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.
I look forward to reading your comments!
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Hebrew Voices #220 – The Aramaic Dialect of Jesus: Part 1
You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.
Nehemia: The text that’s written in the under text, the erased text that you were able to decipher…
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
Nehemia: So, Syriac is Ar… this is like one of these syllogisms. Syriac is Aramaic, Jesus spoke Aramaic, therefore Jesus spoke Syriac.
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, a dialect just means a variety of the language, which would probably be just about comprehensible to one speaker speaking to one of the others. But nonetheless, they’ve got substantial linguistic differences. So, Syriac is a variety of Eastern Aramaic, even though Syriac is sort of itself divided into western and eastern varieties. But that’s another…
Nehemia: Just to make life interesting.
Kim: Yeah, exactly. But the point is, for us, that Jesus, growing up in Galilee, he would have spoken a variety of Aramaic, probably close to, well, it’s called Galilean Aramaic today. That’s one of the Jewish dialects. Jewish Palestinian Aramaic is one of the dialects that… that is better known.
Nehemia: Tell me what the term Jewish-Palestinian means. There’s a lot of confusion today because of, you know, certain geopolitical issues, which we, as scholars, we probably try not to get into. But what is Jewish-Palestinian Aramaic? Is that… Well, what documents do we have that are in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic? Let’s start with that.
Kim: Okay. So, some very, very significant documents. The Targum Onkelos, for example…
Kim: … the most famous Aramaic translation of the Torah, is written in a dialect of Aramaic which is very much “Western Land of Israel Aramaic”. Even though it was then transmitted over in Bavel, Babylon. In other words, Iran, Iraq, and therefore it’s got also little mixtures of this eastern dialect as well. But yeah… So, the Aramaic of the Targumim is… is a kind of classic staple of this Western Aramaic, and it’s that sort of Aramaic that Jesus would have spoken. A dialect like that.
Nehemia: Oh. So, if you read Targum Onkelos, that maybe is something like what he would have spoken, or understood, at the very least. Interesting.
Nehemia: Wow. All right. So, you said Syriac, so… the Aramaic of Onkelos is what you call JPA; Jewish Palestinian Aramaic. All right, so, he would have spoken something like that in the 1st century, and that’s what people probably would have spoken, you’re saying. And I know there’s all kinds of controversies. Let’s not get into that.
Where does Syriac fit into that? And guys, we’re moving towards something which is very shocking, that Kim Phillips here worked on a manuscript written in the script of Syriac, but not the language of Syriac. That’s… I think we’re getting to that, right?
Kim: Yes, eventually. Yeah, yeah.
Nehemia: All right, So, tell us what Syriac is.
Nehemia: Do the Jews speak Syriac?
Kim: Let’s now, for simplicity, say no.
Kim: Although actually somebody has recently published an article from the Genizah containing Judeo Syriac, rather.
Kim: But that’s definitely the exception rather than the rule.
Kim: No, Syriac is the dialect of Aramaic that became a huge dialect for the Christian church in Syria. It’s geographically still understood roughly as the Syria that we think of today.
Nehemia: And wasn’t it focused in a particular region or city? Help me out here. I want to say it’s Edisar or Emisar, I’m always confusing those.
Kim: Yes. Edessa is one of the very key centers.
Nehemia: Edessa, there we go.
Kim: Yeah. That’s right, yeah.
Nehemia: Okay, so, Edessa is… so, Syriac is roughly, at least, associated with the dialect of Edessa, which… is that today in Turkey? Or is that still northern Syria?
Kim: That’s an excellent question. Uh, I have no idea.
Nehemia: One of those things, it probably depends on the day of the week. But anyway, let’s move on.
Nehemia: Okay. So, Syriac is different from the Aramaic spoken in Galilee and northern Israel, so-called Jewish Palestinian Aramaic. So, I once asked a scholar of Syriac, I said, “Okay, if I had like one paragraph and I couldn’t rely on script,” right? Because Syriac is in a different script, usually, than Hebrew. But let’s say it was written in the Hebrew script. “What would be, like, one dead giveaway?” What would be your answer to that? Like, if I had, like three verses or something, three sentences, what would be like a linguistic characteristic that would immediately jump out? And your answer might be different.
Kim: Yeah, yeah. And, well, the one that springs to mind most readily is to do with the imperfect verb. So, in Western Aramaic… so, the Aramaic of Targum Onkelos; if I wanted to say, “he will write”, I would start that with a yi-, yi-khtuv or yi-khtov.
Nehemia: That’s exactly the answer I got.
