Aramaic Gospels: The Dove, Jonah, and the Baptism
The New Testament is written entirely in Greek. But many scholars for the past few centuries have speculated that the Greek gospels we inherited from the 1st century are translations of Aramaic originals that have been lost. Most of the analysis has focused on idiomatic phrases or grammatical structures in the Greek text that would be better suited to Aramaic. Some of these arguments have weight, but I’m going to suggest that the narrative of the New Testament gospels may present a more compelling argument that Aramaic source texts did in fact exist for the Gospels. In this first post on this topic we’re going to analyze the baptism of Jesus and a couple of obscure passages in the New Testament gospels where Jesus makes cryptic references to Jonah, the Hebrew prophet who was swallowed by a fish. Let’s start with Mark 1:9-13 where Jesus is baptized by John in the Jordan river:
Recall that our English translations of the New Testament are based on ancient Greek texts which were written in the late 1st century, but our oldest fragments are copies that date to the 2nd-3rd century. When studying the New Testament most students have a hard enough time dealing with the Greek. But if we want to see what Jesus taught, occasionally the Greek is an obstacle and we must think in Aramaic which is the mother tongue of Jesus and his immediate followers. With that in mind, let’s do a quick analysis of the word Dove in the New Testament.
The word Dove in Greek is Peristeran, which has no special significance in Greek; it simply means Dove. However, we know Jesus’ native language was Aramaic. So if we were to hear Jesus say Dove in Aramaic or Hebrew, he’d say “Yonah” or “Jonah“.
With this in mind, take a look at the following passage from Matthew 16:
In our Greek text of Matthew the name Jonah is given by Jesus in response to a demand to receive “a sign from heaven“. First, the cryptic nature of the reply should alert us that something special is going on here. In this passage, why does the Greek have Jesus saying the only “sign from heaven” is going to be Jonah, a man? The answer is that the author of the Greek text incorrectly transliterated the Aramaic word Dove, when the author should have translated it. If we assume this passage has an Aramaic source, Jesus actually is referencing his own baptism where a dove appeared as a sign from heaven. In other words, what Jesus is saying to his questioners is:
Battistero Neoniano, Ravenna, Italy 451-75 CE
And really this translation makes much more sense because the passage is dealing with a “sign from heaven”, which would naturally refer to a creature living in the heavens such as a bird, not a man. So the Greek text which has been handed down through history has preserved the erroneous reading of Jonah instead of the Aramaic correct reading of Dove. Cryptic narratives in the Greek can sometimes only be explained if we translate the Greek back into Jesus’ mother tongue of Aramaic.
Why would a scribe decide to transliterate the word Jonah instead of translating it as dove? I think the reason is simple. As the years passed, the number of myths and stories about Jesus performing miracles and signs began to increase. The gospels were written decades after Jesus was crucified and they wanted to incorporate all of these miraculous signs into their gospels. But there was a conflict here: why would Jesus say you’re not getting any other miraculous signs except the sign of the dove at my baptism and then proceed to perform miracles which culminated in the miracle of a resurrection? In order to reconcile this conflict, they decided that the statement about the dove was really a prophecy of the greatest miracle of the resurrection, referencing Jonah’s three days in the belly of the whale. The scribes smoothed out this apparent conflict in the statement of Jesus by transliteration instead of translation. This exposition can be seen in two passages, Matthew 12 and Luke 11, which parallel this “Jonah/dove” passage and attempt to expound the cryptic meaning inherent in the erroneous reading of Jonah instead of Dove. In Matthew 12 and Luke 11 the Jonah passage is expounded as a prophetic passage of Jesus spending three days in the tomb, just as Jonah spent three days in the belly of the whale. This type of metaphorical interpretation of Old Testament stories became increasingly popular among the 2nd century Christian authors who attempted to make every Old Testament story point to Jesus (see the book of Barnabas as a good example of this type of work).
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