Jesus Christ’s language kept alive

Press, 24 January 1984, Page 8

Jesus Christ’s language kept alive

NZPA-Reuter Maaloula Long forgotten by Christian churches, the spoken language of Jesus Christ is kept alive by the inhabitants of three remote Syrian villages. The residents of Maaloula and two neighbouring villages are the only people who still speak what scholars call the western Aramaic dialect, which was the everyday language of. Roman Palestine during the lifetime of Jesus,

Today, it is virtually a dead language, studied only in a few Western universities and surviving in ancient texts and fragments of scripture. To the carpenter and greengrocer of the primitive, honeycombed village of Maaloula, it is the everyday language of business, children’s chatter, and neighbours’ gossip. “Of course everybody here can speak Arabic, but among themsleves they speak the language of our Saviour,” said Father Michael Zaqoura, of the monastery of St Sergius or Mar Sarkis.

Father Michael, a jovial man who offers visitors a goblet of monastery wine to ward off the mountain chill, has made a study of the survival of spoken Aramaic in the foothills of the antiLebanon range, about 55km north of Damascus.

“First, this village had a long tradition of pilgrimage and religious devotion. Second, it was isolated and at odds with its surrounding territory,” he said.

Maaloula means “the entrance,” named after a reputed miracle when the sheer mountain split to open an escape route for an early saint fleeing persecution. Today, its tumbledown houses, some blue-roofed and others hewn from the cliff face, straggle up the yawning gap in the hill. Father Michael’s monastery, sitting atop the rock, was once a pagan temple. It became a church in the fourth century A.D.

“Two books of the Bible were written in Aramaic, Daniel and Ezra. The Lord’s Prayer, which Christians recite the world over, was first spoken in this language,” Father Michael said.

The villagers, intrigued that their dialect should make them a curiosity for linguists and historians, gladly speak its soft, flowing tones into a tape-re-corder.

It sounds similar to Arabic but is more guttural. A taxi-driver from Damascus who heard it looked bewildered and could not understand a word.

Although Islam is Syria’s majority religion and the head of State must be a Muslim, Christians do not complain of discrimination. Father Michael has

placed a portrait of President Hafez Assad opposite that of the Pope in the draughty stone room where he receives guests. Most of Maaloula’s 4000 inhabitants are Catholics practising the Greek rite. There are also some Greek Orthodox and the call of the muezzin from a new mosque summons the Muslim faithful to prayer. In Father Michael’s cold church, with its glittering icons and faceless statues of forgotten gods, the haunting Aramaic liturgical chant echoes round. “It is the nearest thing to hearing Our Lord himself speak,” the priest said.