Nehemia: So, I just wanted to see if it was the same answer. He said, “Immediately, you will know that this is Syriac if it begins with a…”
Kim: A Nun instead. So, nekhtuv is… it sounds very odd to somebody who’s used to Hebrew and to Western Aramaic, but…
Nehemia: But really almost all other Semitic languages, right? Meaning like… like one of the features of Semitic languages is in what we call normal… like, what Lehmann calls the future form. What you’re calling the imperfect. That’s a whole complicated discussion. So, normally you have the AYTaN letters – Aleph, Yud, Tav, Nun. Aleph is “I”, Yud is “he”, Tav is “you” or “she”, and Nun is “we”. But in Syriac, Nun is… also “he”.
Kim: So, you see nikhtuv, and it could be, “he will write” or “we will write”.
Nehemia: So, it’s ambiguous. So, that’s a characteristic of Syriac. Okay, so, it’s hard to confuse them even if they’re both written in the same script is… at least if you have enough…
Kim: As long as you’ve got enough text.
Nehemia: As long as you have enough text.
Nehemia: If you have two words, then you probably might not know. But okay, depending on what the words are. All right, fair enough.
Nehemia: So, all right, beautiful. So, Syriac is the language used by Christians.
Nehemia: So, how does this… So, the manuscript you worked on… and it’s two manuscripts, isn’t it? Am I right about that? Or two…
Kim: Well, I only told you about the manuscript by the year 1000.
Kim: That’s the manuscript after it’s been rewritten.
Nehemia: I’m jumping ahead. So, John Climacus, who was a Syriac speaking Christian? Or wrote in Syriac, at least?
Kim: Yes. He was the abbot of Saint Catherine’s Monastery.
Kim: Oh, gosh, I want to say sometime around the 7th, 8th century, something like that.
Nehemia: Okay. Ah, so this is a… this isn’t a manuscript he wrote personally, but it’s a copy from a couple of hundred years later or so. Okay.
Kim: Yes. He wrote in Greek, and it was translated into Syriac.
Nehemia: Oh. Okay. So, this is a Syriac translation of John Climacus. Okay.
Nehemia: From the year 1000, roughly.
Nehemia: Alright. But are manuscripts of that rare? Or are there a whole bunch of manuscripts of that?
Kim: No, to the best of my knowledge it’s a well-known text. As I said, there is another little text there, but the main bulk of the work is The Ladder of Ascent. I know that, I think, is a real staple of the early Christians. Yeah.
Nehemia: Okay. So… and early Christians… are you still talking the 7th or 8th century?
Kim: Yeah, yeah. I mean that in a very general sort of, kind of, way.
Nehemia: Okay, fair enough, right. So, the name of this document is Codex Climaci Rescriptus.
Nehemia: So, it’s the Rescriptus that we’re interested in. So, let’s get to that.
Kim: Yeah, that’s the really… that’s the big deal with this manuscript, yeah.
Nehemia: Okay. So, tell us about that.
Nehemia: And rescriptus, if I had a guess, not being an expert in Latin, would mean something like “rewritten”.
Kim: Yeah, absolutely. So, if we track backwards in time from, say, the year 1000, we can imagine the scribe sitting down sometime in the 900s, maybe, copying out this… The Ladder of Divine Ascent in Syriac… there we are. But he had to get hold of that parchment. So, he goes to the shuk, probably somewhere in the Land of Israel, and he buys the parchment. That parchment is itself recycled, not in the sense that it was pulped down and mashed together like we think of recycling nowadays, but it had been written on before for earlier books that were made in the 6th century. Those books were used for a couple of centuries, and then, for whatever reason, they were discarded, thrown out, and the parchment itself was scraped clean, and the book was dismantled. And then those freshly cleaned sheets were sold in the shuk, and our scribe comes along and starts writing his new book on those recycled bits of parchment.
Nehemia: And he doesn’t know what was written there before and doesn’t care, because he doesn’t see it, right? He just wants… maybe he’s on a budget and so he’s buying reused parchment, I don’t know. Or maybe he doesn’t know it’s reused.
Kim: The question of, does he know whether it was reused? I suspect he probably does, because the process of erasing a text, which was done by scraping… washing and scraping, causes quite a lot of damage to the parchment itself.
Nehemia: And you have, here, sent me a graphic I’m going to share, and hopefully you can explain.
Kim: Yeah, that might help us to…
Nehemia: Actually, before we get to that, there’s a big fancy word that… I want you to explain what it means, palimpsest.
Nehemia: What is a palimpsest?
Kim: It just means written again. It’s a manuscript consisting of… that has been written again or written twice.
Nehemia: And guys, here’s the really big thing; Kim spent years deciphering the erased text, and was able to read things that, in some cases, that nobody read before. Or at least if they did, they didn’t tell us. So, let’s share the screen here. All right. And this is actually a graphic that was made for you by ChatGPT. So, we’re, like, in 21st century material here, guys!
Kim: Yeah. So, I had a nice conversation with ChatGPT earlier today, and it did pretty good. So, image number 1, those are our codices; books that were written in, say, let’s say around about the year 600, roughly speaking, or 550 if you like. Those are the books that we’re really interested in. They’re the earlier books. They’re going to have the original writing, and they’re going to be the material that we want to reconstruct as best we can. But we don’t have access to those books in their entirety, we only have access to them via this palimpsest.
So, after being used for, as I said, who knows, a century or two, those books are then sold for scrap. And so, image 2, they are dismantled, and the separate leaves are piled up. And then image 3, you can see somebody there scraping off what was originally written, so that the parchment becomes nearly fresh and new. And so, there you can see in image 4, it’s being sold in the market by our scribe, who wants to sit down and write The Ladder of Divine Ascent sometime around about the year 1000. In image 5… I don’t think they had scissors back then, but they must have had something…
Nehemia: But according to ChatGPT they did, so…
Kim: Yeah, well there you go. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah. You heard it here first…
Nehemia: Well, in the Tanakh we have the reference to tar hasofer, the scribe’s razor. So, presumably something like that.
Kim: Yeah. So, they’ve definitely got means of trimming the parchment leaves, because if you think back to images one and two, there’s no reason to think that all of those books were the same shape or size. So, in image 2, those bits of parchment are definitely not going to be the same size; they’re going to vary. So, one of the first jobs that the scribe needs to do when he’s freshly bought his big pile of parchment is to trim it so that all of those leaves then become one size. And then finally, stage 6, he is ready to sit down and write, in Syriac, The Ladder of Divine Ascent. I’m not very impressed with ChatGPT’s picture of Syriac there…
Kim: But in general, I think it’s done a great job.
Nehemia: Did you tell it that it was supposed to be Syriac?
Nehemia: Okay. It looks more like a barbaric form of Hebrew, like that maybe is a Nun or something.
Nehemia: He does what he knows how to do.
Nehemia: All right. So, the palimpsest is a rewritten work. And here’s the exciting thing, guys, that, as I said, Dr. Phillips deciphered this erased text. How did you decipher it when it was scraped off? Or could you only decipher it when it was washed off? That’s a question here.
Kim: So, it’s a process. It really is! I think the short answer is that you decipher it with blood, sweat and tears. It’s…
Nehemia: Okay! Fair enough.
Kim: It’s excruciating, to be honest.
Nehemia: But, to give a more useful answer, if you… Well, two things. Over time, even though the ink has been erased, if it’s carbon, iron gall ink, then it will continue to, sort of, go brown. So, actually, when I looked at the manuscript in, you know, the year 2015 when I started working on it…
Nehemia: Oh, wow! So, you’ve been working on this for ten years!
Nehemia: Oh, wow. Impressive.
Kim: On and off, not continuously.
Nehemia: Okay. Still impressive.
Kim: Yeah. Painful, yeah.
Kim: So, probably in 2015 and subsequently, I could see more with the naked eye than was visible to the scribe back in the year 1000 when he’s sitting down. Because, as I say, the traces that were left of that iron gall ink that the original scribe wrote with would have gone brown, or browner over time. And so, have sort of become slightly visible.
Nehemia: I see. So, when he wrote it, he saw fewer traces, you think, than what you’re seeing today. Okay, that’s good.
Nehemia: That’s good for us.
Kim: Yeah. Yes, yes, it’s an advantageous byproduct of using iron gall ink, yeah.
Kim: The great help is when you can look at the manuscript under different types of light. So, I’m not the first person to have deciphered palimpsest by a country mile. It’s a discipline that’s been going on for centuries. And for a long time, people have known that, if you look at a manuscript under ultraviolet light, that can sometimes help reveal the text that is otherwise difficult to see. And certainly, when the second person to edit this text, a very, very competent scholar called Christa Muller-Kessler, came to Cambridge to look at the manuscript… because it ended up in Cambridge. We can talk about that if you like.
Kim: She deciphered it using an ultraviolet lamp. We were able to go a step further, though, and enlist the help of a team of multispectral imaging experts. So, we should probably get into that.
