts. I just went to Cambridge because I was looking for other manuscripts by the Waldensians, and they had disappeared. And I wanted to find out the story. What could have happened? There was a story why they disappeared, and actually I found them. They had just shelved them on the wrong shelf. And I also found the Cambridge Collection of these five manuscripts. So, that was a happy day.

Nehemia: So, I actually… I’ve been aware of these for, I would imagine, longer than you. You know, it’s not a competition, though. I actually… maybe in retrospect, I don’t know that it was a mistake, but I purchased a full set of the photographs from them at the cost of $2,500.

Miles: Wow!

Nehemia: What I later learned is, I could have flown to Cambridge for less money and photographed them myself, and they would have been fine with that. I was not aware of that at the time; it was before I had ever been to Cambridge. So, you know, later, when I held these manuscripts in my hand, I’m like, “Wait. So literally, I could have photographed these myself?” Now, of course, their photos are probably much better and much prettier.

Miles: We did; we had…

Nehemia: But I would have been happy with iPhone photos for $2,500 though.

Miles: Yeah.

Nehemia: But you live and learn.

Miles: Yeah, yeah. For sure. We did that. We had a very high-definition camera and a good cameraman, and we just sat there and copied them. But we may not have found the Gaster 1616, which is part of the collection but is kept at another library.

Nehemia: I was familiar with that, but in the National Library of Israel it says it’s just a copy of the one in Cambridge, so I never really paid much attention to it.

Miles: We did not find that…

Nehemia: I don’t know if that’s the case. You may have a different view.

Miles: We didn’t find it in Cambridge, and we looked through the entire Hebrew catalogue of manuscripts.

Nehemia: No. But there’s a database that’s today called Ktiv (back in the day it was called Aleph) at the National Library of Israel. Or, back in the day it was the Jewish National University Library, and they have it in there. I saw that, like, over 20 years ago. But I didn’t think anything of it, and I don’t know that I’ve ever looked at it, because… maybe I looked at it once or twice, because I’m like, “All right, this is just a copy of something we already know about.” But you may have found something different. That’s why it’s important, guys, to go out and look at the actual manuscripts. For sure.

Miles: Right, and most of these have never been digitized, and a lot of them have never been catalogued, so… But you’re a digger like I am, and I have since found references to them. So, they were known before I took my pictures, or you got your pictures, but we… you know, in fact, Franz Delitzsch, who did the Delitzsch translation of the New Testament, he was contemporary with Claudius Buchanan, who did the final translation of the materials. He, like, recopied everything. Beautiful job by David Cohen, the scribe. But, uh…

Nehemia: Help me out. So, what did Buchanan copy? He copied the ones in, in, um…

Miles: Buchanan discovered them at the synagogue of the Black Jews, the synagogue of the Black Jews in Cochin.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Miles: And he…

Nehemia: I actually want to share an image of that. When I saw this myself in Cambridge… like, I had a photo, but when you actually see it, it’s quite stunning. I’m going to share my screen here, if I can successfully do that. And this, guys, is what looks like Manuscript 132.

Jonathan: Yep.

Nehemia: And it says, “This manuscript was found in one of the synagogues of the Black Jews of Cochin in India by the Reverend Claudius Buchanan in the year 1806.” And Buchanan went several times. There’s also a Torah scroll, and an Esther scroll, and other things that have a very similar label on them. And what he means by the Black Jews is, there were multiple Jewish communities on the Malabar Coast, or I think it’s today called the Kerala Coast, of southwestern India.

Miles: The Kerala Province. Malabar Coast in Kerala.

Nehemia: Okay. And so, he went there multiple times and he somehow got his hands on manuscripts from there, and he… I think there’s an implication here that this must be some ancient document because it came from this… right? In other words, you had Jews that came from Baghdad, and then you had the indigenous Jews who had been there much longer, and even the ones from Baghdad had been there for a few hundred years by the time of Buchanan. And so, his assumption seems to have been, or the implication that this is from the indigenous Jews who have been there maybe since the time of Solomon, or a very long time. And so, it’s much older, or potentially a much older source. Would you agree with that?

Miles: Well, Franz Delitzsch wanted to use that as his base manuscript for his translation of the Hebrew Gospels, but the Jewish society he was working for nixed that idea. Which actually was a good idea, really. But they wanted it translated from the Greek. So, that’s the controversy we have now over these.

Nehemia: Okay.

Miles: And it’s really a fascinating story, actually, because… it’s just… and Mascha did that excellent research in the…

Nehemia: Mascha van Dort.

Miles: Mascha van Dort, right, who was a descendant of Leopold van Dort.

Nehemia: So, she’s not! So, we interviewed her and that was one of my first questions. “So, let’s talk about your descendant.” And we actually had a technical difficulty, so I had to re-record it. You asked before about me being concerned about, like, the recording getting lost, and actually we had an issue there. But so, I said, “Let’s talk about your descendant,” and she’s like, “No, he’s not my descendant.” What happened is, she was contacted by Prof. Meir Bar-Ilan of Bar-Ilan University, and you’re like, “Wait. The guy’s name is Bar-Ilan?” Yes. His grandfather, or something like that, founded the university. Maybe it was his great grandfather, I don’t remember.

Miles: And you know him, do you not?

Nehemia: I interviewed him on my podcast. So, he’s the one who said, “You have to have Mascha on.” I’m like, all right. Let’s have her on. Because I was asking you about the… his field of research is something called The Words of Gad the Seer, which is one of the manuscripts that they have there. So, while he’s working on that, he’s like, “Okay, there’s this Hebrew New Testament which Delitzsch attributed to van Dort. Let me find a descendant of van Dort.” So, he contacts her, and she does the research. She’s not descendent, but now she starts saying, “Okay, I’ve done all this research. Let’s see where it leads.” And so, she ends up… I think she wrote a whole book on it. And then she had the article which has some more discoveries, or more arguments, in Revue d’Études Juifs (REJ). So, she’s actually not a relative, but he contacted her thinking she must be.

