ARAMAIC AS THE LANGUAGE OF JESUS OF NAZARETH

Jesus written in Aramaic

Although Bible scholars have called Aramaic "the Language of Jesus" most Christians have never heard of Aramaic. However, anyone who has read the Bible has been exposed to Aramaic whether he or she knows it or not. "Abba, Father" is Aramaic. Golgotha, the place where Jesus was crucified is Aramaic for "Skull-Place". 
Names such as Thomas, Barnabas, Martha, and Magdalene are all Aramaic names. "Maranatha" is a short Aramaic prayer that is left un-translated in the New Testament. Translated from the Aramaic it means, "Our Lord, Come!" After the release of Mel Gibson's movie "The Passion of the Christ", which was filmed mostly in Aramaic, more people have been exposed to the Aramaic language than ever before. Aramaic is an important but often over-looked tool in discovering the mind of Christ. This book is an introduction to Aramaic biblical studies and to the last Christians who still speak the ancient Aramaic language, the Assyrians of Mesopotamia.
The Words of Jesus in the Original Aramaic This book also explores the Aramaic behind Christ's words, such as in the title Christ used for himself, the Son of Man, which is Barnasha in Aramaic, and looks at important people in early Aramaic Christianity, such as James the Just and Mary of Magdala.

I have been pursuing Aramaic studies since 1991 and teaching Aramaic since 2002 and I have discovered that Aramaic is a very controversial field of study. The common assumption is that Jesus was primarily a Hebrew speaker. People who study Greek often fall in love with that language and since the New Testament is written in Greek they come to assume that it was the language Jesus spoke. Some Hebraic Christians and students of Greek reject the notion that Jesus spoke Aramaic. I have seen people become angry and very offended at the statement, "Aramaic was the language of Jesus". The questions regarding languages spoken in the Holy Land at the time of Christ are best dealt with in Aramaic Sources of Mark's Gospel by Maurice Casey. (Casey's work is beneficial and he is a good scholar but I cannot condone all of his conclusions.
He has attacked the authenticity of the Gospel of John and I do not agree fully with his understanding of the Aramaic term Barnasha.) At this point I will begin to look at the evidence that Jesus spoke the Aramaic language. Scholarly consensus is that Aramaic was the language Jesus spoke. This has been determined by careful study of the text of the New Testament, archeological discoveries and other ancient sources, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Aramaic archeological discoveries include the Prophecy of Balaam Son of Beor, the Tombstone of King Uzziah the Son of David, the Tel -Dan "House of David" inscription, the Elephantine Papyri, the Caiaphas Ossuary, the Nazareth Inscription, the BarKokba Scrolls, the Cairo Genizeh and the Tomb of Queen Helen of Abidene.
It is possible to compose a book entirely of statements by respected biblical scholars that Aramaic was the language of the Holy Land at the time of Jesus. The first I want to cite is the historian Flavius Josephus. Flavius Josephus was a Jewish historian who wrote his monumental The Jewish War and The Antiquities of the Jews during the time that the New Testament was still being written. Josephus was a Jew born in the Holy Land. He wrote The Jewish War in what he called his "ancestral language" and then re-wrote it in Greek. So, what was his ancestral language? Josephus said he wrote initially in his ancestral language for two reasons. The first is, as a Jew from the Holy Land, he did not have a command of the Greek language.
He says, "I have also taken a great deal of pains to obtain the learning of the Greek; although I have so accustomed myself to speak our own tongue, I cannot pronounce Greek with sufficient exactness. For my nation does not encourage those that learn the languages of many nations. On this account, as there have been many who have done their endeavors, with great patience, to obtain this Greek learning, there have yet hardly been two or three that have succeeded therein, who were immediately rewarded for their pains." This means that very few Jews who lived in the Holy Land could speak Greek, or speak it well. The second reason was that Josephus was hoping that the version of his book written in his native tongue could be read by gentiles and Jews in Assyria, Chaldea and Babylonia, since his native tongue was their native tongue as well.
In the first century this region was Aramaic speaking and the direct descendents of the Assyrians, Chaldeans and Babylonians still speak Aramaic till this day. (The writings of Josephus were preserved in Aramaic by Aramaic Christians who looked upon them as important sacred writings.) This proves that Aramaic was the ancestral language of the common Jew born in the Holy Land during the first century. Also, when Josephus includes a word from his native language in his books we find it is almost always an Aramaic word rather than a Hebrew word.
Many respected modern Bible scholars have determined that Aramaic was the language of Jesus the Messiah. Alan Millard in 'Discoveries from the Time of Jesus' states that, "A Jewish Craftsman 's son brought up in Nazareth, a town on a main road, could be expected to talk in Aramaic, to use Greek when necessary, and to have more than a reading knowledge of Hebrew." Joachim Jeremias stated in his New Testament Theology, "The mother-tongue of Jesus was a Galilean version of western Aramaic. We find the nearest linguistic analogies to the sayings of Jesus in the popular Aramaic passages of the Palestinian Talmud and Midrashim which have their home in Galilee .. .In addition to the sentences and words preserved in the original Aramaic [in the New Testament], there are many passages in which an underlying Aramaic wording can be disclosed.