Nehemia: Ooh. That’s cutting-edge stuff, guys. MSI, Multi-Spectral Imaging.
Kim: Yeah, they really took it to the next level.
Nehemia: Wow. Explain what multispectral imaging is.
Kim: So, as far as I understand… and I sometimes think after ten years of working with them I should know a bit better, but anyway, they take photographs of each of the pages under different sorts of light. All the way from infrared to ultraviolet, and those then become the raw images. And then they can combine those images in clever ways so that they can enhance the under text, making it just easier to see. They can change the color of the undertext to make the contrast stand out a bit more, to make it easier to see. In some cases, they can even make it look as though they’ve raised the… called the superior text, the text written on top, so that you can see more of the text written underneath.
So, the process of taking those images in different spectra, in different wavelengths of light, and then the process of digitally processing those images to put various different images on top of each other and together, that whole process is called multispectral imaging. I really hope I’ve not just absolutely mangled an entire branch of science!
Nehemia: No, that sounds correct. So, one of the technical sides of it is that there are tannins in the ink. And even if you can’t see those tannins with the naked eye, under certain wavelengths of ultraviolet light they become more visible. And, of course, there’s what you call the upper ink, or the superior ink you’re calling it, and that may have different wavelengths that it’s visible in, or it’s visible in invisible light, right? And so, you’re kind of bringing out the lower layer. Yeah. That’s… it’s amazing stuff.
I’ve looked at stuff where like… of course, I’m looking mostly at Hebrew manuscripts, where, like, they erased something, and we can read what’s been erased. And there’s nothing visible to the naked eye, and we can actually read it. Now, we know what it says because it’s the Bible, right? So, it’s not like a huge surprise. But in the case of what I’m working on, we’re at least confirming what our speculation is about what it should say. In your case, we don’t even know what it says, and you’re able to decipher it and read it. So, what is the lower text in the Climaci Rescriptus? What do you call the lower text?
Kim: I called it the undertext. But yeah, lower text, whatever.
Nehemia: No, I mean, what is the… tell everybody what the content is, because that, to me, is very exciting.
Nehemia: Because honestly, I don’t really care about The Ladder of Ascension. That’s not my field of interest. But what you have in the undertext is very exciting to me.
Kim: Could you bring back up the ChatGPT’s version of the process?
Kim: And I can talk with that there.
Nehemia: Absolutely. Here we go. Yes.
Kim: There we go. Yeah, great, thank you. So, in ChatGPT’s version, there are six original books. Actually, for Codex Climaci Rescriptus, there are bits, and I emphasize “bits of”, bits of 11 original books. Four of which were written in Greek, and seven of which were written in this dialect of Aramaic, Christian Palestinian Aramaic. So, the dialect of Aramaic spoken by the Christian community in and around Jerusalem in, say, the 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th centuries.
Nehemia: Is that the same as Syriac?
Nehemia: No. This is important. This is where we wanted to get to. When we were talking about Syriac, guys, this is what we were aiming for.
Nehemia: So, now we have the Aramaic spoken by Jews in northern… let’s call it northern Israel, Galilee, and other places. We have the Aramaic spoken in Edessa, and by Christians around the Middle East. And then we have a different dialect, CPA, Christian Palestinian Aramaic. What is that?
Kim: So, we spoke briefly earlier about the dialect of Aramaic spoken by… or that Targum Onkelos has been translated into, Jewish Palestinian Aramaic. And Jewish Palestinian Aramaic and Galilean Aramaic and Christian Palestinian Aramaic are all just varieties… and Samaritan Aramaic, are all varieties of Aramaic spoken in the west part of the Middle East. So, let’s say, in the sort of Mediterranean region.
Nehemia: So, the Aramaic that your undertext is written in, that you deciphered over the last ten years…
Kim: Yeah. Thanks for reminding me.
Nehemia: …is closer to the Aramaic that Jesus spoke, according to your understanding, than Syriac, than the Peshitta text of the New Testament.
Kim: Yeah, yeah, no doubt about it. Yeah. Unless Jesus originated from several hundred miles further east than we have originally thought. Yeah. No, no two ways about it. He grew up in Galilee, so his Aramaic could have been very similar to the Aramaic in Targum Onkelos and the Aramaic that we now call CPA. Yeah.
Nehemia: Okay. CPA; Christian Palestinian Aramaic. We’ll put that up on the screen. By the way… and… oh, so, are you done with this image? Or is there something else you want to show us here?
Kim: So, no. So, I was just going to say that the one book that we ended up with, the one codex, Codex Climaci Rescriptus, actually originates from bits of 11 earlier books. And we’re particularly interested in just two of those earlier books. Two out of the seven that were written in Christian Palestinian Aramaic.