Miles: I must have presumed that myself.

Nehemia: No, I mean, I did too. It makes sense. And I thought somebody had told me that, but it turns out she says she’s not. She’s been able to prove she’s not. And it just means they both came from this town called Dort, or something like this, or district.

Miles: Dort, van Dort.

Nehemia: So, Mascha van Dort does this research on her presumed, but not actual, ancestor, as she’s been able to prove.

Miles: Leopold van Dort.

Nehemia: Leo… He has some weird long name. Leopold Emanuel Yakov…

Jonathan: Yakov, yeah.

Nehemia: He’s got a bunch of names. So…

Jonathan: You know, not to derail the discussion here, but there’s also the local Christian community that identifies with St. Thomas.

Nehemia: Tell me about that. You mean in India? In… Malabar.

Jonathan: Yes.

Miles: Well, this was the heart, the headquarters of St. Thomas Mission to India in the 1st century. And the St. Thomas Christians, they’re still there. And Cochin was the core of that, you know, new church if you will, that spread throughout India.

Nehemia: So, the Thomas in the New Testament, where he… this is Doubting Thomas, am I right? From the Gospel of John…

Jonathan: Yes.

Nehemia: So, am I right that this isn’t in the New Testament? But according to Christian traditions and legends, he went east and started a church. I think in Iraq first, and then in India. Is that right?

Miles: Made his way across Persia to India. Yes, that’s the story. And so, that’s where this came from. So, it’s really interesting.

Jonathan: Rahabi had to get them from somewhere. The man that…

Nehemia: Tell us who Rahavi is.

Jonathan: Rahabi…

Nehemia: For those who heard the interview with Meir Bar-Ilan, maybe they remember this Rahabi, Rahavi. But let’s assume somebody hasn’t heard that. Who is he? Ezekiel Rahavi.

Miles: Ezekiel Rahabi was… he was the head of the Paradesi Jews in Cochin. He was also big buddies… he was very close to the St. Thomas Christians there.

Jonathan: Yes.

Nehemia: What does that mean, Paradesi Jews? Tell us what that means.

Miles: Well, you said there were two congregations there. I don’t know which…

Nehemia: There were three, actually. There were multiple congregations.

Miles: Okay. One of them was the original ones, and the others were the imports from… where did you say they came from?

Nehemia: There was a large community of merchants that came from Baghdad, and then the third community is, there were these merchants who came from Yemen. Like… so, for example, the Torah scroll, which is, I think… I believe it’s a… I say I believe because it’s hard to prove without a C14, which I requested and was not approved… yet. But there should be… So, there’s a Torah scroll in the Buchanan Collection, or the Buchanan Manuscripts at Cambridge, and you look at it and you’re like, “Wait. This didn’t come from India. This is a 15th century Yemenite scroll.” It is, but it was written in India. Either that or it was brought from Yemen by a merchant. So, there are merchants who went back and forth around the Indian Ocean, all the way from Cairo, or from Egypt, at least, to India.

Miles: And Rahabi would… Ezekiel Rahabi, he would have known them because he was the chief agent for the Dutch East Indies Company there in Cochin. I mean, he was a merchant. He was dealing with all these merchants and all this trade coming through. It was a major hub of trade. Portuguese, by the way… So, the Portuguese were in charge of the area at the time, and the Dutch are trying to get a hold because there was so much rich trade going on. They made tons of money out of it. So, he would have known the merchants, for sure, from all the congregations. In fact, this was his purported reason for translating these documents into Hebrew.

Nehemia: When you say “purported,” do you mean this is what some people are claiming and you’re not sure about it? Is that what that means?

Miles: Well, Mascha claimed it.

Nehemia: Okay.

Miles: So, I disagree with that, but…

Nehemia: So, give us your position. If they watch the Mascha episode, then they know her position. Give us your position.

Miles: Okay. Well, we were…

Nehemia: I didn’t want there just to be one voice. The program is called Hebrew Voices, and I want other voices to be heard. Scholars. Look, this is what we do; we disagree with each other.

Miles: That’s what we do. But people…

Nehemia: There’s a statement that says, anybody who says there are scientific facts that are incontrovertible doesn’t understand scientific facts. Something to that effect.

Miles: That’s true.

Jonathan: Yeah!

Miles: We’re ignoring the elephant in the room.

Jonathan: Settled science. There you go.

Miles: And we’ve had a lot of experience with this in digging up ancient manuscripts. Any Hebrew manuscript will be described as a translation, even by its author. And the reason for that is, the Inquisition lasted for 350 years, and for you to possess a Hebrew manuscript of the Gospels could get you burned at the stake, or other…

Nehemia: When you say, “its author,” do you mean the copyist? Or do you mean… Do you mean… Meaning, the author of Matthew isn’t going to say it’s a translation because he’s…

Miles: I should have said “the translator”. If you claim to have original Hebrew documents, you could be burned at the stake.

Nehemia: Oh.

Miles: And I mean, it lasted till like 1835, and they…

Nehemia: So, from what I’ve read, the last auto-da-fé, where they burned someone at the stake for the charge of “Judaizing,” was in 1860.

Jonathan: Wow! That’s recent.

Nehemia: The last one that’s known. There might have been later ones.

Miles: No, you… I may have my numbers wrong, but yes, six years before the end of the Inquisition… yes, they burned a schoolteacher at the stake. So, you could get burned at the stake for just possessing a Hebrew manuscript, much less passing it on. And we find this with that, you know, great Oxford Hebraist…

Jonathan: Shapreve.

Miles: …that you were talking about.

Jonathan: Yeah, Oxford.

Miles: Shapreve. And he did one, and it’s…

Nehemia: Sorry. What’s his name?

