The Aramaic Bible Center is an educational mission of the Church of Living Truth and Metamind Publications. In an attempt to provide a more complete understanding of the historical Jesus and His teachings the Aramaic Bible Center has undertaken the task of researching the history and literature of the earliest Aramaic speaking Christians. The Church of Living Truth is a staunch advocate of Biblical Science as it is practiced by biblical scholars in the form of Biblical Criticism. By Criticism we mean the attempt to discern the authentic message of the Bible through a process of analysis made possible by the sciences of Archaeology, Anthropology, and Linguistics.

The quest for understanding the sacred text takes many forms. The methods and goals of biblical criticism arise with the kinds of questions we have about the Bible's meaning. The search for understanding the Bible's meaning originates with particular questions not only about the content of individual books, but also about when, why, and how these books were produced.

When scholars realized the Bible had been physically handed down in manuscripts that are not identical to one another, they set out to establish what the sources of the written form of the tradition were, in number and kind, and whether the process of transmission was reliable. At first this required that the known manuscripts be catalogued and compared. Then a critical edition could be prepared, which showed where the major variations in wording and placement of biblical texts occurred. The goal of this level of biblical study, called textual criticism, was to establish a trustworthy text.

Other scholars were prompted by an interest to know about the kinds of materials contained in the Bible and how they may have related to the real lives of those who were responsible for producing it. In view of the realization that the transmission of biblical tradition may be quite complex, these scholars set out to catalogue the various shapes that tradition, preserved in the Bible, took. With the help of comparison with other ancient literature, contemporaneous with the Bible, they were able to isolate narrative, poetic, cultic, legal, literary and historical materials, which had their own definite shapes or forms. These, they conjectured, functioned in relation to the various circumstances of life in the ancient biblical world. Such criticism came to be known as form criticism.

Once sources and composite elements of biblical texts could be identified, it was inevitable that interest would turn to the persons who collected and ordered these materials in continuous biblical books. Naturally scholars wanted to know if the process was merely one of collection, or whether it involved editing and composition as well. Out of this method of biblical criticism, called redaction criticism, emerged the identity of particular biblical authors, or editors, known largely from how they shaped the traditions they received into an ordered and continuous form.

Frequently, methods that are primarily concerned with this kind of historical interpretation of the Bible are called diachronic. The literal meaning of this word is "through time," that is, over a span of time. Diachronic methods of biblical interpretation are then interested in how the books of the Bible originated and how they changed down through the time of the biblical period. Traditional diachronic methods fit within approaches that are historical-critical, such as source criticism, form criticism, redaction criticism and the study of the history of a tradition.

To achieve our goals, the Church of Living Truth has reprinted a number of the books that were originally written by the first Western scholars to discover, translate, transcribe, analyze and ultimately publish their findings regarding the earliest Christian literature written in the very language that Jesus spoke. Through our efforts we have managed to document how the earliest manuscripts were discovered, who discovered them, and what they learned. In the seventeen books that we have reprinted, a wealth of information is available to the general public for the first time. We believe that the time has come to roll away the stone so that the original teachings of Jesus might be known to Christian laymen and women.

As a Non-Profit 501-c-3 religious, charitable, and educational organization we are offering these books to the public for suggested offerings that are fully deductable. Since our publishing work is fully funded by donations, and offerings, we sincerely hope and pray that you will support our efforts to continue to provide information that will enable us to more fully understand the Gospels. Donations can be made through this linked webpage OFFERINGS Books purchased through our website with suggested offerings will be acknowledged with a receipt that we will enclose with the shipment of the book.

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