Study to show thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth
2 Timothy 2:15 (KJV)
This Bible verse was one of the first ones I ever learned as a new Christian after my conversion at age 16, and it has also provided me with a strong conviction for proper discernment. At times - especially in my 20s as a young minister still getting my bearings - this was tested heavily. I dabbled some in the hyper-charismatic version of Pentecostalism, and even took some questionable televangelists seriously in my younger years. But, I grew up, and in time I was able to see errors in things I once championed. We have all been there at some point - you have an initial enthusiasm about your faith in the beginning which makes you a sponge willing to soak up and absorb any type of teaching, even if it is wrong. This is natural, and it happens to many of us at points in our lives. However, while not beating yourself over the head about accepting errors at some point, we also should have the capacity to outgrow the errors as our faith begins to mature and we understand things better. That is what 2 Timothy 2:15 is all about. I am going to apply this today to a very specific area that seems to have gained some popularity over the years, and that is the usage of certain translations of ancient Bible translations such as the Syriac P'shitta and the Ethiopian Canon. In their orthodox forms, I love and value both of these Bibles, and indeed I have a deep connection to the people who speak these languages. However, there are some Christians who haven't matured much and think that there is some "hidden wisdom" in an ancient text that it never claimed to have, and this leads to some rather odd ideologies. I want to start first by telling my own story somewhat in relation to this, and then I want to take each of these and analyze them individually, the Syriac and the Ethiopian Biblical traditions.
Back when I first started Bible college at the age of 19, there were two things I was passionate about. One, it was my association with Assyrian, Armenian, and Coptic Christians. Secondly, it was my identity then as a Pentecostal. Both of these intersected in both good and bad ways, and in doing so I was launched into a bit of education that I never anticipated. Back in the day, I used two major Bibles as my main go-to versions. One of them was the massive Dake's Annotated Study Bible, which was gifted to me by a preacher uncle. Like many young Pentecostals then, I thought that using a Dake's Bible was the Pentecostal thing to do, and to be honest the four-column format and the extensive commentary notes did have some attraction to me. I will talk more in detail about the Dake Bible later, but there was another Bible I used too. After getting to know many Assyrians in my early 20s, I became close friends with Assyrian nationalist Dr. Sargon Dadesho - he at the time had an organization called Bet Nahrain in Turlock, CA, and he published a magazine as well as having TV and radio stations (both KBES). In 1995, I would have the opportunity to both visit and be interviewed on KBES by my dear friend Deacon John Khio, but my first contact was Sargon, and even to this day I consider him a dear friend. Sargon's magazine featured articles in both Assyrian and English, and there was a lot of cultural content in those then. On one occasion, he mentioned something about an Assyrian Bible translator named George Lamsa, and I made it a point to obtain a Lamsa Bible - I was able to purchase one through my college bookstore in early 1990. While I will go into more detail about the Lamsa Bible later, as it pertains to my story at this time, my Lamsa and Dake's Bibles were what I used for everything - if I prepared class projects, sermons to preach in churches, or anything else, those were my go-to Bibles. That went on for a few years until I started to become better educated in what both of these Bibles were actually, and in time I would get rid of them because I discovered a lot of heretical stuff within them that didn't match traditional Biblical hermeneutics. As I grew in my own faith beyond Pentecostalism into a more Catholic grounding, it became evident that neither the Dake's or Lamsa Bibles were really appropriate for serious discipleship, and I thankfully outgrew them as well as a lot of things associated with them. I use my own story to preface this because I am coming at this topic from a position of experience, and am not just shooting down anything I simply don't agree with. I used these Bibles, and I believed in them as valuable translations then, and I was completely clueless as a young man as to what sort of damage they could really do. But, thankfully, I grew. So, why am I addressing this topic. Let me give the introduction to that and we will go on from there.
