© 1990 Chris Moseley
© 1990 ANZURA, Australia & New Zealand Urantia Association
The URANTIA Book gives us a privileged insight into Jesus’ entire life, from birth to death, and when we read of Jesus’ early life and education, we see that Jesus’ childhood was not essentially different to that of millions of other children. But Jesus’ earthly bestowal took place in a linguistically and culturally very diverse environment, which demanded of him the learning of at least two languages. Even at the tender age of five years, we read on UB 123:2.14 that Jesus …“did much of his early practice at writing Aramaic, Greek, and later on, Hebrew, for in time he learned to read, write, and speak, fluently, all three languages.”
We know that Jesus was quite a gifted student, but he was not learning “foreign” languages for pleasure or intellectual exercise; they were a real requirement of everyday life in Jesus’ environment. On UB 123:3.1, when Jesus is 6 years old, we read:
“Already, with his mother’s help, Jesus had mastered the Galilean dialect of the Aramaic tongue; and now his father began teaching him Greek. Mary spoke 1ittle Greek, but Joseph was a fluent speaker of both Aramaic and Greek. The textbook for the study of the Greek language was the copy of the Hebrew scriptures — a complete version of the law and the prophets, including the Psalms — which had been presented to them on leaving Egypt. … And in a very short time he could read it readily.”
Jesus had more or less perfected his knowledge of the two main languages by the age of 7 , as we read in ‘School Days in Nazareth’ on UB 123:5.1,
“Already this lad was a fluent reader, writer, and speaker of two languages, Aramaic and Greek. He was now to acquaint himself with the task of learning to read, write, and speak the Hebrew language.”
The teaching of Hebrew was conducted even more by rote than that of Aramaic and Greek, as we learn that the chazan taught it from the Book of the Law. Furthermore, on UB 123:5.11 …“at this time the Jews had just inaugurated a compulsory education law” …
We can infer from this that the Jews had a great deal of administrative freedom in this far-flung part of the Roman empire, in being able to legislate on educational matters and preserve the status of the Hebrew language even though the culture and religion it represented had nothing to do with Rome. From the many references to Greek culture (which the young Jesus openly admired, much to his father’s disapproval) we can understand the importance of Greek among the Galileans — it was the prestige language of culture and trade. The fact that Jesus learned the “Galilean dialect” of Aramaic indicates that it was a fairly widely-spoken language, but we know very little of its use or literary heritage. Conspicuously absent from all this, of course, is Latin. It seems that the Romans made little or no attempt to impose their Latin language and culture on these people, who were already exposed to so many influences. Indeed, the Zealots, whom Jesus was urged to join in his teenage years, were not objecting to the imposition of Rome culture so much as to the humiliation of paying taxes to Rome. (UB 127:2.1)
We know what Latin and Ancient Greek were like, and Biblical Hebrew has been preserved to the present day and even resurrected in this century, but what of Jesus’ own mother tongue, his home language, Aramaic?
“Eli, Eli, lema sabaktani” (my God, my God, why have you forsaken me) — the words of a psalm that Jesus recalled in his semi-conscious state during his last hours on the cross recorded by the Gospel of Matthew and later the subject of much misinterpretation, are practically the only recorded words of Aramaic that we know Jesus to have spoken. The New Testament itself was written in Greek. And though Hebrew was a very ancient language of the Jews, in Galilee and Judea its Semitic relative, Aramaic, had taken the upper hand. Already by Jesus’ time, Aramaic had been one of the most widely-spoken languages of the Middle East. For a couple of centuries — since the conquest of Babylon in 538 BC — it had been the official language of a large part of the Persian empire. The Persian kings made their diplomats and other high officials communicate with their subordinates and with the outside world in Aramaic — not in Assyrian or Persian, which might have seemed more natural. One might well ask why. The answer is still not clear to scholars, but perhaps it may become clearer some time in the next century, when all the Aramaic words that have been preserved for posterity are interpreted. There are about 40,000 of them.
The work of compiling a complete lexicon of this old international language has only just begun, according to a report in ‘The New York Times’. Even with the help of computers it will take twenty years. The work is being carried out at three American universities — John Hopkins in Baltimore, the Catholic University in Washington and the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. The project leader is Dr. Delbert Hillers of John Hopkins.
The corpus of material for the lexicon is made up of inscriptions and writings from a time span of nearly two and a half thousands years. The later time-boundary has been drawn at 1400 AD. That does not mean that the language had died out by then. It has survived to the present, and is still spoken and is still spoken in certain parts of Syria and Iraq, and by Christian groups elsewhere in the world — even in America, by a Syrian-Orthodox community in Hackensack, New Jersey! But is it like Jesus’ Aramaic? From the period after the Babylonian captivity, in the sixth century BC, Aramaic began to spread at the expense of Hebrew among the Israelites of Palestine, and soon it became the general spoken and written language of the area. And thus it was to remain until Mohammed’s teachings thrust Arabic forward in the seventh century AD.
As a religious language, too, Aramaic supplanted Hebrew in the centuries immediately preceding Jesus’ earthly bestowal.
Some short passages in the 0ld Testament are written in Aramaic — one verse of Jeremiah, almost three chapters in the Book of Ezra, and about six in the Book of Daniel, from Chapter 2 , verse 4.
In the story of Belshazzar’s Feast, there are other words in Aramaic. That is the writing on the wall, passing sentence on the king and his kingdom: “Mene mene tekel u-farsin”. Daniel’s interpretation of this in the Bible is that: “(God) has reckoned (the days of your kingdom), you are weighed (on scales and found wanting). (Your kingdom) has been divided (and given to the Medes and Persians.”)
How correct this interpretation is will be shown when the lexicographers have made sense of the Aramaic words. Even if the sense is the same, the original text is perhaps more prosaic
Among the Dead Sea Scrolls, the incredible collection of writings found in the Qumran caves outside Jerusalem, there are some texts in Aramaic, including a translation of the Book of Job. However, there are no texts in Aramaic among them that can tell us anything about early Christianity.
When the Aramaic lexicon is completed, the entire preserved vocabulary from the glorious antiquity of the Middle East will be accessible to modern research. Of the five other great languages of the region, Egyptian and Hebrew already have dictionaries. At the university of Chicago, two other monumental lexical works are approaching completion. One of them deals with Akkadian, the language of the Assyrians and Babylonians, and was begun in 1921, but will soon be finished, according to Erica Reiner, who has been in charge of it for the last 36 years.
For over 50 years, other scholars at the same university have been working on a lexicon of the Hittite language, spoken in a powerful and expansive empire in Asia Minor which existed for nearly a millennium before Jesus’ bestowal. This lexicon will be ready soon, too. And in 1976 work started on a complete dictionary of Sumerian, the first great written language in the world. So perhaps even Jesus’ language can be reconstructed!
Chris Moseley
From: The ASCENDER, Autumn 1989
(Parts of this article first appeared in Swedish in an article by Harry Bokstedt in ‘Svenska Dagbladt’, 20 August '89)
Ethics are aesthetics from within.
Pierre Reverdy
The giving of love is an education in itself.
Eleanor Roosevelt