Nehemia: And I imagine other scholars dealt with the other five and all the Greek stuff. Am I right? Or maybe they’re not that interesting.
Kim: I’ve dealt with four out of the seven of the CPA, and I’ve got work in progress on another one.
Kim: And I think I’m going…
Nehemia: So, you’re continuing to work on that material. So, in the book that you just came out with… and guys, we’re going to put a link up on my website to the book at nehemiaswall.com. And guys, this book is… you can download it for free. It’s from Open Publishers, I believe it’s called?
Kim: Yeah, Open Book Publishers.
Nehemia: Open Book Publishers. And it’s a free download. Now, if you want a print copy, you can probably order and pay for a print copy, but most people are probably just going to download it. Guys, go download this book. It’s absolutely fascinating. I was looking at some, you know… So, well, what is the text? You haven’t told us what the text is.
Nehemia: That’s the exciting thing. Because, like I said, I could almost care less about The Ladder of Ascent, or whatever. And I don’t know that you’re that interested in it either. Maybe you are, I don’t know.
Kim: In my personal life, yes.
Nehemia: Okay, fair enough.
Nehemia: But the text that’s written in the undertext, the erased text that you were able to decipher…
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. And again, there’s debates on this. I mean, according to Kim here… guys, you don’t have to agree with him. But according to Dr. Phillips and many other scholars, this is the dialect, or closer to the dialect, at least… I mean, it’s almost like what we would say, and this might be lost in some of the audience. It’d be like if somebody spoke Danish and he met somebody who spoke Swedish and they could understand each other, and we said they spoke Scandinavian. And then somebody were to say, like, “Oh, well, the Swedish guy, that’s the same as what the Danish guy spoke.” No, it’s two different languages. But in Aramaic we call those dialects. And the joke is that, you know, the definition of a dialect? Have you heard this one? Or the definition of a language versus a dialect?
Nehemia: So, and this was Max Weinreich, who was the great scholar of Yiddish, and he was talking about Yiddish. He said, “A language is a dialect with a navy and an army.”
Kim: [Laughter] Yeah, that makes sense.
Nehemia: Meaning there’s some… So, the difference really between, let’s say… and I don’t know Norwegian or Swedish or anything like that, but I’m told Norwegian and Swedish are so close to each other they can have a conversation, each speaking in their own language. Danish is a little bit more complicated, I’m told. But we consider them different languages because there’s different countries.
Well, in the Aramaic sense, there weren’t different countries. So, we call all of them Aramaic, even though… and this is a question I have for you. If somebody from, let’s say, from Galilee, met somebody from Babylon in the 1st century CE, would they understand each other? Like a Swede and a Dane? Or they would think, “Well, that guy kind of talks funny, but I can understand what he’s saying.” Do you have some sense of what the relationship was?
Kim: My hunch is that, if they wrote to each other, then they would think that each of them were making quite a lot of grammatical errors. But that nonetheless, they would have understood each other pretty well. A word here and there would have not sat, but they’d have been able to make out the gist.
Kim: As to if they spoke to one another, then you’re getting into all sorts of phonology. And that gets really complicated, and I am in no way expert enough to come up with any sort of judgment on that.
Nehemia: Okay, fair enough. Okay, that answers the question. All right. So, the New Testament, written in a dialect of Aramaic, which is spoken by Christians but is very close to the Aramaic that would have been spoken in northern Israel in the 1st century. It’s part of the same family, let’s say, right?
Nehemia: Maybe it’s like different dialects of Norwegian or something, right? I don’t know.
Kim: Yeah, yeah, very close. So, demonstrably closer to Galilean Aramaic, Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, Christian Palestinian Aramaic, they’re all basically varieties of the same language. Whereas Syriac, over in the East, feels quite different in all sorts of ways. And we’ve spoken about that…
Nehemia: So, how do you explain… and you don’t have to have an answer, but is there an explanation of why Christians in the area of Jerusalem, in what did we say, the 4th or 5th century… Or, you said 550… So, Christians in the 6th century are speaking a language closer to Jews in that region than the Christians are in that region to Christians, you know, in Edessa, right? Like you said, a few hundred miles. So, why is that? Do we have some idea of why that is? Or…
Kim: Well, I think if you grow up in a region you speak the language. It’s as simple as that.