Over the past couple of days, I have been listening to YouTube videos of my friend, Dr. Stephen Missick in Texas, who is creating some good content that deals with the Assyrian Bible in particular. Unfortunately, Stephen suffered some damage to his home during a bad storm, and a tree crashed into his house that almost destroyed the very valuable study library he has that he had accumulated over many years. Fortunately, the majority of his collection was spared damage, due to the providential hand of God, but this motivated him to explore his own collection and do some content on different translations and versions of the Syriac Bible he has come across over the years. I relate to that, because for the most part Stephen and I had a parallel course in our studies and association with the Assyrians in particular over the years - he is a few years younger than I am, and he also had the privilege of meeting some people I never was able to meet, including the Assyrian Patriarch Mar Awa. And, a lot of his own journey reminded me of myself - he was soaking up pretty much everything that entailed Syriac studies, as I also did, and he came across some of the same material I did over the years. Some of these included some spurious and somewhat controversial English translations and commentaries on Syriac Bibles, and of course he became familiar with Lamsa's work as well as that of others - notably the New Thought Syriac researcher Rocco Errico, as well as the translation work of Victor Paul Wierwille (who led the neo-Arian cult, the Way International) and some people who splintered from Wierwille's group such as Janet Magiera. When I discuss Lamsa directly, I will go into more detail about who these people are because they do tend to be given a higher level of importance in Syriac Studies than they perhaps should have. Stephen's video though made an important distinction between the work of people like Lamsa, Wierwille, Magiera, and Errico and their actual doctrines they possess, and I think that is a fair assessment. With a chronically limited English-language reservoir for Syriac Studies (that thankfully is changing, but it still merits work) I completely understand why we may have to by necessity take a sip from a proverbial "poisoned well," and I only hope for Stephen and others that Mark 16's promises that if a believer "drinks any deadly thing it shall not harm them." That is why I feel the discussion is warranted. I want to do this in three sections. First, I want to address the esotericist and cultic interest in Syriac studies, primarily through Lamsa's post-mortem influence. Secondly, I want to talk about the Ethiopian Bible, and how at times it gets many people who have a mystical motivation for interest in it. Third, I am going to deal with Dake's - how Dake intersected with Lamsa on some things, and also how many popular televangelists - Benny Hinn, Jimmy Swaggart, and others - use translations such as Dake's or Lamsa's to justify some of the odd doctrines they proclaim. Hopefully, by the time you read this, it will aid in you strengthening your own sense of discernment so you too can "rightly divide the word of truth." I am starting this on a Tuesday, and due to its complexity, it will take me several days to work on this so you more than likely will be seeing it several days after I finish it.
Let's start with George Lamsa. George Lamsa (1892-1975) was a Bible translator who was an ethnic Assyrian. In my earliest Bible college days as I started to learn about the Assyrian community, I first heard of him through Bet Nahrain Magazine, which published an article regarding some historical preservation of his back in 1991. Being I was looking for an actual Assyrian Bible, I immediately had the college bookstore order me one. It was more massive than any Bible - outside of my Dake's - that I had seen, and for a few years I used it quite regularly. I published an old book of my early sermons that is available on Amazon, and if you read some of my material from the early 1990s, you will note that at that time I quoted Lamsa's Bible extensively. However, as I grew in my faith, I started to notice things - when I looked more into George Lamsa's life, he was associated with a lot of weird stuff, including New Thought groups like Unity, the cultic Way International (Lamsa was a close friend of Victor Paul Wierwille, who founded that group), and the controversial Pentecostal tent evangelist William Branham (who, among other things, taught a version of Oneness Pentecostalism as well as a variation of the Calvinist "Two Seeds" doctrine). Of the latter, this explains why some in the "Word of Faith" movement, including prominent televangelists like Benny Hinn and the late Kenneth Hagin, utilized the Lamsa translation. I also found out later from my good friend, the late Fr. Quasha Klutz, in a phone conversation that the official Assyrian Church had never endorsed Lamsa's Bible, and indeed discouraged its faithful from using it. Learning of all that, I immediately began to distance myself from Lamsa's material, and instead focused on actual Syriac Bible studies and translations, including those done by the late Aramaic Bible Translation founder, Wycliffe missionary Esther Matteson, as well as more credible recent translations like those of Dr. George Kiraz (his is very helpful, as I understand the Western Syriac, or Suryoyo, dialect better). While I have close friends who are sound Christians that see some value in Lamsa's work - I get that, and can appreciate it - I would also discourage them and others from taking his translation work too seriously, as it may be questionable due to the influences he himself had.
