Lamsa Bible

This translation of the Old and New Testaments is based on Peshitta manuscripts which have comprised the accepted Bible of all those Christians who have used Syriac as their language of prayer and worship for many centuries. The Church of the East and some noted Western scholars dispute the belief of modern scholarship that the originals of the Four Gospels and other parts of the New Testament were written in Greek. In any case, Aramaic speech is an underlying factor and New Testament writers drew on documents written in Aramaic. Syriac is the literary dialect of Aramaic. From the Mediterranean east into India, the Peshitta is still the Bible of preference among Christians.

George M. Lamsa, the translator, devoted the major part of his life to this work. He was an Assyrian and a native of ancient Bible lands. He and his people retained Biblical customs and Semitic culture, which had perished elsewhere. With this background and his knowledge of the Aramaic (Syriac) language, he has recovered much of the meaning that has been lost in other translations of the Scriptures. There is a section on the problems of translating from the Aramaic to the Greek.

Manuscripts used were the Codex Ambrosianus for the Old Testament and the Mortimer-McCawley manuscript for the New Testament. Comparisons have been made with other Peshitta manuscripts, including the oldest dated manuscript in existence. The term Peshitta means straight, simple, sincere and true, that is, the original. Even the Moslems in the Middle East accept and revere the Peshitta text.

Although the Peshitta Old Testament contains the Books of the Apocrypha, this edition has omitted them.

Genesis 1: 1, 2
God created the heavens and the earth in the very beginning.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the water.

John 1: 1 – 3
The Word was in the beginning, and that very Word was with God, and God was that Word.
The same was in the beginning with God.
Everything came to be by his hand; and without him not even one thing that was created came to be.

The following comparative studies include this version:

1. Burden and Yoke to Be Removed
2. Commandments or Clean Robes?
3. Entering His Rest
4. Falsifying Scribes
5. From Eternity or From Ancient Times?
6. Fringe on the Borders of a Garment
7. God So Loved the World
8. Gods, God, or Judges
9. Hebrew Synoptic Gospels
10. Horses from Egypt and Kue
11. Israelites and Baal-Peor
12. Jude’s Advice About Saving People
13. Lord’s Day in the Book of Revelation
14. Minor Prophets
15. Offering Sacrifices to the He-Goat
16. Passover and the Days of Unleavened Bread
17. Sabbaths and Sundown
18. Scripture Inspired by God
19. Seventy Weeks of Daniel 9
20. Sides of the Court of the Tabernacle
21. Some Variations in the Book of Acts
22. Speech Problem of Moses
23. Story of the Adultress
24. That Which Will Happen Before the End
25. Tragedy at Beth-Shemesh
26. Was Jesus Forsaken by God?
27. Words with Heathen Origins in the Scriptures