Qumran Aramaic, Corpus Linguistics, and Aramaic Retroversion

Abstract

The Aramaic of Qumran is sometimes claimed to be the best or only Aramaic dialect to use for understanding the Aramaic background of the New Testament. In fact, although it has its uses, the corpus of Qumran Aramaic is very small, and it is not a sufficient source on its own for the purposes of back-translating portions of the New Testament into “authentic” first-century c.e. Palestinian Aramaic. A consideration of the difficulties of retroversion when the translation technique of the Greek writer is unknown, combined with inadequate control of Aramaic among retroverters, suggests that largescale Aramaic retroversion of New Testament passages has no chance of reconstructing the original Aramaic of the Gospels.