He's not referring to himself, but to the would-be person in the scenario he's creating to illustrate his point.
Right. That's the problem. Imagine you have a friend who happens to be a specialist in peripheral nerve damage & repair. A few months ago, you had surgery on a nerve in your wrist (which was severed in an accident), but the pain is more severe than your surgeon had anticipated, so you ask your friend about nerve pain and possible solutions. While she is in the middle of explaining why neurontin would be better than the extra-strength tylenol you are taking (and perhaps even more than the oxycodone/percocet & tylenol you took right after surgery) a nearby stranger butts in and declares "hey, I have no medical knowledge or experience, but I know that when I get headaches, tylenol works for that pain."
Why on Earth would you pay any attention?
Here, with the issue of the Pe****ta, we have an intersection of many, many, disciplines, including linguistics, classics, philology, middle eastern studies, archaeology, textual criticism, Semitic languages, and so on.
On the other hand, we have someone who doesn't know the first thing about translation, the dynamics of language use in a linguistically diverse setting
in general (let alone first century Palestine), or anything else which would give us reason to believe the analogy used is appropriate.
Until we have evidence of the claim the Church of the East is making, that they, in fact, DO have in their possession the original Aramaic texts consisting of 22 books of the NT, we shall have to leave it at that.
We have plenty of evidence that this claim is false. A truly staggering amount. No other document from the ancient world has anything approaching the number of textual witnesses the NT has (i.e., instances in which we have a manuscript, a reference to one, a quotation, a scrap, a translation, etc.). Nor are there any languages which have been the subject of study, research, and progress as with Greek and Hebrew. And while there are languages which had native speakers in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and are now either dead or dying, enormous grammars on Aramaic, Syriac, etc., were recently completed and were being written.
This is the most studied document in history, and studied in so many ways by people in so many fields it boggles the mind. On the other hand, there are a group of amateurs running around calling Syriacn "Aramaic", claiming that this "Pe****ta" (which they can't read) is the Aramaic of Jesus (or close to it), and that it is for some reason natural given their almost complete lack of knowledge about the Hellenistic world and the dynamics of Graeco-Roman & Jewish interactions (including the effects on orality, textuality, and communication in general) to suppose that the Greek NT they also can't read is secondary to this "Pe****ta". Why? Because there are a tiny handful of people with the capacity to at least read certain older dialects of Aramaic who have webpages making saying so. And as the "Pe****ta first" supporters lack the ability to evaluate these claims, they make or point to arguments despite a complete inability to judge the veracity, validity, and support for these arguments.
Victor Alexander, whom I have referenced earlier, is claiming to have created an English translation of the Aramaic NT from those same texts.
And I've translated some of the Gothic NT (it is, after all, the only real witness to the language we've had). Same with Latin, and even "high german".
The problem is that this all seems to rest on a series of completely flawed premises:
1) That Jesus, almost certainly a native Aramaic speaker, would not have had an early following of people who were more comfortable speaking other languages (esp. Greek, the
lingua frana of the day), and who were "translating" Jesus' teachings into Greek probably while he was still alive.
2) That because Jesus spoke Aramaic, it is only natural the first, second, and or third generation of followers would have written the NT texts in Aramaic, despite the fact that the Rabbinic teachings from around Jesus' time weren't recorded for centuries to come (the Mishnah only being written down about 200 CE).
3) That someone like Paul, who was writing to an increasingly non-Jewish audience already in the 50s, wouldn't have written in Greek.
4) That people after Paul, who were writing in what was a community of early Christians largely made up of non-Jewish converts, weren't just capable of writing the gospels in Aramaic, but would want to even if they could. That is, here is a language that fewer and fewer Christians can understand at
all, let alone read, while Greek is widely used and spoken as a second language across the Roman empire (especially the East). But despite the missionary nature of 2nd and 3rd generation Christianity, and despite the precious few Christians who knew Aramaic compared to a vast number of already or potential converts who knew Greek, these people wrote the Gospels in Aramaic.
5) That the nature of textuality and oral and written transmission in the first and early 2nd centuries made it at all plausible that this spreading community (which required texts for increasingly spread out churches in regions in which no Semitic language was commonly spoken), would have produced accounts (which have parallels in greco-roman literature) in a language which would severely limit the capacity to transmit the accounts of Jesus' mission and teachings.
6) That the nature of the texts themselves don't read like translations at all, but rather show influence of Semiticisms.
7) That the Pe****ta manuscripts show evidence of being original, rather than the numerous instances in which they reflect Greek influence.
8) That the Pe****ta manuscripts, which don't agree with each other, somehow have some special status that other Semitic NT texts,
including Old Syriac, do not possess.
9) And finally, that the only people capable of understanding not just the languages of all these textual traditions (Greek, Gothic, Italic, Syriac, Armenian, Arabic, etc.), as well as the relevant history, are those who have no training in any of it.
