The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

WlLCOX The Aramaic Background of the New Testament 367
grammatical features which appear in the LXX?
In this connection we should remember that certain of the books of
the Apocrypha, for example, the Book of Tobit, although in Greek,
have presented Aramaisms in their style and thereby encouraged
scholars to speculate that the original form of the book may have been
Aramaic (or perhaps, Hebrew): here at last the appearance of several
fragments of Tobit in Hebrew and another in Aramaic at Qumran has
largely settled the matter: the Aramaisms were after all indications of
translation-Greek, and the matter has been tangibly proved. This alone
should be a warning not to be too dogmatic about the allegedly pervasive
influence of the style and language of the LXX upon NT authors.
The fact is, the 'septuagintalism' case rests on a series of suppositions,
which are then consciously or unconsciously elevated to the appearance
of fact, and used to deny the reality of the influence of Aramaic and/
or Hebrew. But perhaps the greatest weakness of the septuagintalismtheory
is the circularity of its logic.
Here we may refer to the Babatha Archive, officially named
P. Yadin. These documents, found in the so-called 'Cave of Letters' at
Nahal Hever, are mostly dated quite precisely to the day and month of
the relevant Roman regnal year, and some also include consular dating
and even the Greek month and date. The dates range from 93/4-132
CE. Babatha was a good businesswoman but she does not appear to
have written or spoken Greek. The witnesses to the documents give
their attestations and signatures in their own language, Aramaic,
Nabataean or Greek. A number of the documents attest that they were
written by the scribe «ru3 DID by, 'at the dictation of Babatha' (literally:
'at the mouth of Babatha'). The fascinating thing is that the Greek
documents in this collection frequently display expressions which, if
found in the New Testament, would be overwhelmingly claimed as
'septuagintalisms'. But it must be beyond belief that that is what they
are here. The documents are not religious texts, and it is clearly
highly doubtful that Babatha knew much if any Greek, and in the
realms of fancy to suggest that her long-suffering scribes were trying
to 'septuagintalize' her documents to give them a Jewish or biblical
flavour. Yet this is exactly how we are told that some New Testament
writers behaved. That is, the absence of an actual Aramaic or Hebrew
original in our hands enables theories to be proposed which are in fact
little more than speculation, but which are then exalted to the rank of
near fact, on the ground that those who support the Aramaic and/or