Christian Palestinian Aramaic was a Western Aramaic dialect used by the Melkite Christian community, predominantly of Jewish descent, in Palestine, Transjordan and Sinai between the fifth and thirteenth centuries. It is preserved in inscriptions, manuscripts (mostly palimpsests, less papyri in the first period) and amulets. All the medieval Western Aramaic dialects are defined by religious community. CPA is closely related to its counterparts, Jewish Palestinian Aramaic (JPA) and Samaritan Aramaic (SA). CPA shows a specific vocabulary that is often not paralleled in the adjacent Western Aramaic dialects.
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👉 Christian Palestinian Aramaic in the context of Codex Sinaiticus Rescriptus
Codex Sinaiticus Rescriptus, mostly originating in Saint Catherine's Monastery, Sinai, is a collection of nineteen Christian Palestinian Aramaic palimpsest manuscripts containing Old Testament, Gospel and Epistles pericopes of diverse Lectionaries, among them two witnesses of the Old Jerusalem Lectionary, various unidentified homilies along with two by John Chrysostom, hagiographic texts such as the Life of Pachomios, the Martyrdom of Philemon Martyrs, and the Catecheses by Cyril of Jerusalem. The palimpsests manuscripts are recycled parchment material that were erased and reused by the tenth-century Georgian scribe Ioane-Zosime for overwriting them with homilies and a Iadgari (979–980 AD). Part of the parchment leaves (Sin. Georg. 34) had been brought by him from the Monastery of Saint Sabas, south of Jerusalem in the Kidron Valley, when he moved to St Catherine's Monastery and became their librarian. In the nineteenth century most of the codex was removed from the monastery at two periods. C. Tischendorf took two thirds in 1855 and 1857 with the Codex Sinaiticus to St Peterburg and handed it over to the Imperial Library, now the National Library of Russia, and the remaining third left on a clandestine route [so-called collection of Dr Friedrich Grote (1862-1922)] and found its way into various European and later also into US collections, at present in a Norwegian collection. From the New Finds of 1975 in the Monastery of Saint Catherine missing folios of some of the underlying manuscripts could be retrieved (Sinai, Georgian NF 19; 71), with one connected to Princeton, Garrett MS 24.
In this Dossier
Christian Palestinian Aramaic in the context of Melkite
Melkite (/ˈmɛlkaɪt/) or Melchite churches are various Eastern Christian churches of the Byzantine Rite, and their members. The name comes from the Central Semitic root m-l-k 'royal', referring to the loyalty to the Byzantine emperor, and became a denominational designation for Christians who accepted imperial religious policies, notably the Council of Chalcedon (451).
Originally, during the Early Middle Ages, Melkites used both Koine Greek and Aramaic (Classical Syriac & Syro-Palestinian) language in their religious life, and initially employed the Antiochian rite in their liturgy, but later (10th–11th century) accepted the Constantinopolitan rite, and incorporated Arabic in parts of their liturgical practices.
Christian Palestinian Aramaic in the context of Hexapla
Hexapla (Koine Greek: Ἑξαπλᾶ, lit. 'sixfold'), also called Origenis Hexaplorum, is a critical edition of the Hebrew Bible in six versions, four of them translated into Greek, preserved only in fragments. It was an immense and complex word-for-word comparison of the original Hebrew Scriptures with the Greek Septuagint translation and with other Greek translations. The term especially and generally applies to the edition of the Old Testament compiled by the theologian and scholar Origen sometime before 240.
The subsisting fragments of partial copies have been collected in several editions, that of Frederick Field (1875) being the most fundamental on the basis of Greek and Syrian testimonies. The surviving fragments are now being re-published (with additional materials discovered since Field's edition) by an international group of Septuagint scholars. This work is being carried out as The Hexapla Project under the auspices of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies, and directed by Dr Neil McLynn. The members of the editorial board are: Peter J. Gentry (Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and the Göttinger Septuaginta-Unternehmen), Dr Alison G. Salvesen (Oxford University), and Bas ter Haar Romeny (Leiden University).