Miles: His name was Shapreve. And he did it for Henry…

Nehemia: How do you spell that? I’m not familiar with…

Jonathan: Shapreve, you know, “E-V-E”, Shapreve.

Miles: But he did a Hebrew “translation” for the king of England, Henry VIII.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Nehemia: Oh, okay. I know what you’re talking about.

Miles: But it was still during the Inquisition. And they had teeth. I mean, they could really burn you at the stake if you had these manuscripts. So, everyone claimed it was a translation from the Greek, or whatever. So, here’s the…

Nehemia: So, you’re saying that even when they knew what they were copying was not a translation, it was in their interest to say it was a translation.

Miles: Yeah.

Jonathan: It was an interest to translate from Greek.

Nehemia: An interest in not getting killed, right? I mean…

Jonathan: Yes.

Miles: Right. That’s very much in their interest. But here’s the evidence of that, and that’s important. And Mascha really wouldn’t have known of this because they said that they took it from three sources. And that’s the…

Nehemia: Who’s they?

Miles: Who’s they?

Nehemia: Who’s they? You say “they say it took was taken from three…” Well, you mean Masha or Delitzsch or who…?

Miles: Well, Mascha, from her sources, and those sources themselves said they took it from three sources; from the Luther Bible… they’re translating the Hebrew New Testament using three sources: The Luther Bible…

Nehemia: Are you reading her article?

Miles: No. Oh, I have read her article. This comes from…

Nehemia: No, I’m asking… You’re reading something. I saw you put on the glasses. What are you reading?

Miles: No. I’ve got… I’ve got my notes right here.

Nehemia: Okay, that’s your own notes. Okay.

Miles: The Statenvertaling, the Dutch New Testament, and also the Plantin Syriac Polyglot. Well, I looked up all three of these… and we have people working with us in Europe and we looked up the three authentication verses in the scripture.

Nehemia: What are those?

Miles: They differ from the Greek. It’s about, “At the crucifixion of Yeshua there was an earthquake,” and in the Greek text it says, “The veil, the curtain, was ripped asunder.” In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, it says that, right? But in the Hebrew Gospels, it says that the lintel stone, the great lintel stone in the Holy of Holies was split in two. Now, keep in mind that the veil is hanging right beneath that. So, the lintel stone cracked in half and fell. It would tear the curtain apart, but the curtain is not mentioned in the Hebrew. It only mentions the stones of the Temple being split in half, the lintel stone. All right? So, that is the most important authentication verses of the Hebrew Gospels. So, we talked about…

Nehemia: So, you said there were three authentication verses. I guess what you’re going…

Miles: Yes, that’s Matthew 27:51.

Nehemia: Oh, you mean in the three Gospels, that verse.

Miles: In the three Gospels… Mark 15:38 and Luke 23:45. So, it’s mentioned three different times in each of the three Gospels. And Saint Jerome, who translated Hebrew Matthew into Greek and Latin, says it came from the earliest church tradition and was written that way in the Hebrew Gospel, in the Gospel according to the Hebrew. So, you have a very early, you know, attestation of it from Jerome himself.

Well, guess what? In the Cochin Gospels it says exactly those verses like it says in the other Hebrew Gospels such as the ones we found in Spain. And it’s very specific. It says, if I may, “And suddenly the face of the Temple was split in two from the beginning until the end, and the earth shook, and the heavens were hidden.” “The face of the entry,” that would be the lintel stone, and “the entry to the Temple cracked,” after the start of the earthquake. That’s Mark 15:38. “It was dark and split the entry of the Temple right down the middle.” So, they all say exactly the same thing that the Hebrew Gospels from Catalonia say about the actual stones, the huge lintel stone over the Holy of Holies being split in half. All right?

So, those are the authentication verses. They have them in the Cochin Gospels. We looked in the Luther Bible, the Statenvertaling, and the Plantin Syriac Polyglot, and they are not in there written that way. They go according to the Greek version, where the Cochin goes according to the Hebrew version. So, that’s pretty solid evidence there that they weren’t simply translating from those Bibles into Hebrew. It wasn’t that simple. But that makes sense from what we know from other manuscripts. You have to claim it’s a translation or you get burned at the stake. So, you claim it’s the translation from the Greek. If that keeps you alive, that’s what you do.

Jonathan: So, the van Dort claim of… he would have taken it from the Greek… and there’s a van Dort version of James and Jude at the end of these manuscripts. And so, it definitely looks like the Greek because you can look phrase by phrase and you can see the Greek coming out.

Miles: Can I mention something?

Nehemia: Please. Let’s try to identify which van Dort we’re talking about. Masha, the scholar from the 21st century…

Miles: Leopold.

Jonathan: Leopold.

Nehemia: …or Leopold from the 18th century, who’s not her ancestor.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Nehemia: I thought Leopold said he translated it from the Greek.

Jonathan: No. He was brought in by Rahabi to finish the New Testament, and you’ll find it at the very end of the codex.

Miles: Yeah.

Jonathan: The James and Jude, right after Hebrews.

Miles: Wow.

Nehemia: So, you’re… so you’re… and I want to hear what Miles is going to say. But you’re acknowledging, or are you acknowledging… are you saying that Leopold van Dort is the one who translated James and Jude in the Cochin New Testament?

Miles: He translated James. He claims himself in Mascha’s research, and also Jude, Acts and Thessalonians. So, those are the three we know that he did. But I think it was beyond his skills, frankly. So, he turned it over to someone else as soon as he could. He got Friedrich Christian to do Hebrews for him, and then van Dort apparently did the rest.

Nehemia: Leopold van Dort.

Miles: Yes, of course.

Jonathan: So, all in the same hand. The scribe is the same, but the style is not.

Nehemia: Mm-hmm. Okay.

