Aramaic Peshitta
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page IV
Before
the ten tribes were carried away into Assyria, they had been brought under the
power of the Syrians of Damascus, and this may have tended to change their
language. While they were in Assyria, they seem to have adopted Syriac wholly,
and to have ceased to speak their ancient Hebrew tongue.
DR. ASAHEL GRANT, M. D., a modern missionary to that part of ancient Assyria,
which is now called Coordistan, published a book, the third edition of which is
dated 1844, entitled, "The Nestorians, or the Lost Tribes." At page
55, he says that among the Nestorian Christians whose ancestors dwelt there from
before the time of Christ, the worship is still conducted and the Scriptures are
read "in the ancient Syriac language," which is now "quite
unintelligible to the common people;" so that when the Scriptures are read
to them, they have to be translated by the reader into the modernized Syriac,
which is now spoken both by these Nestorian Christians, and by the Israelites
who are not Christians, who dwell near them in Coordistan. He says at page 149,
that this modernized Syriac is "at this day a living language ONLY among
the Nestorians and nominal Jews of Media and Assyria; unless an exception be
found among the Syrian Christians dwelling west of the Tigris; who may, perhaps,
also have a Hebrew origin." He says that both the Nestorian Christians, and
the unchristianised Israelites, who use this "vernacular language, peculiar
to themselves, must have acquired it at a remote period of antiquity; because an
entire want of social intercourse forbids the idea that they have learned it
from each other in modern times."
Dr. Grant says, that both the Nestorians and the Israelites say that they all
speak this modern Syriac language because they have a "common
ancestry"; and he thinks that their common and peculiar language
"affords convincing proof that they are both alike the children of
Israel."
Dr. Grant was fully convinced that the ancestors of these Nestorians
"received the gospel from the apostles and immediate disciples of our
Saviour," (pg. 56); "from Thomas, Bartholomew, Thaddeus, and others;
not from Nestorius," from likeness to whom they are called Nestorians, (pg.
50). He says that their Scriptures, which are like other copies of the ancient
Peshito-Syriac Bible, have been preserved by them "in manuscript, with
great care and purity," (pg.60); that "these Nestorians throughout
Assyria and Media have a generally and universally believed tradition that they
are descendants of the ten tribes," (pg. 110); that the Israelites
"admit that the Nestorians are as truly the descendants of the Israelites
as themselves, (pg. 114); and that the Nestorians have a tradition that they
"came from the land of Palestine," (pg. 113).
Dr. Grant remarks that both the Nestorian Christians and the Israelites, inhabit
the very country where "the ten tribes were placed," (pg. 114); that
they "are the only people in Assyria who can be identified with the ten
tribes, and consequently that they must be their descendants," (pg. 140).
He says that Dr. Perkins, another missionary, agreed with him that the body of
the modern language now spoken by the Nestorians and Israelites, comes as
directly from the venerable Syriac, and as clearly, as the modern Greek does
from the ancient, (pg. 144).