Category Archives: News

Is ISIS Threatening to Eliminate Aramaic, the Language Jesus Spoke?

Aramaic Blog, News, , ,

This is the image that's circulating with the story.

In a word: No.

In a few more words…

This claim has been circulating the Internet lately. It’s been on Brietbart, it’s been on Before It’s News, it’s spreading through Twitter and the rest of the Internet.

ISIS cannot, no matter how hard it tries, eliminate Aramaic. Aramaic is not a single language, but an entire family of languages. Sadly, the dialect spoken by Jesus is already dead. (Well, outside what I speak with my kids in reconstruction, but that doesn’t make it “living” by any means.) It died as a living language in the 6th and 7th centuries with Arab Conquest.

However, ISIS can certainly extinguish a few of the smaller Neo-Aramaic dialects if they strive to, which in some cases consist of a single surviving village — and let me not be equivocal about this: That is a serious problem.

Most Neo-Aramaic languages are severely endangered as it is and in the past 100 years we’ve seen dozens die due to violence (like this) or simply migration and adoption of another language (most Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialects have been lost due to immigration to Israel and the adoption of Modern Hebrew). These language are certainly related (the dialect in Ma’loula the closest by lineage) but none of these are the language Jesus actually spoke.

Syriac Aramaic is the language of the liturgy of the Syriac Church (Syriac Orthodox, Chaldean Catholic, Assyrian, etc.) and recited every Sunday. That’s not going anywhere. Jewish Literary Aramaic is used in the Jewish liturgy nearly every Sabbath, and that’s not going anywhere either. There are Aramaic-speaking diasporas all over the place. Aramaic is global, and ISIS is not.

Peace,
-Steve

So, What Has Steve Been Up To Lately?

News

In some places I’ve been a bit scarce, and I hope to be able to catch up with things this week. Today, on the occasion of Pentecost, was especially busy as not only did I give a lecture for the Adult Forum at Christ Church New Brunswick (“Speaking in Tongues: Aramaic in the context of Pentecost” which I’ll be posting on here later, perhaps even with some video), but I also was among the folks reciting Acts 2 in different languages (Galilean Aramaic, adapted from the CPA Lectionary, which I may also post here — not video just a vocalization of the text) and my son Harry was baptized…

It was crazy… and exhausting.

And tomorrow is Monday.

Time to catch up. 🙂

Peace,
-Steve

Maurice Casey (1942-2014)

News,

Aramaic Sources

בשלמיה
(May he rest in peace.)

As everyone on the blogosphere has been noting (Mark Goodacre, Jim West, Larry Hurtado, Jim Davila), Maurice Casey has recently passed on.

His works Aramaic Sources of Mark’s Gospel (1998) and An Aramaic Approach to Q (2002) were some of the first books I read when I was getting into Aramaic source criticism, and where I have disagreed with a number of his reconstructions (as have many others!) they will forever be within the cornerstone of literature in that field, as he was the very first to seriously set about the task with consistency.

His death is a great loss.

Peace,
-Steve

Talk on the Galilean Aramaic Lord’s Prayer

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Lecture Advert

Just another reminder of my talk coming up this Sunday on my reconstruction of the Lord’s Prayer, prefaced with a bit of history about the Galilean dialect. This is the first time I’ve done something in this format, so I’m not 100% sure what to expect, but I know it’s going to be awesome. 🙂 

Visit the Events page for more info.

The Final Nail in the Coffin For The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife

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Gospel_of_Jesus'_WifeThere has been some confusion expressed to me about the recent revelations from Christian Askeland (and further explained by Alin Suciu) about the Gospel of John fragment and how it eliminates any possibility of authenticity for the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife.

Allow me to break it down into simplified and easy-to-understand bullet points:

  1. The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife and the Gospel of John fragment were originally purchased together.
  2. According to dating tests, both are written on genuine, ancient papyrus.
  3. They are also both written with identical ink, in nearly identical handwriting, and apparently nearly identical writing implements. With this level of similarity, they must have been inscribed by the same person. Any alternative is infeasible.
  4. The Gospel of John fragment is demonstrably a forgery. It copies a known Coptic text of the Gospel of John first published in 1923 and made available on the Internet sometime in 2005-2008. The spellings, word choices, corrections, and line breaks (things which vary widely between versions and serve as a “fingerprint”) are identical to the modern printed edition edited by Herbert Thompson (every other line was copied precisely). This is virtually impossible if it were genuine.
  5. Because of this, the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife must also be a forgery. 1

So this means that even though both the Gospel of John fragment and the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife are indeed made from ancient materials — as carbon dating shows — they are without a doubt modern forgeries.

This is why comparative analysis is so very important.

Peace,
-Steve

UPDATE: Mark Goodacre also demonstrates the every-other-line copying very well.

Notes:

  1. (There are also a number of other important factors that all add up to forgery, but this is the most relevant to the present misunderstanding.) ↩