Was Syriac the original language of Jesus?

My son sent me the following article this past Sunday: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090206/lf_nm_life/us_cyprus_bible. It involves a Bible found in Cyprus. I had read this on the news myself and my guess is that the MSS (manuscript) will be found to be old (maybe 800-1000 years), but not the 2000 years that “they” are looking for. The they in this case is the subject of today’s blog.

Near the end of the hyperlinked article someone said that they noticed some modern Syriac words in the text. It is always interesting what the pro-Syriacists do to promote their language! Note how the media portrays the dueling “experts”. “Experts were however divided over the provenance of the manuscript, and whether it was an original, which would render it priceless, or a fake.”

It was the same when I was at school in Chicago studying this very language with the foremost authority in the field, Arthur Voobus at the Lutheran School of Theology in the late 1970's (you can google him and see that I’m not just name-dropping….go ahead….I’ll wait). There was a faction (friends of mine, even!) that always insisted that Syriac (more properly the Peshitta text of the Syriac Bible) was the "language of Jesus". Their enthusiasm was boundless and the newspapers always picked up the story of this “language of Jesus” thing. Let me try to import some sanity here.

Syriac was not the language of Jesus (as the article rightly points out), but a dialect of Aramaic (“Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic - the native language of Jesus - once spoken across much of the Middle East and Central Asia.”). But this does not tell the whole story. Syriac was a dialect, but it was not spoken in Palestine. Rather, it was an unwritten language until it was given form in Turkey (specifically Edessa, the area of its origins) in the later years just before Christ. It was a dialect specifically of Imperial Aramaic; that form of Aramaic which existed in the upper Fertile Crescent from the 5th Century BC onward.

Jesus spoke Palestinian (more specifically Galilean) Aramaic, which form may be found in ancient texts such as the Genesis Apocryphon (of Dead Sea Scrolls notoriety). The Christian Scriptures, if they had an original autograph in Aramaic (the jury remains out on this matter, but I am firmly in the pro-Aramaic-original school, having done essential research on this hypothesis while in graduate school at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute), would have been written in this language and not Syriac.

I’m not using Syriac as a piñata, but frankly, those who try to tie Jesus to this language are always being a bit disingenuous. Because Syriac was used to bring the message of Christianity to the East (even as far as India) it is revered by the Eastern Churches over against Western Christianity (whose embodiment was principally the Roman Church in the early years after the Councils started meeting). A prejudice developed against the Western church (and it's Greek Bible) in those earlier years and has given rise to the differing “experts” (the Eastern versus the Western) even today. But the scientific study of the languages of the Northwest Semitic varieties tells the true story (see the former paragraph).

Syriac, along with Coptic, Ethiopic, Old Latin, Gothic and other languages into which the Christian Scriptures were translated in the earlier centuries after the death of the apostles are great resources for textual variants (those places where the more familiar Greek MSS readings are dubious or outright forgeries). And Syriac, among all the others, is sometimes better in that it retranslates (is that a word?) the Greek, from which it is taken, back into the idiomatic language of the Original. But Syriac is still not the original language of Jesus.

I’d like to talk a bit about the Old Syriac texts of the Syriac language tradition (over against the Peshitta text of the Syriac Bible), but space and time does not permit.

Until next time...