Miles: So, there are some differences. Now, other than these three authentication verses, which is powerful evidence of the Hebrew 1st century origin, there’s not… what we do is, we search for Hebrew markers in all the manuscripts we do. Things that are different in the Hebrew than the Greek. An easy example would be in Revelation. This is something you actually translated in the Hazon Manuscript, is that it says, “I am the Aleph and the Tav,” when the Greek says, “I am the Alpha and Omega.” So, which one appears to be more from the Hebrew tradition? Well, the one that says I’m the Aleph and the Tav.

So, we isolate these things in the manuscripts we read. What is the difference between the Greek and the Hebrew? And, is there any explanation for that? And usually there is. And often it’s a doctrinal tweak, if you will. So, other than the authentication verses, we don’t find nearly as many other Hebrew markers as we would expect in the rest of the manuscript. So, people that say…

Nehemia: Which manuscript are we talking about? The Cochin Gospel…

Miles: In the Cochin Gospels. In the Cochin Gospels. We don’t find as many Hebrew markers as one would expect, so obviously a good part of it really did come straight from the Greek.

Nehemia: Okay.

Miles: So, it’s a mixed bag, which we deal with all the time in manuscripts. A mixed bag. Many different translators, many different scribes. You might disagree with me on that.

Jonathan: No, I don’t disagree, because I haven’t studied the Gospels like you have. I’ve studied mostly Revelation, and Revelation came in the end of the codex, and it even is numbered differently. 1.16.2 versus 1.16.1. And you can see it’s a different hand. And that’s where, you know, I…

Nehemia: Can you show the audience?

Jonathan: Excuse me?

Nehemia: Can you show the audience? I can see it’s a different hand. I like things to be tangible.

Miles: No… yes, absolutely.

Jonathan: Let me…

Nehemia: In this case, it’s not hard to see, so…

Jonathan: This is what we call, 1.16.2.

Miles: It’s Revelation, right?

Jonathan: This is Revelation at the end. It’s coming in in a different stream. And when you see this at the end of Hebrews…

Nehemia: Obviously that’s different.

Miles: Yeah, very.

Nehemia: Now, I don’t know that it’s two different scribes. It’s definitely two different styles of writing. One is a square script, and one is a… what we would call, like a medial script.

Miles: Remember they got the ancient Jerusalem script. You just showed us that translator’s note in the front of the manuscript. They call it from the… it was translated… was copied from the ancient Jerusalem script.

Jonathan: And this is 1.16.1. This is the style of the script, very different, and then at the end of the codex 1.16.2…

Miles: That’s Luke right there.

Jonathan: Actually, this is Acts, but right. Oh, is it Luke?

Miles: This has…

Jonathan: Let me look. Lucas and Acts of the Apostles, I believe. But…

Miles: Yeah, yeah, maybe.

Nehemia: Yeah, that’s Luke.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Nehemia: Well, it says, uh, Apostulus min Lukus…

Jonathan: Min Lukus.

Nehemia: Yeah. So, this is Luke, chapter 1, verse 1.

Miles: Mm-hmm, right.

Nehemia: That’s the preamble to Luke.

Miles: Yeah.

Jonathan: Okay.

Nehemia: There’s Theophilus.

Jonathan: Not going to… yeah.

Nehemia: So, let’s stop here for a second, and this is actually important.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, on the fourth line there, it says Yeshu ha’masiach.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Nehemia: And one of her arguments is that this can’t be an ancient document going back to early Christians… well, she doesn’t even consider that possibility. But actually, to her, and I think, to Delitzsch, this proves that you have what’s called abusive…. she calls it “abusive language” by the translator. Because the word masiach… there, yeah… if you could zoom in. It’s the second word on the fourth line… says Yeshu ha’masiach. Right, right. Exactly there.

So, masiach is with a Samekh instead of a Shin (maSHiach), and according to her, masiach is something like uprooter, or destroyer. And they changed the word mashiach to masiach as kind of a jab.

Jonathan: Yeah, we see that.

Nehemia: I want to hear your thoughts on that. And maybe you accept that, I don’t know.

Jonathan: Well, in Rabbinical… if you’re going to be a Rabbinical scribe, you’re going to jab, and you’re going to have your own take on this. And we saw this… you know, the difference between one generation of scribes, where you have the Rahabi scribe versus the David Cohen scribe in Revelation alone, you’re going to see one generation of differences and tweaks and changes. And that’s, I believe, a doctrinal reason. You’re going to see Hashem…

Nehemia: Can we zoom in more so we can see some more detail here? Because I… Yeah. If you can make it like 200 percent… can you do that?

Jonathan: Will do.

Miles: There’s… one thing is that, you know, copying is often done by dictation, and that happens a lot. You can tell because there’s a lot of corrections, but you see misspellings all the time when scribes are taking it down from dictation. But that way you could have four scribes or 12 scribes. You could be making four copies or 12 copies at the same time if you’re doing it by dictation. But you get a lot of spelling errors. This says Yeshu masiach instead of mashiach. Could be a simple error. Yeshu is…

Nehemia: So, it doesn’t have to be dictation. One of the things I work on all day long is, you know, medieval Tanakh manuscripts of the Old Testament, and there are errors all the time. Even if you don’t hear it, you hear it in your head and you make mistakes. And look there… if you go back, if you scroll up there, on… the line below where it says masiach… Can you put your cursor there? Or the mouse, so they can see… Oh, exactly. A little bit to your left where it says be’ruach ha’kodis. So, immediately… just before the number three.

Jonathan: Wow, yes.

Nehemia: Right on the other side. Yeah. So, there it says, “the Holy Spirit”. But instead of kodesh, it says kodis. So, whoever’s copying this speaks a language, probably as his daily language, which has trouble distinguishing between shuh and suh.

Miles: Well, could it be an Ashkenazic scribe? Or…

Nehemia: It could be, but there are plenty of dialects of Hebrew that don’t distinguish between shuh and suh. For example, Lithuanian Jews of that period didn’t. But I don’t actually know about the Dutch language, if they have a distinguishing shuh and suh. But clearly that scribe, the one we just… if you go back to it…

Miles: We have Mascha van Dort…

Jonathan: I have another Acts here, and that’s why I wanted to show you.

