The Language of Jesus
Matthew 4:1-11

February 10, 2008


“I heard the voice of Jesus say, ‘I am this dark world’s light, look unto me, your morn shall rise, and all your day be bright.’” Yet, when you come down to it, no one has heard the literal voice of Jesus, the sound and tone and depth of how he actually sounded. Our mind’s ear can only imagine.

The only place we actually “hear” Jesus’ voice and words is in the Gospels of the New Testament, originally written in Koiné Greek, a dialect used by traders and the so-called common people - a genius of a choice for this language was used around the ancient Mediterranean world, so it was an effective tool to get out the Word.

However, many know that Jesus probably spoke Aramaic, a Semitic language closely related to Hebrew. By this time, Hebrew was no longer in use except for worship in the synagogues where it is still the language of the Tanach, the Old Testament. The rabbi or cantor would read the scripture for the day in Hebrew and then comment and preach on the text in Aramaic and we have a lot of these translations or targums available.

Moreover, there are a number of instances in the Greek Gospels where the evangelist feels compelled to simply transliterate the original Aramaic phrase of Jesus which had been passed down by word of mouth. “Eli, Eli, lama sabbachthani?” “Talitha, cum!” “Ephphatha!” “Abba, Father.”

Aramaic is the oldest continually spoken language, the first evidence of it around 1000 B. C., but just scraps from Jesus’ time are available. Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion included a significant amount of dialogue in Aramaic. William Fulco, SJ, perhaps the world’s expert in that particular period of Aramaic was hired by Gibson and company to come up with a dialogue for the movie, so it was manufactured, not real historical language.

So where do we hear the voice of Jesus? Aramaic did not fade away growing and expanding its boundaries, as it was also used in the East as the language of traders and travelers. In the latter part of the 2nd century, a new dialect, Syriac, was beginning to emerge with its own script, the dialect of Urhai (modern day Urfa in southeastern Turkey) which the Greeks called Edessa. One would think Syriac came from Syria, and while it was spoken in that region north of Israel and Palestine, it had spread to the mountainous regions of southeastern Turkey, modern-day Iraq and Iran, and wouldn’t stop there. This local dialect of Edessa had become the standard for Syriac throughout the ancient world, spoken by Jews, Persians, Arabs, pagans of all sorts, but especially by Christians.

The golden age of Syriac literature was from the late 200’s to the mid-600’s, much of it still not translated and unpublished. The Syriac-speaking Church took great pride in its Semitic language and its heritage as the language of Jesus. The most important work, naturally, was the early translation of the Bible called the Peshitta or the ‘Simple Version.’ Syriac scholars became experts in producing more and more accurate Biblical translations in the coming centuries.

Everything imaginable was written: commentaries on the Bible, sermons on theological controversies, spiritual direction and advice to monks on how to live in a monastery. Poetry galore, usually a lyrical way of retelling the Biblical stories, histories of the world and of the church, stories about saints and martyrs, and eventually grammars of the Syriac language, philosophy, logic, science and medicine, and geography.

We complain about all how Christianity is so divided today; it was worse back then. One part of the Syriac-speaking church was so persecuted they migrated east, along the Silk Road into Central Asia and finally into China. There are a number of marvelous monuments from the 700-800’s inscribed in both Syriac and Chinese. The legend goes that Syriac clergy at the court of Kublai Khan almost converted him to Christianity, which might have had an immense impact on the subsequent course of world history, but he never quite did.

By 640 Arab armies had conquered most of Syriac-speaking territory for Islam, but contrary to popular opinion, relationships between the two faiths were remarkably cordial in the first three centuries. While most Syriac Christians eventually spoke and wrote Arabic, they actually increased their writing in Syriac. The greatest of all Syriac writers is thought to be virtually the last one - Bar Hebraeus, “Son of the Hebrew,” or Gregory Abdul al-Faraj who died in 1286, a genius who wrote on every subject known to humanity at the time.