Kim: And the language that is spoken in the Levant region is Aramaic. Well, Greek, obviously, is the kind of imperial language, but Aramaic… And so, the Christian element of Christian Palestinian Aramaic really comes down more to the type of text that you find in the dialect, and every now and then, a sort of more theological word, which is suitable for Christianity and less suitable for Judaism, and vice versa.
Nehemia: All right. So, the New Testament in Christian Palestinian Aramaic; how much of the New Testament were you able to decipher in the Codex Climaci Rescriptus?
Kim: Sure. So, just to remind you, we’re only interested in two of the 11 earlier manuscripts that eventually made their way into Climaci Rescriptus.
Nehemia: So, there’s actually two different texts, and two different manuscripts that are the source, and they’re both New Testament in Christian Palestinian Aramaic?
Kim: Yeah. So, of those, remember, there are seven, if you like, books, from the year 550, which are then dismantled, and parts of those then get used in Climaci Rescriptus centuries later. One of those books is a copy of the Gospels, and that’s called CCR 1. And I published that in Aramaic Studies, and that’s also open access. So, listeners can just download that.
Nehemia: We’ll put a link there as well. What does CCR stand for?
Kim: Codex Climaci Rescriptus.
Kim: CCR 7 is just two pages of Leviticus in CPA, Christian Palestinian Aramaic, and I published those. And they are just about to come out in the Journal of Semitic Studies, also open access, so listeners can also go there and download that.
Kim: I particularly enjoyed that one because most of my work is done in Hebrew Bible, Old Testament. And so, to be able to work on Leviticus in CPA was a real treat. And there’s hardly any Leviticus. I think there’s maybe one or two extra leaves, but basic leaf in Leviticus that I was deciphering there was the only witness to Leviticus in Christian Palestinian Aramaic.
But we’re not interested in that, we’re interested in CCR 2 and CCR 11. CCR 2 is a copy of the Pauline Epistles, and CCR 11 is a copy of the Book of Acts plus what are either called the General Epistles or the Catholic Epistles. But we’re talking about Peter, Jude, James and the Letters of John. Those are what we would refer to as the General Epistles.
Nehemia: I’m sorry. CCR 2 is the Pauline Epistles, or 11?
Kim: CCR 2 is Pauline Epistles, yep. CCR 11 is… well, actually, until I started the work, people didn’t realize they were two separate manuscripts.
Nehemia: That’s one of your discoveries.
Kim: Half mine, I would say. We can get into…
Nehemia: So, for the audience who’s not familiar… maybe we have some Jews listening who have never heard of the Catholic Epistles. I know this is a loaded question, but… So, what is the relationship between the Roman Catholic Church and the Catholic Epistles?
Nehemia: Like… in other words, what does the word Catholic mean in this context?
Kim: Yeah. In this context, it just means that they were written for… rather than being written to a specific group, they were written for the churches more broadly.
Kim: So, it’s nothing to do with, anything partisan in, you know, Catholic/Protestant divides; nothing like that. These are, as I say, the letters of Peter, James, Jude and John. They’re in everybody’s New Testament.
Nehemia: Okay. And there’s an irony that, and correct me if I’m wrong, isn’t it the Nicene Creed that mentions the Catholic Church? But it doesn’t mean what we call the Catholic Church today. It means, actually, like, just the universal church, or something like that. Right?
Kim: Yes. That’s right, yes. The Nicene, and I think the Apostles Creed, even earlier…
Kim: …talks about the Holy Catholic Church, yeah.
Nehemia: Right. By which it doesn’t mean the Roman Catholic Church. It’s extremely… probably confusing for an outsider like me.
Kim: Yeah. And I’m confused when we recite it in church, to be honest, which we do…
Kim: …every now and then. We regularly have to explain, in that line we actually mean the church all over the world, as the earth. That’s what we mean by Catholic.
Nehemia: So, in a sense, it’s somewhat marketing… the Roman Catholic Church calling themselves Catholic is like, I don’t know… well, maybe… maybe let’s not get into that.
Nehemia: But it does seem very clever of them to adopt that phrase. Or maybe… I don’t know. Anyway, I don’t know enough about it. All right. So, we’ve got CCR 2, Pauline Epistles and CCR 11, Acts. Before we get to the… I’m really interested in Leviticus, because, you know, that’s more my wheelhouse. So, CCR 7, Leviticus… and maybe this is a question for all of these, right? The Gospels. I want to make… I want you to make this really clear to the audience. Can somebody come along and say, “Kim has discovered the original gospels that were written by the disciples.” Or “he’s published them…” maybe not “discovered them”, in CCR 1, because they’re in the same dialect that Jesus spoke. Right? That’s not at all what you’re saying, right?