Nehemia: Okay. Yeah. So, this is from Manuscript 1.32. Okay.

Jonathan: Yeah. Sorry about…

Nehemia: So, here he has mashiach, not masiach. So, the copyist is making a mistake because, in his native language… whatever that is; maybe it’s some Indian language. I have no idea. Let’s say this is a translation, just for argument’s sake. He might not be the original translator. He might just be a copyist of something that was before him and he doesn’t know the distinction, even in his head, between mashiach and masiach.

Look, you’ll see this when non-Arabs are dealing with Arabic. There’s a profound difference in Arabic between Heit and Kheit, or ha and kha. I don’t know, there’s just… non-Arabs will… or especially people who don’t know Hebrew as well, will confuse those two letters with Kheit, with the Heit. I mean, I see this all the time. People say EloKHim instead of Elohim. You’ll hear in movies, they’ll say, “Baruch atah Adonai eloKHeinu.” EloKHeinu? It’s with a Hey; why would you say eloKHeinu? Because they don’t know the difference between ha and kha.

So, I wonder if this isn’t just a phonetic issue. I find it hard to believe that this is meant as an insult. It could be, I don’t know. But when we see ruach ha’kodis, with a Samekh, nobody could say ha’kodis is an insult. He just doesn’t know how to pronounce ha’kodesh. Or he doesn’t know how to distinguish. It’s like, when I was a kid, we had this plumber who was from eastern China originally. And he told my mother there was lust in the pipes, by which he means rust, right? Okay, so, he’s not trying to insult us. He just doesn’t distinguish the two sounds. And whoever wrote this obviously didn’t distinguish between kodesh and kodes. That’s clear!

Miles: Yeah. I think… I think it’s…

Nehemia: There could be another explanation, but that seems the more obvious explanation.

Miles: Well, yeah. And you’re looking at Yeshu. A lot of people call that an insulting use of the Son of God’s name. My understanding, it’s really just the way the Aramaic language spelled his name.

Nehemia: Right. So, we have inscriptions from the Second Temple period. We have ossuaries, like little bone boxes…

Miles: Yeah.

Nehemia: …where they would bury people and put the bones in a box. And we have ones that have the name Yeshu; Yud-Shin-Vav, and this… and I think on the same bone box, it says Yeshua with an Ayin. So, that was like… I don’t know. It was an abbreviation of Yeshua, because, like you said, in Aramaic… and more particularly Galileans even speaking Hebrew couldn’t pronounce Ayin, so… so, that’s only an insult if you mean it as one. Let’s put it that way.

Miles: Yeah, I don’t see it. Because everything else reflects the awe that the…

Nehemia: That one doesn’t impress me, let’s put it that way. Ha’masiach doesn’t impress me.

Miles: Well, let me give you one indication. Yeshua is pronounced; it’s used 60% of the time in the New Testament manuscripts…

Nehemia: With an Ayin. Or Yeshu. Which one?

Miles: Yeshua with an Ayin.

Nehemia: Okay.

Miles: So, Yeshu is used 25% of the time. And Yehoshua is used 10% of the time, which is pretty much a made-up name, unless you know something I don’t know.

Nehemia: Yehoshua is a made-up name?

Miles: Yehoshua is… in other words…

Nehemia: Like Joshua?

Miles: Ye-HO-shua…

Nehemia: Joshua the son of Nun in Hebrew is called Yehoshua. So, is that what you mean?

Miles: Well no, that could be the reason. A lot of people think it’s from the same root. And the last…

Nehemia: And it’s obviously… So, Yehoshua, the son of Nun, in Nehemiah, I think it’s chapter 8, is called Yeshua the Son of Nun. So, I mean, it’s clearly… I don’t know that it’s disputed that it’s the same name. Look, ruach kudsa, with a Samekh. Obviously, he’s pronouncing shuh as suh and suh as shuh. He’s having trouble distinguishing them.

Miles: Well, it’s probably his dialect.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Jonathan: And then, you know, you’ve got the same… it looks to me like that first document I showed that was much clearer, is owned by Rahabi, probably. And then you have…

Nehemia: I think the takeaway here is… for the non-technical listener is, especially those who are listening and not seeing this… guys, we’re looking at manuscripts. Go to nehemiaswall.com and watch this, because we’re actually seeing the manuscripts here from Cambridge that originally came from India and were brought in 1806 over to England.

And there are subtleties when you look in the manuscript. Somebody can write an article… and she might be right. In other words, Mascha van Dort is saying masiach is an insult. It means destroyer, uprooter. But maybe it’s just the guy’s dialect of whatever language he speaks, and he has trouble distinguishing… Because it’s really hard to argue that ruach hakodis is somehow an insult. Like, what would the meaning of that…

By the way, here’s another interesting thing. There’s a claim… you mentioned the Polyglot, that the translation was from Syriac, which is Aramaic. Well in Syriac, holy is Shin, right? It would be ruach kudsha or something like that. It’s not with a Sin. Right? Shuh and suh, right? So, how would you explain that other than a phonetic issue in this particular case? Maybe there’s some other explanation. I’d love to hear what it is.

Miles: Well, the thing is, if you want to consider whether it’s an insult, you have to look at the context of the whole manuscript. Is there anywhere else where it’s obvious that they’ve got an axe to grind, they’ve got an agenda going on? And if there’s nowhere else where you see that, then the idea that they would have this one insulting word in there is really a non-starter.

Nehemia: And it could be a copyist who obviously isn’t a Christian, if this is David Cohen, right? Who is a Jew whose name we know. And the claim is that one of these things, at least this… his handwriting, you know. I don’t know…

Jonathan: Is Hashem an insult with the gershayim? No.

Nehemia: No. Nobody means that as an insult, let’s put it that way.

