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In April of 1954, a manuscript of the New Testament in the Aramaic language was first shown to the public in America. On that day, the Yonan Codex was, at the President’s request, presented at the White House to President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. After their examination, it was then transported to the Library of Congress for display. In an emotion packed unveiling, a panel of speakers headed by the Secretary of State gave tribute in an impressive ceremony.
The manuscript was labeled as the “N.T. Time Bomb,” by the Reverend Frederick Brown Harris, Chaplain to the United States Senate. His words are most appropriate. We quote them from his newspaper article about the manuscript.
“The N.T. of the title stand for New Testament. More profound in its final significance than the test of any instrument of deadly destruction on the Nevada desert was a recent April scene in the Capitol of the Nation. The setting was the exquisitely beautiful Great Hall of the Library of Congress. That cathedral of learning and letters, where are stored the garnered treasures of all man’s searching and striving, received that day into its custody a priceless volume, its safety insured for $1½ million, escorted by motored police and armed guards.”
“It was about 1,600 years ago that a skillful scribe, with an evident pride in expert workmanship, laboriously yet joyously inscribed on parchment velum the entire New Testament. The chapter headings in red are still timelessly brilliant. Across the centuries, through the varied vicissitudes of history, invasion and catastrophic social and political changes, including cruel examples of man’s inhumanity to man, this book has been almost miraculously preserved. It represents the canon of the New Testament on which the early followers of the Great Galilean were in agreement before divisive controversies split the church. But the thing that lifts it to the pinnacle of Biblical interest is that it is written in the language used by Jesus, who spake as never man spake, as the vehicle of His deathless concepts of life. Here are the very syllables as they fell from His lips when the matchless Teacher was here among men. It is like hearing the One whose birth broke the ages in two, talking to our modern age without a language barrier between. Here is not a translation of the words, but the words themselves of that One who under the blue sky of Palestine, declared: ‘My words shall not pass away. They are spirit and they are life.’ Gazing across the years to be, He warned that those who defy His precepts, which are the laws of life, will be ground to powder.”
“What treasures will be found as the very language of Jesus (Y’Shua)
is studied can only be imagined.”
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