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Robert P. Gordon | |
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| Born | 9 November 1945 |
| Alma mater | St Catharine's College, Cambridge |
| Scientific career | |
| Thesis | A study of Targum Jonathan to the Minor Prophets from Nahum to Malachi (1973) |
| Doctoral advisor | John Emerton |
| Website | www.robertpgordon.co.uk |
Robert Patterson Gordon (born 9 November 1945) is a British scholar who was the Regius Professor of Hebrew at the University of Cambridge from 1995 to 2012. [1]
Gordon was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He studied at Methodist College Belfast [2] and at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, where as an undergraduate, Gordon placed in the first class of the Oriental Studies Tripos. In 1973 he earned a PhD at the University of Cambridge with a thesis entitled A Study of Targum Jonathan to the Minor Prophets from Nahum to Malachi, under the supervision of Professor J.A. Emerton. In 2001 he was awarded the University of Cambridge’s Litt.D.
While pursuing doctoral studies, Gordon was appointed Assistant Lecturer in Hebrew and Semitic Languages at the University of Glasgow. Teaching Ancient Near Eastern History at Glasgow had a formative influence on Gordon’s subsequent research on the Old Testament. He returned to Cambridge as a Lecturer in Old Testament and Intertestamental Studies in the Faculty of Divinity in 1979. Upon his election as the Regius Professor of Hebrew in 1995, a post he held until his retirement in 2012, Gordon moved to the Faculty of Oriental Studies (now the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies). He is an Emeritus Fellow of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge.
Gordon served on advisory committees for three major Bible translations: Revised English Bible, New International Version, and English Standard Version.
Identified generally as an Old Testament scholar, Gordon's writing addressed issues presented by the various Old Testaments. These are the Aramaic- (Targums), Greek- (Septuagint), and Syriac-language (Peshitta) traditions that serve as conduits of the text and interpretation of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. Other Gordon’s works addressed the biblical text of the Old and New Testaments directly.
Gordon is a member of the British Society for Old Testament Study and served as the Society's president in 2003. He is a member of the editorial board of Vetus Testamentum , and served as the journal's Book List editor from 1998 to 2009. He was the secretary of the International Organization for the Study of the Old Testament from 2001 to 2004.
Gordon’s major authored or edited works include:
Gordon married Helen Ruth Lyttle in Belfast in 1970. They raised three children.
Aramaic is a Semitic language that originated among the Arameans in the ancient region of Syria. For over three thousand years, Aramaic served as a language of public life and administration of ancient kingdoms and empires and also as a language of divine worship and religious study. Several dialects are still spoken today. It subsequently branched into several Neo-Aramaic languages that are more widely spoken in modern times.
The Greek Old Testament, or Septuagint, is the earliest extant Greek translation of books from the Hebrew Bible. It includes several books beyond those contained in the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible as canonically used in the tradition of mainstream Rabbinical Judaism. The additional books were composed in Greek, Hebrew, or Aramaic, but in most cases, only the Greek version has survived to the present. It is the oldest and most important complete translation of the Hebrew Bible made by the Jews. Some targums translating or paraphrasing the Bible into Aramaic were also made around the same time.
The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh is the canonical collection of Hebrew scriptures, including the Torah, the Nevi'im, and the Ketuvim. These texts are almost exclusively in Biblical Hebrew, with a few passages in Biblical Aramaic.
A targum was an originally spoken translation of the Hebrew Bible that a professional translator would give in the common language of the listeners when that was not Hebrew. This had become necessary near the end of the first century BCE, as the common language was Aramaic and Hebrew was used for little more than schooling and worship. The translator frequently expanded his translation with paraphrases, explanations and examples, so it became a kind of sermon.
Nevi'im is the second major division of the Hebrew Bible, between the Torah (instruction) and Ketuvim (writings). The Nevi'im are divided into two groups. The Former Prophets consists of the narrative books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings; while the Latter Prophets include the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve Minor Prophets.
The Minor Prophets or Twelve Prophets, occasionally Book of the Twelve, is a collection of prophetic books, written between about the 8th and 4th centuries BC, which are in both the Jewish Tanakh and Christian Old Testament.
The Peshitta is the standard version of the Bible for churches in the Syriac tradition, including the Maronite Church, the Chaldean Catholic Church, the Syriac Catholic Church, the Syriac Orthodox Church, the Malabar Independent Syrian Church, the Syro-Malankara Catholic Church, the Mar Thoma Syrian Church, the Assyrian Church of the East and the Syro-Malabar Church.
George M. Lamsa was an Assyrian author. He was born in Mar Bishu in what is now the extreme east of Turkey. A native Aramaic speaker, he translated the Aramaic Peshitta Old and New Testaments into English. He popularized the claim of the Assyrian Church of the East that the New Testament was written in Aramaic and then translated into Greek, contrary to academic consensus.
The Aramaic original New Testament theory is the belief that the Christian New Testament was originally written in Aramaic.
Samuel Rolles Driver was an English divine and Hebrew scholar. He devoted his life to the study, both textual and critical, of the Old Testament. He was the father of Sir Godfrey Rolles Driver, also a distinguished biblical scholar.
John Wesley Etheridge was an English nonconformist minister and scholar. He was the first person to translate the four gospels from the Syriac Peshitta into English (1846), shortly before the full New Testament was translated by James Murdock (1856).
A polyglot is a book that contains side-by-side versions of the same text in several different languages. Some editions of the Bible or its parts are polyglots, in which the Hebrew and Greek originals are exhibited along with historical translations. Polyglots are useful for studying the history of the text and its interpretation.
Bible translations into Aramaic covers both Jewish translations into Aramaic (Targum) and Christian translations into Aramaic, also called Syriac (Peshitta).
Jonas Carl Greenfield was an American scholar of Semitic languages, who published in the fields of Semitic Epigraphy, Aramaic Studies and Qumran Studies, and a distinguished member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
John Merlin Powis Smith was an English-born, American orientalist and biblical scholar.
A biblical canon is a set of texts which a particular Jewish or Christian religious community regards as part of the Bible.
Michael B. Shepherd is an assistant professor of Biblical Studies at Cedarville University who specializes in Hebrew/Aramaic language and exegesis. Before joining Cedarville in 2015, Shepherd held the John and Allie Fogleman Assistant Professor of Old Testament and Hebrew at Louisiana College in Pineville, Louisiana, as well as professor of Old Testament and Hebrew at the Caskey School of Divinity.
Takamitsu Muraoka is a Japanese Orientalist. He was Chair of Hebrew, Israelite Antiquities and Ugaritic at Leiden University in the Netherlands from 1991 till 2003 and is most notable for his studies of Hebrew and Aramaic linguistics and the ancient translations of the Bible, notably of the Septuagint.
Aramaic studies are scientific studies of the Aramaic language and cultural history of Arameans. As a specific field within Semitic studies, Aramaic studies are closely related to similar disciplines, like Hebraic studies and Arabic studies.
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