Our knowledge of the corpus of extra-biblical and extra-rabbinical Aramaic texts has largely been the acquisition of the last seventy-five to a hundred years. Through numerous discoveries in Egypt, Arabia, Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, Armenia, Mesopotamia, Persia and the Indus Valley we have come to know what various phases of Aramaic were like from the tenth century B.C. until roughly the eighth century A.D. This knowledge has enabled us to situate the biblical Aramaic of Ezra and Daniel in a matrix similar to that provided by extra-biblical Hebrew texts for biblical Hebrew.

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Speculation about the “change” in the name of the apostle Peter will undoubtedly always be in order. In this respect the recent article of Cecil Roth of Oxford raises an interesting point. He suggests that the apostle's name Peter prevailed in time over Simon because of a current tendency of contemporary Judaism to avoid the use of the name Σίμων or װעמש. The latter name was “commonly or even methodically modified or eliminated, for some reason or the other, among the Jews at the beginning of the Christian era. One finds it difficult to avoid the conclusion that the modification of the name of the Apostle by the elimination of ‘Simon’ was connected with this and due to the same cause, whatever that may have been.” Roth offers parallels of persons whose name was Simon, but who were known more usually by a patronymic or a nickname (ben Sira, ben Zoma, ben Azzai, ben Nanos, bar Kochba), and suggests that it was a peculiarly “patriotic” name, borne by great national and revolutionary leaders such as Simon Maccabee, Simon the High Priest (Sir 50.1–21), Simeon ben Šeṭaḥ (politician-Rabbi of the second century B. C), Simon the rebel (Josephus, JW 2.4,2 #57; Ant. 17.10,6 #273), Simon the son of the founder of the Zealots, Judah the Galilean (Josephus, Ant. 20.5,2 #102), Simon bar Giora (leader in the First Revolt), Simon bar Kochba (leader of the Second Revolt).

In his article on the name Simon (HTR 56, 1963, 1-5) Father Joseph A. Fitzmyer, S.J., assembles a number of instances to show that this "is the most frequently used name for Jews of the period. .. of Roman denomination." From this he deduces that my suggestion (HTR 54, 1961, 91-97) that its use was deliberately avoided for some reason by Jews at this time (this perhaps explaining the change of the name of the Apostle Simon to Peter) can have no basis. On the contrary, I am inclined to think that his investigation strongly supports my view; he seems to have misunderstood me, unless the inadequacies of language led me to express myself awkwardly. For what I proposed was not that the name Simon (Simeon) was not applied at this period-i.e., was not given by Jewish parents to their childrenbut that, when given, there was a tendency for it not to be used, the patronymic "the son of. . ." being normally substituted. Clearly in an official act, or on a tombstone, this would not have been the case. The number of funerary inscriptions recording persons officially named Simon is irrelevant, so long as we do not know how they were actually called at home and in the marketplace. The recently discovered documents from the Engedi neighborhood confirm what we already knew, that the leader of the Second Revolt was Simon; but from the literary sources already available it is certain that colloquially he was known as Bar Kosiba (or Bar Kochba). Similarly, we have positive evidence Simon Bar Giora, the leader of the last desperate resistance in Jerusalem in the siege of 69/70, was normally referred to as Bar Giora, and Rabbi Simeon ben Zoma a generation later as Ben Zoma, and so on. As I say in my article: when in this period a man was generally called by a patronymic of this type, and his Eigenname is known, that name in a majority of cases was Simon. The fact that it was so popular, as Father Fitzmyer has shewn, may perhaps confirm my suggestion that it had patriotic associations, this being the reason for its avoidance in actual usage. CECIL ROTH OXFORD, ENGLAND Dr. Roth's note makes his position clearer. I shall leave to others the judgment whether I misunderstood what was originally written. But the problem still remains. How do we know that "there was a