Back to those Syriac translators who had perhaps the most significant effect upon world civilization. In the 800-900’s, the height of the so-called Dark Ages in Europe, the intellectual capital of the world was Baghdad. Philosophy was alive in Baghdad, Muslims and Christians studied together at the great Bayt al-hikmah (House of Wisdom). Here the classics of Greek civilization, Aristotle and Plato among many others, began their long journey back into Western Europe via Moorish Spain to help nurture and ignite the Renaissance. The problem was that the Muslims and Arabs did not know Greek. Here in their midst was this community of Syriac Christian scholars, heirs of a long tradition of translating the Greek New Testament and other Greek Christian writers. Scholars such as Hunayn ibn-Ishaq translated the Greek classics first into Syriac and then into Arabic. It was the language of Jesus that revived learning in the West under the sponsorship and agency of Islam. How ironically wonderful!

The ancestral region of the Syriac speaking Christian Church straddles the borders of Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran, which is sometimes identified as Kurdistan, one of the most volatile areas in today’s world. As a consequence, the people living in the mountain villages, speaking a modern version of Syriac and Aramaic, have been fleeing the region in droves. Large communities are now settled in Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland, along with many who came to North America, Australia, and other European nations.

How do we keep the language of Jesus alive? Sweden, for instance, has had a long standing educational principle in practice that every child should be able to learn in his/her native tongue. For the children from the Tur Abdin, reading primers and grammars have been written and used in schools for two decades. A movement on the part of an ecumenical group of Syrian bishops and educators is afoot to institute the use of Classical Syriac (the state of the language from the 3rd-7th centuries) as the lingua franca, the common spoken language among the diverse number of nationalities and denominations.

How did I get into this language? When I was in seminary in Berkeley, California, I liked to read the works of Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk who wrote extensively on the spiritual and monastic life. One of his books was called The Wisdom of the Desert Fathers, a collection of short stories and sayings by the monks who went off to live in the Egyptian desert in the 300s and 400s. The introduction mentioned that among other languages this collection of stories was available in Syriac. Having taken one year of Biblical Hebrew, my eye caught the notice that beginning Syriac was going to be offered, so I jumped. I continued to take Syriac at Catholic University of America, Washington, DC, during my first pastorate, earning an MA.

In 1984 I went to the international Symposium Syriacum in Oosterhesselen, The Netherlands, south of Groningen. I met Martien Parmentier, a Dutch Old Catholic pastor and scholar, who had been working like me on an old collection of sermons, The Book of Steps. He introduced me to his doctoral supervisor, Sebastian Brock of the University of Oxford who agreed to offer suggestions and corrections to my translations through the mails. We did so for a few years until in 1995 our family decided to do something drastically different, moving to Oxford and I studied directly under Dr Brock.

After finishing the degree I came back to Canada and this is where I landed. The Book of Steps, after a long delay from the publishers, finally came out in 2004. Some good things take a very long time. I am now at work on the sermons of a similar writer, Philoxenus of Mabbug, which I hope to finish translating this spring while on sabbatical leave at the Center of Theological Inquiry, Princeton, New Jersey. Philoxenus - whose name means “lover of strangers” - wrote 13 sermons on the spiritual life to monks under his supervision as a bishop. His shortest sermon is 25 pages, the longest 95 - poor monks. The sermons tackle traditional and unusual topics: faith, simplicity of heart, the fear of God, and then renunciation of the world, followed by gluttony and fornication. For the record, Philoxenus is against fornication! His fundamental principle is “the lust of the belly (= gluttony) is the beginning of all sin.” Should be on everyone’s fridge.

I don’t know how many of you used to watch the Jack Paar Show. I can remember as a young teenager watching one of the shows in which he broadcast one of his ‘home movies.’ He and his family had toured the Holy Land in Israel. The final shots were a panorama from a plane during which a speaker was going to pray the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic, as it would have originally sounded. I have not forgotten that scene and those sounds and what it meant to be hearing the voice of Jesus say, “Awoun, dabshemaya....”

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan