I also forgot to mention that he, at another site, said that reading ancient Aramaic is no big deal.....for him...in spite of what scholars (and you) have said about the near impossibility of doing so as the ancient script is too far removed from more modern Aramaic.
You are completely misunderstanding what I said. I can read Homeric Greek. It's a form of Greek that is older far older than the Greek of the NT. I can read Attic Greek, Doric Greek, koine Greek, etc. Guess what I can't read? Most Greek manuscripts. Why? Because although the basic alphabet remained the same it could be written in widely varying ways and that's without all the errors and other problems (like those related to age) that begin when it comes to extant manuscripts. Hell, even reading German in scripts from a century ago is a severe pain and that's printed. People who read manuscripts get trained to read manuscripts, not languages. It's a different skillset that requires not simply an understanding of languages but a familiarity with scribal hands, stand orthographic errors and customs, a careful and keen eye, and lots and lots of practice. Most people, even if they were so inclined, can't get this training or practice because 1,000+ year old manuscripts don't grow on trees. They're kept carefully in libraries and other institutions where they are preserved.
Finally, it's a waste of time as I said before. Translating a manuscript is almost always a waste of time. The only exception is when that manuscript is all we have. But we have lots of "Aramaic" NT manuscripts (they're all Syriac, which didn't exist in Jesus' day). What your guy translated was a bible. It was put together like the way the Vulgate, KJV, Armenian, & Georgian bibles were. It's not an ancient manuscript but a fabricated, compiled, and typed text designed for modern readers of Syriac.
In general, the West has ignored the Eastern churches as far as Biblical matters are concerned
This is patently false.
So a claim by an Eastern church that it has in its possession the originals (which they have claimed for years) has been pretty much totally ignored, or has been classified as nonsense.
Nobody has claimed to have originals. That would be the autographs. And all one needs to know is a bit about languages to realize that a language which didn't exist in Jesus' day (Late Aramaic, of which Syriac is a dialect) couldn't be spoken by him even if he didn't live in Palestine as Syriac wasn't spoken there (Jewish Palestinian Aramaic is). Also, nobody much cares what any church says other than that church. You don't see scholars going and consulting the Catholic church about Jesus or whether X manuscript was written by a heretic or some other nonsense. Classicists, historians, linguists, NT scholars, scholars of Judaism, Romanists, etc., are peopled by all sorts. Individually, some may believe that the Catholic church has the only say, or that the NT is inspired by god, or whatever. But as a whole the scholarly community has spent 200 years doing exactly the opposite of what would be required for a "Christian" textual history of the NT.
Nor is this an East/West thing. For one thing, Eastern Orthodoxy is just as old as the Roman Church and they're bigger into the Greek language (obviously) and they're all over the East. Also, Syriac is Eastern Aramaic and wasn't spoken in Palestine.
The Pe****ta and Syriac texts are littered with Greek loanwords. They're written in a style that didn't exist in Jesus' day in a period of Aramaic that didn't exist in Jesus' day and in a dialect that when it existed wasn't spoken where Jesus lived (Syriac).
As I recall, Alexander spent a bit of time writing about the Old Syriac. He knows what it is, and indicated that it is unauthentic, as it comes from the Greek.
Old Syriac isn't a language or a dialect. It's a script used in a particular manuscript tradition. Classical Syriac is a form of Eastern Aramaic spoken from around 200CE/AD onward.
Look at the texts or manuscripts. If you see this kind of writing- ܢܫܩܘܠ - then it's influenced by Greek and wasn't around when Jesus lived and is a dialect that wasn't spoken in the place Jesus lived when it did exist.
Alexander got his undergrad degree in filmmaking and even his English leaves something to be desired: "Yes, I do understand Aramaic
to a profound level. I went to an Aramaic language school. It was a Presbyterian Church school. Our two teachers were both from Urmia, Iran, where the Aramaic language scholarship was the dominant force in Ashurai cultural life and where most of our best literary people came from. I studied religion and language
from the first grade, in the language Jesus spoke! I continued my education at an American Jesuit high school, from the time I was twelve, entering the seventh grade. I studied religion with Father Merrick. I got an "A" in the course based on my presenting a final assignment on the "Proof of the Existence of God." I studied Latin at Regiopolis College in Kingston, Ontario,
during my eleventh grade. Later, I
completed my high school in San Francisco in 1962. I
entered college and finally graduated in 1970, from the San Francisco State University, with a BA in Filmmaking."
This is not bad for a non-native speaker. That said, for a person who understands "Aramaic
to a profound degree" so much that he feels qualified to translate the bible and says so as he does in the project proposal excepts from which the above is taken, this isn't great. It's idiomatically incorrect and getting the idioms down pat is essential to translation. Also, he didn't study the language Jesus did "from the first grade". Modern Aramaic dialects differ even from the Late Aramiac of the gospels let alone the Aramaic of Jesus' day (Middle Aramaic). This isn't a blog post or something where one expects spelling errors but was taken from a 1995 proposal and remains posted on his site today without corrections.