Kim: No, I’m not saying that at all. These are all… these are all translations from Greek. All of them, without exception. Including Leviticus.
Nehemia: Do you have… and I know I’m putting you on the spot; are there some proofs you have of that? Or is that just the assumption? Because we know it was written in Greek, or we believe it was written in Greek.
Kim: Yeah. Well, no, I can give a… yeah, it is slightly on the spot. So, I might, given a few minutes to think, be able to come up with a better example.
Nehemia: That’s totally fair.
Kim: But just on the spot, though… hang on, just on the spot…
Kim: There are two characters in the New Testament called Jesus; the famous one, and the less famous one.
Nehemia: Who’s the famous one?
Kim: [Laughter] How else are we meant to distinguish?
Nehemia: No, fair enough. You mean Jesus of Nazareth, and then there’s another one.
Kim: There is another minor figure called Jesus, yeah. In Christian Palestinian Aramaic, you would expect somebody called Jesus to be called Yeshu or Yeshua, or something of that sort.
Nehemia: Did they pronounce the Ayin in Christian Palestinian Aramaic? Do we know?
Kim: Okay, no. So, that’s one of the distinguishing features, actually, of CPA; the so-called guttural letters Alef, Ayin, Chet and Hey had become so weak and not distinctly pronounced that they started to be confused with each other. So, we’ve got all sorts of words where you would expect a Chet but we get an Ayin, or we would expect an Aleph, but we get a Hey and vice versa, and all that sort of thing.
Nehemia: There’s a famous passage in the Talmud where it says “You should never let a Jew…” I want to say from Haifa, and maybe Beit She’an, or someplace like that… Tivon, maybe, there’s a bunch of several different places. “You should never let them lead the prayers because they don’t distinguish between Alef and Ayin and Hey and Chet.” Right? So, part of the dialect, I guess, of Aramaic, and maybe of whatever elements of Hebrew… like, even when they’re reading Hebrew in the prayers, they’re not distinguishing between those guttural letters, like we don’t do today in many Israeli pronunciations.
When I was in Ulpan in 1990, we were reading something about the death of Aaron, the brother of Moses. And one of the students read the text in Hebrew and he said, “Or’ a’ar.” And I raised my hand, and I said, “That’s wrong. It’s called ho ha’har.” And everybody looked at me like I was crazy. They’re like, “Oh no, we don’t pronounce the Hey.” It’s like… but then you’re saying Alef? “Yeah, that’s how we pronounce it.” And I learned that some modern Israelis do pronounce the Hey, and some pronounce it as an Alef, meaning everybody pronounces it. But whether you distinguish between Hey and Alef depends on your accent.
Kim: Sure, sure. And if you listen to early, kind of from the 60s, recordings of songs or newsreels or whatever, they’re far more assiduous in pronouncing Ayin’s and…
Nehemia: So, there was actually a rule up until the 70s that required you to have a “rolling R.” And it was kind of like an in-joke among newscasters because nobody spoke that way. They’re like, “I go home, and I don’t talk that way, but I’m required to have a rolling R.” And then they kind of dropped it sometime in the 70s. And you’ll occasionally hear like a politician who still has a rolling R, but not so much anymore.
Kim: Or if you’re speaking to somebody from, say, a Mizrachi type of community, then you’ll still get a pronunciation…
Nehemia: Oh, there’s definitely people of Mizrahi or Sephardic descent who will say Chet and not Khet, and will say A’yin. Generally, though, you only hear that if somebody is trying to make it clear. Meaning like somebody who isn’t of Sephardic descent. Or even when they are, they’ll generally only say the Ayin when they’re trying to distinguish between osher ve’osher, or something like that. Two words that otherwise are homonyms unless you emphasize the pronunciation of the guttural letter. But then a second later they won’t pronounce it because it’s not necessary for disambiguating.
Kim: Sure, sure. It’s incredible how…
Kim: …a linguistic situation that is still very much around today, the pronunciation, or otherwise, of these gutturals is exactly what we find back in these texts. And we’ve got just a plethora of evidence that those sorts of confusions were being made in Christian Palestinian Aramaic and in other dialects of Aramaic in Western Aramaic.
Nehemia: So… and I don’t know the answer to this; in Syriac, do they pronounce the Ayin? The letter Ayin? In other words, do they call him Yeshu’a, or do they call him YeshuA?
Kim: Yeah, that’s a good question.
Kim: My hunch, but again, this is only… this is a hunch based on later pronunciation, is that they are much more assiduous, yeah, in pronouncing the gutturals.
