Aramaic steps briefly into the light

An ancient, dying language got a new life on American movie screens this week.

Some linguists, who fear the language spoken by Jesus could vanish within a few decades, hope for a boost from Mel Gibson’s new film, “The Passion of the Christ,” which opened Wednesday in U.S. theaters. The dialogue is entirely in Aramaic and Latin.

Among the few places in the world where Aramaic is still familiar is a small Syrian Orthodox church in Jerusalem, although even here it is little more than an echo these days.

A church elder laments that he has few people to speak with in Aramaic besides the monks. Parts of the liturgy have to be said in Arabic. And a nun who sings the Lord’s Prayer says the words are just about the only ones she can recite in Aramaic.

Aramaic was once the lingua franca of the Middle East and parts of Asia. Today, the Syrian Orthodox community in Jerusalem offers Aramaic in summer school, but there is little interest and fewer than half the 600 members speak the language.

“Maybe the new generation will wake up and continue,” said Sami Barsoum, 69, a community leader fluent in Aramaic.Just half a million people around the world, mostly Christians, still speak Aramaic at home.

“Undoubtedly, Aramaic is in danger of disappearing,” said Moshe Bar-Asher, president of the Academy of the Hebrew Language in Jerusalem.

Aramaic is one of the few languages that has been spoken continuously for thousands of years. It first appeared in written records around the 10th century B.C., although it was likely spoken earlier.

It is a Semitic language and has similarities with Hebrew and Arabic. “Carpenter,” for instance, is nagouro in Aramaic, nagar in Hebrew and najar in Arabic.

Aramaic reached its widest influence when it was adopted by the Persian Empire about 500 B.C. Written in a 22-letter alphabet -- similar to Hebrew’s square-shaped letters -- it was a relatively simple language, and scribes and intellectuals helped spread it in a largely illiterate world, Bar-Asher said.

Aramaic texts have turned up as far apart as India and Egypt. Jews returning from exile in Babylon around 500 BC helped spread the language to the eastern Mediterranean, where it largely supplanted Hebrew.

Scholars believe Jesus might have known Hebrew -- which by that time was reserved mainly for use in synagogues and by upper classes -- and some Greek, but Aramaic was the language of his native Galilee.

The New Testament records Jesus’ last words on the cross in Aramaic: “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” St. Mark, most likely writing in Greek, adds, “ ... which means, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ ” (Mark 15:34).

Michael Sokoloff, a professor of Hebrew and Semitic languages at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv, said it is believed that parts of the Gospels were originally written in Aramaic, but that only Greek writings have been found.

Aramaic was largely replaced by Arabic during the Islamic conquest of the 7th century.

Today, a few people speak it in parts of Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Lebanon, India, Europe, Australia and some U.S. cities, including Chicago.

In Syria, once the core of indigenous Christian Aramaic speakers, the language is still heard among 10,000 people in three villages perched on cliff sides in the Qalamoun Mountains north of Damascus.

But it is dwindling as the older generation dies, said George Rizkallah, a 63-year-old retired Syrian teacher. Rizkallah has appealed to the Syrian government and international groups to help save the language. A few thousand Israelis who emigrated from other Middle East countries still speak Aramaic, but few pass it on to their children.

However, the Talmud and other Jewish religious texts are written in Aramaic. It appears in the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, and in Israeli marriage and divorce contracts.

Gibson’s film, depicting Christ’s final hours, uses subtitles. The script was translated into 1st century Aramaic for the Jewish characters and “street Latin” for the Roman characters by the Rev. William Fulco, director of ancient Mediterranean studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.