Dr. George M. Lamsa
was an Assyrian scholar and 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 (literally "straight, simple, sincere or true") into English versions of the Old Testament and New Testament.
Dr. Lamsa was a member of the Assyrian Church of the East. He was a strong advocate of one of that Church's beliefs: Peshitta primacy (a form of Aramaic primacy). His hypothesis was that for the New Testament, the Aramaic Peshitta was the original text, and the Greek version was translated from it. In support of this, he noted that Aramaic was the language of Jesus, His Disciples and the earliest Christians, including the authors of the Bible.
Lamsa further claimed that while most of the Old Testament was written in Hebrew, the original was lost and the present Hebrew version, the Masoretic text, was re-translated from the Peshitta.