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Arameans
Alphonse Mingana

Alphonse Mingana

Alphonse Mingana (1878–1937) was an Iraqi-born Syriac scholar, theologian, and orientalist best known for his work on early Christian and Islamic texts. He later worked in Europe, especially in Britain, where he founded the Mingana Collection of Middle Eastern manuscripts at the University of Birmingham. His research and publications significantly advanced the study of Syriac Christianity, early Islam, and Semitic languages.
Manuscript
The Expositor

The Expositor

"In fact, no Church can claim to have studied the Scriptures more, carefully, and to have applied all the scientific resources of the early ages of Christianity to biblical criticism more steadily than the Syriac community. From the second century till the first quarter of the seventh, eight different versions of the New Testament were produced by genuine researches of the Aramaean population, spreading from the Mediterranean shores to the East of Persia, and from the massif of the Taurus to the Arabian peninsula. [...] On the other hand, the writers of the Gospels, being from an Aramaic-speaking population, while writing in Greek were generally thinking in Syriac, and the Aramaic stamp of their phrases is sometimes so strong that without a knowledge of this language and the reading of the versions which are written in it, the real thought of the sacred author will perhaps be misunderstood."