Speaking of the Way International, that is of interest because after the death of Victor Paul Wierwille and the later scandal that surrounded his successor, Craig Martindale, a number of groups split from the original cult and formed their own versions of it - they differ some what in administration, as some of them don't have Wierwille's original rigidity, but they haven't changed the quasi-Arian doctrines that Wierwille taught. These groups believe in a school of thought called "Aramaic Primacy," which would assert that because Jesus spoke Aramaic, the original Bible must have therefore been written in it. There are two big issues with this. First, traditional Biblical scholarship - including the Syriac and Assyrian Church traditions - acknowledge Greek as the original language of Scripture (and some Hebrew as well, especially in regard to the Old Testament). Therefore, given this is the accepted view and it has the evidence to support it, Wierwille and even to a lesser extent Lamsa were wrong about the "Aramaic Primacy" just on that alone. But, there is another complication too - the Aramaic many of them rely on is either Assyrian or Suryoyo, or possibly ancient Estrangelo, which the latter two dialects derive from. The Aramaic Jesus spoke would have been a totally different dialect entirely, as it was Palestinian Aramaic, and if there was an existing dialect that was closer to that, it would more than likely be the Aramaic spoken by the small Samaritan community in Israel today. With that established, one of the branch-offs of Wierwille's original cult was a woman named Janet Magiera, who more or less compiled her own Aramaic translation. There is little fundamentally different about it from Wierwille's, and therefore it is to be studied or read with a big grain of salt. In our enthusiasm, we tend to embrace some weird things, and it seems these ancient Christian communities like the Assyrians often end up being exploited by groups that are radically different than their traditional Churches. The same is true with the Ethiopians too, which we will get into next.
If one browses online shopping platforms like Ebay, Amazon, or Temu, you will see literally dozens of books with the title "Complete Ethiopian Bible." This seems to be a recent phenomenon, as I didn't recall seeing these a few years back. I don't see anything fundamentally wrong with them on a theological level, but the problem is they are not the authorized Ethiopian Church translation, which doesn't exist yet (although I have heard rumors about one being in progress). Also, these books seem to be knockoffs of each other too. Unlike Lamsa or the various incarnations of Wierwillism though, the problem with these Bibles is not necessarily their theology - they don't claim to be something "secret" or "hidden" for one thing - but rather their authenticity as actual translations from the Ge'ez text. While some of them are actually quite good and are decent study aids - I so far have liked Asher Wilson's as well as the Faith Made edition of this - it's important to be consistently factual about what these resources are. However, for an even longer time, there are these other versions of Ethiopian Bibles, liturgy books, and classic works like the Kebra Nagast that I would find theologically suspect as well, and that is because of one thing - those particular English-language materials are often the production of Rastafarian sects, and that brings in a whole new level of heresy. If you are looking for research material particularly on the Ethiopian Tewahedo Church, I would advise looking to authentic Ethiopian sources first, and often a good Ethiopian scholar or priest can help with that.
Finally, let's talk about Dake a little. Finis Jennings Dake (1902-1987) was a Pentecostal minister who was first with the Assemblies of God, and later the Church of God, before becoming independent. An uncle years ago when I was still young myself gifted me a Dake's Bible, and I have to be honest with you, it is impressive - most people read it for the extensive liner notes more than anything, and the four columns of text on each page could easily elevate Dake's notes to the level of Scripture, which is an inherent danger. The connection that few have made though is that Dake too also relied on some of Lamsa's work - Dake's citation of Lamsa's work as being "authentic Aramaic" led many Pentecostals to be exposed to Lamsa indirectly, and this is why it has been even noted that some high-profile televangelists such as Benny Hinn, the late Kenneth Hagin, and Kenneth Copeland will often use passages from Lamsa to justify their own odd theological ideas. I admittedly did this too, as when I was a young minister I heavily relied on both Bibles for my own sermon preparation. I honestly regret doing that now, and that is why I wanted to publish something here warning people about the risks of relying on unorthodox translations of the Bible just because they promise some "hidden meanings" or they have an impressive amount of notes and commentary in the margins. I have actually learned over the years to be more cautious of that. Hopefully, that is a warning many will take seriously.
So, of these three Bible translations - Lamsa, Dake, and the numerous English-Language "Complete Ethiopian Bibles" out there - I think the only one I could still utilize with good conscience is the Ethiopian Bibles, and that is fine as long as you understand that these are not official translations. The one I have by Asher Wilson in particular is actually quite good - he and his co-editor, both of whom are fairly sound Lutheran Evangelicals with Concordia Seminary credentials - and I can find value in it as I have a few neat takeaways of my own by learning to appreciate the Ethiopian Canon better. It is also good to be at least familiar with Lamsa and Dake too, and you can research them as long as you are grounded enough in your own faith to reject some of the wilder and somewhat heretical ideas they had.
Thank you for joining me today, and will see you next time.
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