Miles: No.

Jonathan: No, nobody does. And so, therefore… and between that one generation… you’ll see David Cohen, you’ll see him writing it out as Elohim most of the time. Very, very rarely, Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey. And so, I don’t know.

Nehemia: And by the way, we saw there, they wrote, instead of Elohim, they wrote EloDim. And that’s because they considered the word Elohim too sacred to write, really, outside of the Tanakh, and maybe in a prayerbook.

Miles: Yes.

Nehemia: And even that, there are… there are printed Tanakhs where they write Elodim. Because when they first started printing, they weren’t sure, “Are we allowed to print this holy word?” Because they weren’t sure about printing. Especially because the first number of pages you print get thrown away. Even recently, with offset printing, that was the case.

Miles: Well, EloKim is another variant of that.

Nehemia: Right, and that’s because they thought, this is too sacred to write in a New Testament, or really, like I said, anywhere else in the Tanakh. There are Tanakhs, like I said, where they have… well, they have Elodim specifically in the Constantinople Bible from like the late 1400’s. So, I want to show you guys something.

Miles: The messianic…

Nehemia: Sorry, go ahead.

Miles: The messianic scribes were split on the name of God, but I would say that most of them actually use the name of God with the correct vowel pointing. And so, we have many, many examples of that in the New Testament, at least ten manuscripts where we’ve shown…

Nehemia: Look, we need to do another program to talk about your broader research. I wanted to focus it here just on as much as possible… because you’ve studied dozens of manuscripts in your institute, of all kinds of, I suppose, of nature, I would imagine. I would imagine there’s manuscripts that you immediately say, “Yeah, that’s from Greek or Latin,” and other ones where you say, “Wait, there’s…” you know, you use the term authenticate, “We authenticate this as having Hebrew origins.” Maybe you say… I don’t want to put words in your mouth. But let’s try to focus on this one. It’s a fascinating subject. By the way, where can people find you if they want to learn more about your research?

Miles: Writingofgod.com

Nehemia: Okay.

Miles: Writingofgod.com

Nehemia: And I see on your computer you have your… your “R” is actually a “Quf.” That’s very clever. And your “G” is like a… maybe a backwards “Pei”? I don’t know, it’s hard to see.

Miles: Yes, it was all done from the Hebrew letters.

Nehemia: Okay. So, alright, beautiful. So, I want to show you something here from… this is from Manuscript 1.32, folio 95m. Let me share my… And look, this was kind of my, like, my notes from reading van Dort’s article and Delitzsch’s article, which he… So, masiach… so, this is the first page of Romans. And guys, we’re going to put up a link on nehemiaswall.com to an article in German. We’ll look at it in a minute. There’s this article in German by… or, it’s actually part of his book, by Franz… I think it’s DElitzsch? Maybe it’s DeLITzsch. I don’t know how it’s pronounced.

Miles: Yeah, I think it’s DElitzsch. I don’t…

Nehemia: Okay. So, Delitzsch has this… however his name is pronounced… it’s even harder to spell, guys, the name Delitzsch. I always get it wrong. But Delitzsch has an article where he analyzes this page from this manuscript, and he transcribes it. So, even if you can’t read the script up on the screen from the manuscript, you can read his Hebrew transcription. So, it says here… First of all, we talked…

Miles: Where did he do that? Where did he do that?

Nehemia: Okay, so that is… I have it open here in my computer if I can find it. I have a lot of things open. So, here he has a book… We’ll come back to this, page 117. He has a book; you can get this on archive.org for free. So, this is a book called, Igeret Paulus Ha’shaliach El Ha’romaim, “The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans,” or Paulus… ah, my German is horrific. I took two years at Hebrew University. Paulus Des Apostels Brief An Die Römer, or something to that effect.

Alright. So, on page 117… well, actually it’s a little bit before that. No, it’s page 103 in the… the PDF number is different pages… it’s page 103 in the book. He has the first chapter of Romans 2, in the translation, übersetzungen, in the translation of Cochin. And then he has like seven pages or so. And then on page 107, he has the transcription here. So, even if you have trouble reading the Hebrew, in the handwriting, which I’ll admit, is a kind of an unusual script if you’re not familiar with it…

Jonathan: Is that script from Babylon, do you think, that you were looking at?

Nehemia: Boy, that’s a very complicated question, because there’s a bunch… no, I don’t think so. But let’s leave that for a different discussion. I use paleography; I’m not a paleographer. So, I kind of don’t want to… it’s a complicated discussion. But anyway, here we have Romanus. Why is that in brackets? It’s an interesting question. Anyway, he says beshem, “in the name of”, and then there’s something in brackets. And the reason it’s in brackets is because it’s not in the other manuscript. That’s where it’s a bit confusing.

Miles: Oh, that’s it.

Nehemia: So, it’s not in manuscript 116, but it is in 132, this word that we’ll talk about in a minute. Yeshu igeret shel Paulus (or Pavlus) etzel Romi’im. We’ll talk about the word etzel; it’s really interesting. It’s exciting and interesting. We’ll save it for part two, which we’ll just continue one conversation. We’ll have the editor split it because we’re going so long. So, he has here beshem, “in the name.” It’s a very ornate, beautiful handwriting here. Or maybe you think it’s horrific if you can’t read it. Hatame, “the unclean,” Yeshu. Right, Yeshu is Jesus, Yeshua.

So, Delitzsch says, “Hatame is an insult.” And then Mascha van Dort repeats that, you know, and she says she got this from Delitzsch. She’s not claiming to have discovered something new here. So, he has a discussion here in German. You guys can read it; you can put it through Google Translate, or maybe you read German. Somewhere he has a section on page… I looked at it this morning. I spent all morning going through this just to refresh my memory. Page 104, he has… “Jesus is called hatame, the unclean one.”

Jonathan: Yeah.

Nehemia: So… and what’s interesting is that’s in manuscript 132. But there’s a second copy, which is what you showed before with the really, let’s say, more familiar Hebrew script, where the word hatame isn’t there. So, this is Delitzsch’s argument. He says, “Well, obviously the translator is insulting Jesus here.” And my question is, how do we know that’s the translator? Maybe that’s just the copyist.

Miles: Mm-hmm.

Nehemia: In other words, we have two manuscripts. One of them has “the unclean” and the other… which is… it’s hard to see how that’s not an insult of Jesus. But the other manuscript doesn’t have it, so maybe just the copyist stuck it in there because they didn’t like Jesus. Like, what?

Miles: Here’s what I found in my study of all Christians who have studied the Hebrew Gospels. It seems to be a requirement that you find something to criticize in the manuscript. I mean…

Nehemia: If he’s really calling him “the unclean”, that’s criticizable. Can we agree on that?

Miles: No, I’m not saying it isn’t. But I’m saying… and you and I have talked about this with…

Nehemia: Not sure that’s a word, criticizable. But I just made it up.

Miles: With Pinchas Lapid’s comment on the acronym above the Hebrew Gospels from Catalonia. Besiyata shemaya, you know, with the name of God…

Nehemia: Oh, that was ridiculous! So, Pinchas Lapid wrote this book Hebrew in the Church.

Miles: Yes.

Nehemia: And… you know, let’s save that for a different discussion. But he…

Miles: My point is that…

Nehemia: He makes the argument… go ahead.

Miles: It happens so regularly in studying the literature that I think it is required for even modern day… It’s required for Christian researchers that are studying the Hebrew Gospels. You’ve got to find something wrong, even if it’s made up, or interpret something as being insulting to Christians. It’s so common. It is almost a principle of research, I find…

Nehemia: Let’s give them more… I want to give a more generous interpretation, or more…

Miles: Go right ahead.

Nehemia: Which is that scholars have a working assumption that, if Jews translated it, and more importantly, transmitted the New Testament, or even if the original translator didn’t have that, someone who’s copying is going to put insults in.

Miles: Yes.

Nehemia: Right. That is 100 percent a working assumption, and Delitzsch is obviously looking for it.

Miles: Mmh-mm. Yes.

Nehemia: And to say masiach is an insult when he has kodes, right? It’s like, well, I won’t bring the analogy, but anyway…

Miles: Number one, they’re going to say… They’re going to say it’s a translation from the Greek, number one, always… or Latin. Number two, they’re going to say it’s heretical, so there’s something in it that’s heretical. So, these things are always going to accompany any discussion.

Nehemia: Well, there’s what I’m calling an infamous article by, um… oh, boy, it’s been a long time since I worked on this… by George Howard.

Miles: Yes.

Nehemia: And George Howard makes the statement in the article… and look, this is a peer reviewed journal article in a very respectful, you know, publication. And he says that in Shem Tov’s Hebrew Matthew… I’ve obviously worked more on that than this, he says that Jesus isn’t called the Messiah, and that was to strip him of his title Messiah. What he really meant to say, and he misspoke, was, in this particular verse there’s the Latin word, or Greek word, christos, and not the Hebrew Mashiach. But in other verses the word Mashiach appears there. So, that’s a lesson. Look, if you had asked George Howard, he’s like, “Yeah, I published a lot of articles. I didn’t formulate that well.” Look, I do that all the time. I’m trying to say something, and in my head it makes perfect sense. And somebody later says, “Nehemia, why are you misleading the people? You said X, Y, Z!” Okay, so you’re saying I didn’t formulate it well. Okay. Fair criticism. Am I trying to deceive people? No! I’m just not perfect, right?

So, I think there are assumptions here that they’re bringing into the study of the text and… and look, I mean, from my perspective, to say masiach is an insult, but not mention, two lines below, it’s kodes, is almost… So, obviously the person who wrote that was unaware of that, or didn’t think it was important. I don’t see how… to me it’s important. There’s obviously a phonetic confusion between shuh and suh, and that has nothing to do with insults. Somebody who sees lust in the pipes, right?

Miles: But there’s such strong and consistent evidence of anti-messianic bias. Same messianic… because these are basically messianic scribes that are doing the translation.

Nehemia: But you’re not saying… so, I’m asking you, are you saying David Cohen, who supposedly is one of the scribes, that he’s messianic? Is that what you’re saying?

Miles: He is messianic.

Nehemia: Wow!

Miles: Well, Leopold van Dort, who hired him…

Nehemia: Well, Leopold van Dort was definitely a Jewish Christian, that’s not disputed. Right?

Jonathan: Right.

Nehemia: So, what she found, Mascha van Dort… and here we’ve got to give her amazing credit, I think she found, like, the conversion documents or something. I don’t remember what it was, it’s in the interview. She found, like, primary documentary evidence of his conversion, the reason he converted, the context in which he converted, something with his half-brother, and it’s the whole story. Alright, guys, listen to the interview, it’s fascinating. So, that’s amazing historical research she’s done there…

Miles: I know, it is.

Nehemia: On the Dutch material that I would have no access to.

Miles: Yeah.

Nehemia: And some of it’s German as well. So, there you really have to give her credit. She doesn’t claim to be a Hebrew expert, though, so we have to really be, I think, generous with her when it comes to that. She’s telling us this is what other scholars have said. This is what Delitzsch said, right? And I think there’s some room for criticizing Delitzsch, and maybe we’ll get to that in the second part.

Miles: I would be, you know… I understand she wouldn’t have any idea about that, and you don’t seem to be either, but that adds two more to my list. Delitzsch was saying that the scribes were saying insulting things, and so was…

Nehemia: So, the question is, why doesn’t Delitzsch mention ruach ha’kodes? Delitzsch is a Hebrew expert. He should immediately… Here’s my takeaway, and I’m guessing here. I don’t know. My guess is that, when Delitzsch went to Cambridge and spent like half a day with the manuscript and made some notes, and when he got back to Leipzig, in Germany, he wrote up his article… he wrote up his book… he wrote up a chapter in a book about it, like seven pages, and he didn’t have the ability that we have to pull it up on the computer screen and see the photo and say, “Oh, you know what? Two lines below it says the word kodesh with a Samekh. And so, you know, maybe there’s another explanation.” That’s the generous interpretation.

So, yeah. I’m going to ask you to do this, to say some final words on this, and then we’re going to do part two, where we’re going to talk about what I think is a bombshell of a discovery! I spent the whole morning preparing for this interview thinking, I’ve got a gotcha with Miles. And it turns out it’s a gotcha with Delitzsch. So…

Jonathan: May I point out one thing?

Nehemia: Please, yeah, absolutely. More than one thing.

Jonathan: And I appreciate you guys very much. I’m not… I’m not an archaeologist or a linguist, but when you look at the other script here that you’re talking about, this is the more familiar Babylon, or whatever, script.

Nehemia: This is what we call a square script.

Jonathan: A square script. It’s beautiful.

Miles: Yes. It’s easy.

Jonathan: Bashem yeshu; it does not have hatame on the front.

Nehemia: Right, exactly. That’s why Delitzsch has it in brackets. Because in one manuscript it’s there and the other one it’s not.

Jonathan: And then in this case, because I can see the hen scratchings of the other scribe on this manuscript, I’m going to say that this manuscript was owned before the other one, the other codex. The other codex was assembled by that scribe. And I’m going to say that that scribe did add hatame on there. And this is just another example of it, because I’ve seen many of them, especially in the Book of Revelation, where that other scribe did add things that were not there. So…

Nehemia: So, I’m not a linguist either. I’m a philologist. And in philology we have a… look, this is Philology 101. We have two manuscripts: A was copied from B, or B was copied from A, or A and B were copied from C. Right? And there could be a million different letters, intermediary, right?

Jonathan: Right, right, right.

Nehemia: A was copied from C, and B was copied from D, and then they were copied from… So, we don’t know the relationship precisely… I don’t know the relationship, let me say that, between these manuscripts. But one of them has hatame and one doesn’t. And then you have to ask the question, “Did somebody take out the insult? Why would he do that?” And why would… I can understand why somebody would add an insult if he’s a Jewish scribe and he’s bitter about the history, that really tense history Jews have had with Christians. And so, if he says, “If I’m going to have to copy this, I’m going to put an insult in.” That I can understand. Why is a Jewish scribe… Now, maybe it’s a messianic scribe and he takes out the insult. That makes sense. But…

Miles: Yeah.

Nehemia: These are complicated things. They’re not so straightforward. But to say the translator put in the insult when it’s not in the other manuscript, that’s strange to me. I don’t know. It could be. It’s possible.

Miles: We’ve already had one bombshell. We’re waiting for bombshell number two. And then…

Nehemia: Hey, guys, I’m going to ask you to come over to nehemiaswall.com and watch part two, because we’ve been going for too long. And I also have to take a quick break to turn off… somebody turned on the heat here. I’m sure it was my wife, she’s always cold. And I’m literally sweating. Probably can’t see it. So, give me like two minutes. Actually, give me five minutes. Is that okay? And I’ll be back with a cup of coffee.

Miles: Five minutes is great.

Nehemia: Alright.

You have been listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon’s Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

We hope the above transcript has proven to be a helpful resource in your study. While much effort has been taken to provide you with this transcript, it should be noted that the text has not been reviewed by the speakers and its accuracy cannot be guaranteed. If you would like to support our efforts to transcribe the teachings on NehemiasWall.com, please visit our support page. All donations are tax-deductible (501c3) and help us empower people around the world with the Hebrew sources of their faith!

Subscribe to "Nehemia Gordon" on your favorite podcast app!
Apple Podcasts | 
Amazon Music
 | TuneIn
Pocket Casts | Podcast Addict | CastBox | iHeartRadio | Podchaser
 | Pandora

If you have found Nehemia Gordon’s teachings to be of value, please consider supporting his efforts through his ministry Makor Hebrew Foundation.

Make a lasting impact through the year by making your donation recurring.

Or support Makor Hebrew Foundation by becoming a member of the Scholar Club.

VERSES MENTIONED
John 20:24-29
Matthew 27:51; Mark 15:38; Luke 23:45
Revelation 1:8; 21:6; 22:13
Nehemiah 8:17
Galatians 6:10
Matthew 26:41; Mark 14:38
Jeremiah 31:31-34
Matthew 26:28
Luke 24:1; John 20:1, 19; Acts 20:7

BOOKS MENTIONED
Leopold Immanuel Jacob van Dort, a learned Jewish-Christian man from Dordrecht
by Mascha van Dort

Paulus des Apostels Brief an die Römer aus griechischen Urtext auf Grund des Sinai-Codex in das Hebräische übersetzt und aus Talmud und Midrasch erläutert (1870)
by Franz Delitzsch

A Prayer to Our Father: Hebrew Origins of the Lord’s Prayer
by Nehemia Gordon and Keith Johnson

RELATED EPISODES
Hebrew Voices Episodes
Hebrew Voices #210 – The Lost Book of Gad the Seer: Part 1
Hebrew Voices #212 – Mysteries of India’s Hebrew New Testament: Part 1
Hebrew Voices #168 – Israelite Archaeology at the Israel Museum

OTHER LINKS
Benai Emunah Institute

Mascha’s article

Cambridge Oo.1.32

Cambridge Oo.1.16

Cambridge 1.16.2

Manchester Gaster MS 1616

Cambridge Catalogue

Walton Polyglot

Using ChatGPT and Other AI Engines to Vocalize Medieval Hebrew

The post Hebrew Voices #215 – Bias in India’s Hebrew New Testament?: Part 1 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.