LBP - 1957
Lamsa Bible
OldCovenantNewCovenant
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This translation of the Old and New Testaments is basedon Peshitta manuscripts which have comprised the accepted Bible of allthose Christians who have used Syriac as their language of prayer and worshipfor many centuries. The Church of the East and some noted Western scholarsdispute the belief of modern scholarship that the originals of the FourGospels and other parts of the New Testament were written in Greek. Inany case, Aramaic speech is an underlying factor and New Testament writersdrew on documents written in Aramaic. Syriac is the literary dialect ofAramaic. From the Mediterranean east into India, the Peshitta is stillthe Bible of preference among Christians.

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

Manuscripts used were the Codex Ambrosianus for the OldTestament and the Mortimer-McCawley manuscript for the New Testament. Comparisonshave been made with other Peshitta manuscripts, including the oldest datedmanuscript in existence. The term Peshitta means straight, simple, sincereand true, that is, the original. Even the Moslems in the Middle East acceptand revere the Peshitta text.

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

A. J. Holman Company (1957)

[Tyndale House, Cambridge, UnitedKingdom]

Genesis1: 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.

 
 

John1: 1 - 3

The Word was in the beginning, and that very Word waswith 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 thatwas created came to be.

Comparisons which include this version: