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In this episode of Hebrew Voices #220 - The Aramaic Dialect of Jesus: Part 1, Nehemia brings back Dr. Kim Phillips to discuss Gospel texts written in a form of Aramaic very close to what Jesus would have spoken, the various dialects of Aramaic, and how he managed to painstakingly revive an erased text using 21st-century imaging technology.

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Nehemia: The text that’s written in the under text, the erased text that you were able to decipher…

Kim: Yeah.

Nehemia: That is even more interesting because it is…

Kim: It is New Testament. New Testament in Christian Palestinian Aramaic. There we go.

Nehemia: And it’s the New Testament written in a dialect of Aramaic, which would have been the dialect that Jesus spoke.

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Nehemia: Shalom and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I am here once again with Dr. Kim Phillips, who is a research fellow at the Institute for Hebrew Bible Manuscript Research. He teaches Hebrew at University of Cambridge and has for the last decade. He’s also, now, recently become the host of the Hebrew Bible YouTube channel with Kim Phillips. We’re going to post a link to that on nehemiaswall.com. And what we’re going to talk about today is his recently published book on, and I hope I can pronounce this, Codex Climaci Rescriptus. Shalom, Kim.

Kim: Hi, good to see you, Nehemia. Great to be with you again.

Nehemia: Thanks for joining us, Kim. Kim, what is Codex Climaci… Can you say it for us?

Kim: Codex Climaci Rescriptus. Yeah.

Nehemia: So, what is that?

Kim: So, it’s a good question. What it is in the, say, year 1000, is a codex written on parchment consisting of around about 150 folios, or about 300 pages, containing a Syriac translation of John Climacus’s book The Ladder of Divine Ascent, or hei climax in Greek.

Nehemia: There’s a lot of terms to define there, but I’m going to let you keep going.

Kim: Yeah.

Nehemia: I’m making notes here.

Kim: Okay. So, in effect, it, let’s say at around about the year 1000, it is a book written containing two very, very famous, very popular at the time, works on Christian discipleship, written in Syriac, which translated from…

Nehemia: Tell us what Syriac is.

Kim: Syriac is the most important language you’ve never heard of, probably.

Nehemia: Well, I mean, I’ve heard of it, but I think some of my audience hasn’t.

Kim: Yeah, yeah. Of course. Um…

Nehemia: Or if they heard of it, what they heard is that the New Testament was originally written in Syriac. And I want you to give your opinion as someone with a PhD from the University of Cambridge. What is your view on that?

Kim: Okay.

Nehemia: Jesus spoke Syriac. That’s what I hear all the time, and the Peshitta is the original New Testament. Have you heard that?

Kim: I have heard it, yes.

Nehemia: Okay.

Kim: I don’t think it’s right, but it’s got enough kind of half or quarter truths in it to mean that it’s a kind of myth that persists. So…

Nehemia: And I think there was someone named George Lamsa who popularized that idea about several decades ago.

Kim: I’ll take your word for it.

Nehemia: Right. All right, anyway, go on.

Kim: Sure. All the evidence points to the New Testament having originally been written in Greek. Which makes sense; it’s the lingua franca of the entire Levant region. It’s the language that got out to the most people as quickly as possible. So, logically, we would expect Greek, and in terms of the manuscripts, I mean, the early ones, the earliest ones we have are Greek. There’s no two ways about it.

Jesus, though, yes, would have spoken a dialect of Aramaic. But it’s an open question, still, how much Greek he spoke. Some people actually have recently argued… Pete Williams at Tyndale House has recently argued that Jesus actually could have been fairly fluent in Greek, growing up where he grew up. And just the context of the land of Israel-Palestine as a whole at the time; open question there. But one thing is fairly certain, that he would have spoken Aramaic and Hebrew. That’s pretty clear.

Nehemia: He would have also spoken Hebrew?

Kim: Well, he would have read his Bible in Hebrew. So, we’ve got various narratives in the New Testament of him reading bits of scripture, a very famous instance where he stands up and reads from the scroll of Isaiah. And, yes, I see absolutely no reason not to think that he would have read that in the Hebrew. That would have been natural to him. Yeah.

Nehemia: Okay. So, where does Syriac fit into this?

Kim: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, Syriac is Ar… this is like one of these syllogisms. Syriac is Aramaic, Jesus spoke Aramaic, therefore Jesus spoke Syriac.

Kim: Yes. Yeah.

Nehemia: Is that…

Kim: Yeah. So, when you think Aramaic… Aramaic covers a huge geographic area, vast geographic area, which we can broadly split into east and west. And so, east, we’re thinking, areas nowadays sort of, kind of Iran, Iraq and further up even over into Turkey, up into Syria. And then west, we’re thinking obviously the Land of Israel kind of area. And scholars tend to divide Aramaic as a single language into its eastern and western dialect.

So,