The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Rotation Of The Ninevites

Rotation Of The Ninevites
Posted by pancho (Guest) - Wednesday, February 28 2007, 16:26:23 (CET)
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The modern Assyrians had no independent knowledge of their supposed history as the ancient Assyrians. This is most strange in people so sure they maintained that connection through 2000 plus years. What they knew about the ancients they learned, like everyone else before the excavations, through the Hebrew bible that Christianity inherited from them hoary Hebrews. The memory of ancient Assyria was kept alive, not by Assyrian writers or historians all those hundreds of years, but rather from the stories in the Old Testament.

That’s the reason Nestorians have such difficulty allowing their ancient “cousins” to sit at table with them, because that branch of the family were known as bloody savages for 2000 years and as nothing else. To round out the difficulty, even when their descendants (sic em) turned Christians, they went and got themselves excommunicated and branded as heretics….something they didn’t think to mind till the Europeans reminded them…so that many turned orthodox once again while the rest renamed their Nestorian churches “Church of East” etc…still failing to add “Assyrian” till 1976 A.D. It has been a very slow road to “pride” that has wound through the Bible for most of human history, where the ancients are presented as nothing to be proud of at all.

The bible Nestorians inherited “…gave them not only a sacred book but also a vision of the past and its peoples; it provided them with a new and distinct identity. In time, the only past these Christians (Nestorians, mine) knew came from the Old Testament…what Fergus Millar calls, ‘the historical inheritance of the Bible’”.

When Jesus speaks of Jonah and the Rotation of the Ninevites, it is to tell a universal story of repentance at the threat of punishment by the lord and the sinful people singled out are the Ninevites…I guess because no worse sinners were handy at the time. This has "rotated" to become, to our befuddled nationalists, a cause for pride. They have chosen to see it as proof that “our” forefathers always “remembered” their ancestors. Jesus knew the story well and used the sinning Ninevites as a model for his people, to show them that even people as full of sin as the Ninevites were saved in time…”and what is here is greater than Jonah”….so that if them damned Ninevites could take warning, you had better as well for you are even WORSE than they were.

Dr Joseph continues:

“ Emhardt and Lamsa in the 1920s, and the Assyrian nationalists after them, have misinterpreted the Rogation of the Ninevites (Ba’uta d’Ninwaye) as a unique fast among the Nestorians, observed as a thanksgiving ‘for the salvation of their forefathers’, entirely missing the theological and historical significance of the Biblical story of Jonah in both Jewish and Christian traditions.



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