c. 1998 Religion News Service

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. _ To many, it may seem as dead as Latin, but Aramaic _ the language Jesus spoke _ is alive every weekend at St. Elias Maronite Church here and in communities across the nation from San Diego, Calif., to Yonkers, N.Y.

“It’s as close as we can get to the words Jesus spoke,” said the Rev. Richard Saad, pastor of St. Elias, a Lebanese Christian congregation. “It’s a holy language, it’s a liturgical language, it’s the language Jesus spoke.”

And because Jesus taught and told his oft-puzzling parables in Aramaic, the language also holds the key to interpreting passages that have long been misunderstood by westerners, said Aramaic scholar Rocco Erricco, author of “Treasures from the Language of Jesus.”

“In biblical scholarship and translation, it’s becoming more important,” said Erricco, president of the Noohra Foundation in Santa Fe, N.M. “It helps clarify passages that are obscure.”

Especially since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1940s, the importance of Aramaic _ a general term that includes a group of closely related Semitic dialects _ has grown in offering clues to biblical scholars.

“When they run into difficulties, they turn to Aramaic,” Erricco said.

“The three languages that are crucial for biblical scholarship are Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic,” he added. “When the New Testament went west, it was in Greek. When it went eastward, it was in Aramaic.”

The current interest in Aramaic crosses denominational boundaries and puts Aramaic speakers and translators like Erricco in great demand.

“I can hardly keep up with it,” he said. “People are really interested in it. What I’m doing is showing the Bible through the eyes of the Middle East, the Semitic languages of Aramaic and Hebrew, the ancient culture, psychology, idioms and symbolism of the ancient Near East.”

At the same time, Aramaic is not just a “dead,” scholarly language, like Latin. Many people from the Middle East who have migrated to other parts of the world have kept Aramaic as their primary language, Erricco said.

Indeed, there are communities of Aramaic speakers as large as 3,000 in San Diego, Calif., Chicago and Yonkers, N.Y. Other Middle Eastern Christians who migrated to Australia and Russia also speak it, he said.

“It is still spoken today,” Erricco said, adding, however, that it is in danger because “the younger generation is no longer speaking Aramaic.”

At the 3,000-member St. Peter’s Chaldean Catholic Church in El Cajon, Calif., “they still speak Aramaic in their community” and continue to use it in the liturgy, Erricco said. “The people preserved it and kept it.

“Today the Aramaic language is still alive. The liturgy is still alive in the services. In Iraq and Kurdistan, thousands still speak Aramaic.”

At St. Elias, a church of Lebanese immigrants, “it’s definitely part of our spiritual culture,” Saad said. Throughout the Mass, prayers and scripture are recited in Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic.

“Mal-ko shma-yo-no ha-so lan khool dah-ty-nan lokh,” they say at the start of the service. “I have entered your house, O Lord, and have worshipped before your throne. O King of heaven, forgive all my sins.”

When Saad holds up a communion wafer during the consecration of the Eucharist, he recites a gospel account of the Last Supper in Syriac. In the church library, there is a Syriac manuscript of Holy Week services handwritten by monks and copies of the Peshitta, a Syriac translation of the Bible. Above the front door, the name of the church is written in Syriac.

The liturgy dates back to a time before Muslims conquered most of the Middle East, beginning in the 7th century, when Arabic became the dominant language of the region. “It put Aramaic on the back shelf,” Saad said.

Aramaic is a Semitic language, closely related to both Hebrew and Arabic. It is written right to left and uses the same alphabet, syntax and grammar.

“The common tongue of first-century Palestine (Jesus’ time) was Aramaic,” he said.

In the Old Testament, several verses in Ezra, Daniel and a verse in Jeremiah _ Jer.10:11 _ were written in Aramaic. The New Testament contains several Aramaic expressions including “Talitha cumi” in Mark 5:41, “Ephphatha” in Mark 7:34 and “Maranatha,” in 1 Cor. 16:22.

The earliest existing copies of the gospels were written in Greek but maintained 46 words of Aramaic, which some scholars feel point back to an Aramaic original before Greek, Erricco said.

Even if Aramaic was not the language the gospels were originally written in, it was the language that Jesus taught and spoke in, Erricco said. So it sheds light on many of his sayings. “There are about 12,000 differences in interpretation,” Erricco said.

For example, he said, one portion of the Lord’s prayer has been translated into English with the line, “Lead us not into temptation.” The phrase puzzles Middle Eastern Christians familiar with the Aramaic version, Erricco said. “Do not let us enter into temptation,” is the true meaning, he said. “We know Jesus said this prayer in Aramaic, not in Greek,” Erricco said.

One of Jesus’ most famous sayings has been popularly translated as, “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.” But Aramaic versions of the Bible choose the word “rope” instead of camel, although the word for camel and rope is the same.

It is impossible for even a thin mooring rope to go through the eye of a needle, yet the spirit of the saying is in the Middle Eastern tradition of amplification, or exaggeration for effect, Erricco said. “Jesus is saying that you must learn to share some of your goods,” he said.

The most important difference in an Aramaic translation of the Bible is the term “kingdom of God,” Erricco said. “We think of kingdom as a realm, an area,” he said. “In Aramaic, it means God’s sovereignty.”

Jesus taught the kingdom of God as an inclusive place where prostitutes and tax collectors would be welcomed, even put first while the righteous would be last, Erricco said. Yet some Christians teach the kingdom of God as a place only for the righteous, where sinners would never be welcome, despite Jesus’ emphasis on welcoming the outcasts, Erricco said.

“We wouldn’t have all this hatred of people by color or sex orientation if we had a real deep understanding of how God lets his rain fall on the just and unjust,” Erricco said. “We live by condemnation and fear. Jesus never taught that. He taught the loving, powerful, healing presence of God.”

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Perhaps the most famous passage of Aramaic in the Bible is the words of Jesus on the cross in Matthew 27:46 and Mark 15:34. The exact phrase used by Jesus was so important that the gospel writers, who most scholars believe wrote their original texts in Greek, left the actual Aramaic words within the Greek text: “Eli, Eli, lama sabach-thani,” and then attempted to translate it.

“The translation, `My god, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ is not accurate,” Erricco said. “How could he have been forsaken if the next phrase out of his mouth is, `Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.”’

The Aramaic-to-English translation offers a different twist.

“The words of Jesus on the cross are, `Oh God, Oh God, to what a purpose you have kept me,”’ Erricco said. “God was with Jesus throughout everything. Assyrian scholars never thought he was forsaken. God was with Jesus through everything, the suffering on the cross, everything.”

Erricco said that it’s important for western Christians to be exposed to the meaning of the Aramaic words that Jesus used. It’s not a matter of changing long-held translations but understanding that subtleties may have been lost in interpretation, he said.

“I’m not here to convert anybody to anything,” Erricco said. “I just want to stress the Aramaic original and let people take from it what they want.”

DEA END GARRISON