Customer Reviews

Idioms in the Bible Explained and a Key to the Original Gospels

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This book could mean hope for the fundamentalists. If they take this book to heart maybe they will find a more loving God. I loved the book. I would also recommend the book An Encounter With A Prophet; but only for those people who enjoyed this book. The Encounter is way too far advanced for the fundamentalist to start off with. Again this is a wonderful work.

This book should cause Christians to re-think their current belief about prophecies of Jesus returning on the clouds or about the Rapture. According to the Aramaic-speaking Lamsa, these prophecies (and many others) are idioms or metaphors and are not to be interpreted literally. A real eye-opener for theologians and layman alike. How did this book get ignored for 60 years?

Hundreds of important verses of the Bible are translated by Lamsa from the Tree of Life in the garden (Gen. 2:9) being an idiom meaning "sex, posterity, progeny;" to the Messiah coming from the clouds (Dan. 7:13) being a metaphor meaning "coming with great honor and glory;" to the meeting of the Lord in the air (II Thess. 4:17) simply meaning "to hasten meet him."

After reading this book, I wondered how many Christian tenets are based on the mistranslation of idioms. It sort of puts Christianity "in a pickle," when you think about it.

This book, and Lamsa's Bible translation, could revolutionalize Christianity if enough theologians were aware of it. Perhaps seeds of thought for a New Christianity that finally transcends the Dark Ages.

The purpose of this book is to help us understand the idioms used in the Bible.
Part One is broken down into books by order;Genesis first etc..
A phrase and location are listed with a translation.
An example-Gen.49:24 "His bow abode in strength" means he will become a valiant warrior.

Some of the translations in this book are "off the mark" in my opinion.
The number 666 meaning Nero Caesar.
The Sons of God from Genesis 6 being Seth's descendants.
These ideas are debatable.

A Key to the original Gospels(Part Two of the book) has some interesting information.
"Eli,Eli,Lmana Sabachthani" the phrase uttered my Messiah shortly before his death is rendered-"My God,my God,for this I was kept."

Mr.Lamsa may have went a bit too far looking for symbolic meaning in passages that have a literal meaning.
While I don't think that this book is without error, it has value as a tool for studying some difficult idioms.

This book contains over 1000 passages from both New and Old Testaments that the author, George Lamsa, believed to contain significant differences from our "conventional" English derivations of the original script, which was written in Aramaic (bearing in mind that the Syrian Orthodox Church considers the Hebrew language to be "Western Aramaic"). Some of the differences are significant, though there is no difference which would offend anyone's sense of Gospel meaning.

George Lamsa is one of the foremost Ancient Aramaic Scholars in the world today. He offers great insight to idioms and difficult scriptures in the bible. I myself am a Christian author and his handling of Eli, Eli, lamana shabachthani is right on. (My spelling may be a little off on these Aramaic words because I do not have them in front of me.) If you want to better understand the bible and the society during Jesus Christ time on earth than this book is a must for those who really want to see the accuracy and the integrity in the word of God.

This book explains certain items in the bible with their meaning in Aramic, the language of Jesus' time.

These colloquial meanings of some familiar parts of scripture did shed new light on some of the ancient texts. All of us read Christian scripture that has been handed down from transcription to translation to interpretation for many centuries. It was interesting to read the possible meanings of some of this scripture.

Books like this are valuable because they help us to see the context in which they were written. If an accounting for context and the historical era aren't taken into consideration, can the truth of scripture ever be revealed? Even if scripture was inspired by God?

Recommended!

What a difference Prof. George Lamsa's explanation's make to the scene at the Wedding at Cana. By understanding the customs of the time we are provided with an enhanced peek at the wedding party and watch as Mary makes sure that Jesus is aware of his duties as a wedding guest.

By not being intimitely aquainted with the Aramaic language of Jesus's time, where one word can have several meanings, where what is said turns out not to be what is meant, it's no wonder early translations into Greek and Roman missed important points.

This book is already one of my prized possessions for bible study.

Every language has idioms, and the translation from Aramaic to Greek to English has left much to be desired. This fills in the gap for many verses in the NT and OT.
Although Lamsa did his work by himself as Jermone did in the Latin Vulgate; there are some things that appear opinionated with need of confirmation. A great reference for scholars.

This book is very interesting and enlightening however, only a strong Christian should embark on this journey. Although it sheds light on many passages of the Bible, it also tends to strip away the deity of Christ and can be considered blasphemous. Approach with caution.

I read through this book in the library at my University. Most of the so-called "idioms" were not even idioms!! Most are invented! They have nothing to do with the culture or history of Israel or Hebrew. They are in fact the author's invention of idioms. There are real idioms in both the Old and New Testaments that most people are not even aware of, and the author of this book is not even aware of them himself. I am a student of Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic and I know better than to call simple words and phrases "idioms" just because I want to believe that they are idioms. Besides, this book is quite old. It was first copyrighted in the 1970s. This book is not based on real Hebrew idioms, but his own idea of what is and isn't an idiom. Just about any phrase could be an idiom, such as "let there be light." He says that means, "let there be enlightenment." He says that serpent is an idiom for the enemy! That is not correct! He does that to many words and phrases that have absolutely nothing to do with idioms, while ignoring the true idioms! I suggest you avoid this book.

The Key to the Original Gospels is alright. But, if you want better information than what he has, you should get good scholarly books on the history of the Jews, the Jewish culture, the cultures surrounding the Jews, and their religions both during the Old Testament and the New Testament. Such books would bring twice as much clarity than this book will ever give.