Susan,

The 1890 Strong's Concordance is an English language concordance of the King James Version of the bible.

See toadfrog's 12/28 post above regarding Catholic usage of the King James Version of the bible. While there are Catholic versions of Strong's available nowadays, to my knowledge, they haven't been used much by Catholics since they don't use the KJV.

Liland,

I think my dulia, hyperdulia, latria shorthand summed up your post pretty accurately. Or would my anonymity cause you to disagree with that?

As to your insinuation that any suggestion of Aramaic origins of the Greek translations of the New Testament would be considered either Catholic or (by association, perhaps?) merely lunatic fringe, I disagree.

While the scholarship is more recent than what you might be familiar with, there are, nonetheless, a number of reputable academics (as opposed to religious academics) who are pursuing this line of study. They publish in reputable journals and with reputable presses, in which they discuss this aspect of the Hebrew/Aramaic biblical and contemporaneous non-biblical written record. Two such journals include Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies, and the Journal of the Aramaic Bible. Online there is also the Syriac Orthodox Resources WWW Site, originally housed at Berkeley, and now found at Catholic University.

I realize what I'm saying sounds a bit like we aren't in Kansas anymore to some of you. So be it. Protestants tend to view the Greek texts as The Written Word of God. Catholics tend to view the Hebrew/Aramaic texts (including Apocrypha and and Pseudepigrapha) as the more authentic source.

Nearly all biblical scholars would now agree that Greek Christian texts were later translated into Aramaic Christian texts. The controversy we are bantering about here is to what extent did the Greek writers of those texts simply translate the Aramaic oral and written biblical texts into Greek and write it down, and the church fathers (both Roman and Orthodox) claim the translations as the true word of God (for the Old Testament) and the true sayings of Jesus (for the New Testament).

I'll agree that the jury is still out on this one. But considering how recently some of these texts have been recovered (ie late 19th c. and as late as what, 1945 for the Nag Hammadi?), I'm not ready to concede on the Hebrew/Aramaic origins of the New Testament texts just yet.