Jesus

This includes expressions which are idiomatic in Aramaic but alien to both Hebrew and Greek (Aramaisms), and translation mistakes which show up when recourse is had to Aramaic." Maurice Casey in 'Aramaic Sources of Mark 's Gospel' says, "The Gospel of Mark is written in Greek, though Jesus spoke Aramaic .. .It follows that the change in language from Aramaic to Greek was part of a cultural shift from a Jewish to a Gentile environment. If therefore we wish to recover the Jesus of history, we must see whether we can reconstruct his sayings, and the earliest accounts of his doings, in their original Aramaic. This should help us to understand him within his own cultural background."
Joseph A. Fitzmyer in 'The Semitic Background of the New Testament' says, "As for the language that Jesus would have used, the evidence seems to point mainly to Aramaic ... Jesus used Hebrew on occasion ... the consensus of opi nion at the moment seems to support Aramaic as the language commonly used by Jesus and his immediate disciples in Palestine." Gustaf Dalman in 'The Words of Jesus: Considered in the Light of Post-Biblical Jewish Writings and the Aramaic Language' states that, "From all these considerations must be drawn the conclusion that Jesus grew up speaking the Aramaic tongue, and that He would be obliged to speak Aramaic to His disciples and to the people in order to be understood."
Matthew Black in 'An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts' says, "Jesus must have conversed in the Galilean dialect of Aramaic, and His teaching was probably almost entirely in Aramaic." According to Biblical archeologist John Romer in 'Testament: The Bible and History', "Recent linguistic analysis of all four gospels, however, has tied them not to these grand cities of the Empire, but to the verbal culture of Palestine itself. The construction of their Greek texts, the shading and coloring of the writing strongly suggest that much of them had been translated from Palestinian Aramaic, Jesus' own language."
Bart Ehrman in 'Jesus the Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium' states, "Jesus was Jewish. Realizing the Jewish-ness of Jesus is critical if we are to make sense of his teachings. For despite the fact that the religion founded in his name quickly came to be filled with non-Jews ... it was founded by a Jewish teacher who taught his Jewish followers about the Jewish God who guided the Jewish people by means of the Jewish Law. Jesus kept and discussed Jewish customs like prayer and fasting, he worshiped in Jewish places of worship like the synagogue and the Temple, and he kept Jewish feasts like the Passover. .. He maintained that God's will was revealed in the books written by Moses, especially in "the Law" that was delivered to Moses on Mount Sinai ... Most of Jesus' teachings, in fact, relate in one way or another to his understanding of Jewish Law. This Jewish Law, of course included the Ten Commandments, but it contained much more besides ... "

About Aramaic Ehrman says, "there are multiple attested traditions that Jesus spoke Aramaic. Sometimes, for example, the Gospels quote his words directly without translating them into Greek (see Mark 5:41, 7:34; John 1 :42). It is also indicated in the Gospels that Jesus could read the scripture in Hebrew (e.g., Luke 4: 16-20; see also Mark 12: 10,26), and that he eventually became known as an interpreter of them. He is sometimes, for example, called "rabbi ," that is, "teacher" (see Mark 9:5; John 3:2) ... There are no traditions that specifically indicate that Jesus spoke Greek, although some historians have surmised that living in Galilee where Greek was widely known [among non-Jews], he may have learned some. Moreover, some have suspected that he communicated with Pontius Pilate in Greek at his trial.. .At best we can say that it is at least possible that Jesus was tri-lingual-that he normally spoke Aramaic, that he could at least read the Hebrew Scriptures, and that he may have been able to communicate a bit in Greek. The final point is, in my judgment, the least assured." Scholarly consensus and data from the New Testament agree that the primary spoken language of Jesus, the language he used when working miraculous cures and teaching the multitudes, was Aramaic.

By Stephen Andrew Missick in the book 'The Words of Jesus in the Original Aramaic' - Discovering the Semitic Roots of Christianity -,Xylon Press, USA, 2006, part two, p.41-46. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.