When the TJ scrolls were translated into German during the years between 1963 and 1974, occasional peculiarities within the Aramaic writing apparently found their way into the German text, through having been translated quite literally. These are called Aramaisms. The ones that have come to this investigator's attention are as follows:
1.) TJ 3:30-31 When Jmmanuel had been baptized, he soon came out of the water of the Jordan, and behold, a metallic light came down from the sky and rushed over the Jordan. Consequently they all fell on their faces and pressed them into the sand while a voice from the metallic light spoke: "This is my son..."
Here "fell on their faces" is an Aramaism meaning to bow down or cower before. In this case the expression can be taken more literally than usual due to the fear that a close-up UFO encounter would instill in bewildered witnesses.
2.) TJ 5:30 "If a thought causes you annoyance, eradicate it and ban it from your brain. It is better to destroy a thought that incites annoyance and not to bring the whole world of thought into an uproar.
This is a literal translation of the German, in order to bring out the Aramaism, which is "and not." If the translator, Rashid, had been concerned with rendering this into better German, he would have used the common German word "als" here, meaning "than," instead of "and not" (und nicht). Fortunately, he made a rather literal translation. The Aramaic language lacked the capability for expressing this comparative sense in the manner we are used to (e.g., see M. Black, An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels, 3rd Ed., 1967, Oxford Univ. Press, p. 117), not possessing the direct equivalent of "than," and so other language was used to put across the intended thought.
3.) TJ 15:14 What would be better to make them come alive and think, if not through speaking in parables!
This Aramaism is of the same nature. "if not through" here could more conveniently have been rendered "than by" if its equivalent had been present in the original Aramaic. This verse refers to why Jmmanuel spoke in parables to the people on that one day.
4.) TJ 4:51 "So spoke they, the celestial sons between the North and the West, before they brought Jmmanuel in the metallic light back to Israel..."
The italicized words constitute the Aramaism, called the proleptic pronoun (M. Black, p. 96). It involves the use of a pronoun in the nominative case just preceding a noun to be emphasized. It is uncommon in German, but was not uncommon in Aramaic.
5.) TJ 13:6 "Truly, I say to you, you brood of snakes and vipers, a stone will turn into bread before no work may be done on the Sabbath."
There is word play between "stone" ("kyphthe" in Aramaic) and "bread" (ryphthe) (see Frank Zimmermann, The Aramaic Origin of the Four Gospels (1979), p. 78). Why else would those two words have been chosen to illustrate the point? This sentence was omitted by the writer of Matthew, though the same word play occurs in Mt 7:9. However, it is not very likely that a literary hoaxer would have known of this word play in Matthew and decided to use it a second time in his fabrication.
A very common Aramaism was the word for "Behold!" Besides the many instances of its use within TJ verses having parallels to verses within the Gospel of Matthew, there are 42 other instances of its use in TJ verses having no parallel within the Gospels. A literary hoaxer would probably have noticed this in Matthew and thus inserted the word into his hoax, but then again, he might have slipped up and failed to do so.
Because there was no punctuation within the ancient texts, it was frequently the custom in Aramaic to alert the reader to the beginning of a quotation through use of an expression like "He answered and said...", with the "said" indicating the start of the quotation. When this carried over into the German, its English translation was often rendered as "He answered, saying,....". A TJ example of this, upon rendering the German literally, is:
TJ 28:41 But Jmmanuel answered and spoke: "Truly I say to you: You may succeed for a long time in accusing Judas Iscariot of treason in front of the people, but the truth will come out and be known by all in the entire world."
Notice the two verbs "answered and spoke." English translations of this often omit the redundant "and spoke," which indicates how easily such an Aramaism can be lost through translation.
Two more such instances occur in:
TJ 29:50-51 Slowly the screaming stopped, and a third time the governor asked and spoke: "Which one of these two shall I release?" The people cried out and spoke "Free Barabbas!"
Two others occur in the following, with a literal translation of the German being employed:
TJ 31:12-13 But Mary asked and spoke, 'Yet he was dead and lay here dead, how can he rise?" But the guardian angel answered and spoke, "Why are you seeking someone alive among the dead?"
The above examples occur in verses not having parallels within the Gospels, since these verses were unacceptable to the early church and could not be extracted from the TJ for use in Matthew when that gospel was being written. There are at least ten more such instances, plus others if one considers verses that Matthew does have parallels to.
Another indication that the original had been an ancient text lacking punctuation is that in several places within the TJ's German text there is a series of three or more nouns, adjectives or verbs in a row, each separated by "and ("und") rather than by commas and then a final "and." That is, one finds usages of the "A and B and C" structure rather than of the conventional, present-day "A, B, and C" structure. This is indicative of the original text having dated back to a time before the concept of "comma" had been invented. This ancient structure then oftentimes carried over into the German translation of the TJ, even for text having no parallel, or no close parallel, within the Gospel of Matthew: e.g., see TJ 4:15, 6:26, 6:50, 10:10, 10:26, 14:26, 18:36, 18:49, 18:50, 18:58, 19:15, 22:10, 22:17, 24:35, 24:47, 25:10, 28:45, 29:4, 30:14, 30:34, 31:27, 31:36, 31:48, 32:39, 33:14, 33:35, 35:41, 36:3, 36:5-6, 36:14, 36:17, 36:23, and 36:37-38. Of these, the English translation preserved the ancient structure only once (36:3). On the other hand, Eduard Meier in his various German writings dating back to 1975 does use the ordinary "A, B, and C" structure (e.g., in the "Vorwort" (Foreword) of the TJ, p. xx, lines 3-4, 8, 15 and 22-23; and in the Epilog (lines 14-15 ), rather than the ancient structure.
Is Eduard Meier, having had no formal secondary schooling, nevertheless supposed to have known about such indications of antiquity and formed them within a gigantic literary hoax? If so, advocates of the hoax hypothesis must consider how he ever became such a "superman" as to additionally accomplish all the following:
(a) allegedly hoax hundreds of UFO photographs that show every indication of genuineness;
(b) somehow without ever having been detected, construct a score of circular patterns of bent-over, swirled meadow grass (crop circles), witnessed and photographed by others, and notice, for the first time (in 1976), that although the bent-over grass did not straighten up for many weeks it nevertheless continued to grow horizontally (only 10 years later was this phenomenon noticed within some English crop circles, but it remains unexplained);
(c) how he managed to arrange for a loud, lengthy, never-before heard, noise to come from above, outdoors, after he and a witness had their tape recorders set up and ready for it; one of the tapes of these apparent UFO sounds was later analyzed and found to contain wave forms much too complex to have been fabricated in any manner at all feasible;
(d) how he acquired alloy samples whose detailed analyses indicated a compositional structure totally unknown to the very capable chemist, the late Marcel Vogel;
(e) how Meier managed to rapidly type down, when in a semi-trance state, scores of lengthy, realistic word-for-word conversations he had had with his ET contactors during contacts the day or so previously, during 1975-1977, and have their 1800 pages turn out to be riveting reading although his normal typing rate was very slow, using one finger of his one hand; and
(f) how he allegedly managed to dupe some 30 sincere, named witnesses into seeing remarkable events related to his UFO contacts that have no explanation other than the contacts having been real.
The alternative to the Meier-as-superman hypothesis is the UFO-contactee phenomenon, with Meier being a key contactee.
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