Kim: But as I say, that could be entirely anachronistic because I’m just hearing…
Nehemia: Right. It could be the influence of Arabic coming along, and then they say, “Oh, we have the same letter with the same name…”
Kim: Precisely, yes, yeah, absolutely.
Nehemia: “…we’ll pronounce it that way.” So, and look, this is like when I speak… it’s funny, when I speak Hebrew in Israel, I pronounce the Reish. But if I’m talking to American Jews, then it’s “Reish”. Well, there is no “ruh” in… and this is my, what do they call it? Rhotic American accent, there is no “ruh” in Hebrew. Right? So, where am I getting that? I’m getting it by analogy, because it’s considered to be the equivalent of the Hebrew Reish. Right? Even though it’s not, right? There are two different letters. “R” and Reish. But we’ve equated the two in, let’s say, American Jewish pronunciation.
All right… Even though it’s not obvious that you have to, right? And then when British Jews speak, boy, that’s really interesting because they have non-rhotic… from our American perspective, they don’t pronounce any “r” unless it’s followed by a vowel. There’s a whole bunch of rules there.
Kim: So, you would end up saying things like shamar instead of shama… Am I hearing? Or am I preserving? Or what am I doing here? “Shamar.”
Nehemia: So, I once heard a British person who was trying to explain logograms in like, I don’t know, Akkadian or something like that. And he said, “It would be like, if you have a symbol of an eye and you have a symbol of a deer. And that’s ‘idea’.”
Nehemia: And I’m like, “No, that’s i-dear.” Right?
Nehemia: Which to me is like, is not idea. But anyway, so the point is, within English we have these differentiations, these distinctions, and then we have them in Aramaic. And so, you’re saying the Ayin… Right? So, we have two letters, guys, Alef and Ayin, and probably in ancient Hebrew we had three letters, but let’s not get into that, right? Because you had Ayin and Rayin. But like I said, let’s not get into that.
So, in Christian Palestinian Aramaic, in CCR 1, 7, 2 and 11, they’re not pronouncing the Ayin. So, what do they call Jesus?
Kim: So, yeah… that’s right. That’s what we were talking about originally. [Laughter]
Nehemia: Yeah. The famous one; what do they call the famous one from Nazareth?
Kim: They call him, and this is…
Nehemia: Or Bethlehem, whichever.
Kim: …this is a bit surprising, actually. They call him Yesus. In other words, they take the Greek word, and they write it in Aramaic letters. And that’s kind of one dead giveaway that they were looking at Greek manuscripts when they were translating.
Kim: Because they don’t call him the name that his mother would have called him.
Nehemia: What would she have called him? Everybody listen here…
Kim: Well, presumably something like Yeshua, or something like that. Actually, do you know what? I think my colleague, Ben Cantor has a YouTube video on the pronunciation of Jesus in the 1st century.
Nehemia: We’ll put a link to that. We’ve had him on the program, too. Amazing information he has.
Kim: Okay. There we go. Yeah. So, and I think he… that’s precisely what he discusses there, so far better.
Kim: But yeah. So, whenever they’re talking about the famous Jesus, his name is written as Yesus. In other words, the Greek name written in…
Nehemia: What about the non-famous Jesus? What do they call him?
Kim: He gets called Yeshua. Yeshua with an Ayin.
Kim: But, yeah, that’s a distinction. Yeah.
Nehemia: All right. So, I’m going to read here from the NRSV. “And Jesus, who is called justice, greets you.” And this is my Israeli Greek pronunciation, Kai Yesus ho legomenos yustos. Right? So… “Yesus, who is called Yustos,” right? In other words, there was somebody named Yeshua… what would justice be in Hebrew? I don’t even know. Yeshua Yehoshaphat, or something like that, maybe. I don’t know.
Kim: So, which verse are we in here?
Nehemia: That’s Colossians 4:11. So, read that for us, if you can. I’m pretty sure you can.
Kim: Okay. So, yeah. “Kai Yesus ho legomenos yustos,” saying “Jesus, the one called justice.”
Nehemia: And what do we have in the Peshitta?
Kim: In the Peshitta we’ve got “Ve’yeshu hau d’methqrei yuwstows.” Which is just that, “And Jesus, who is called justice.”
Nehemia: Well, that’s interesting. Here we have… I can see we have the Yud-Shin-Vav-Ayin. It’s not Yesus. Now, whether they pronounce the Ayin or not, that, I guess, we don’t really know.
Nehemia: That’s what we’re talking… you know, it’s up to debate. But in Christian Palestinian Aramaic, instead of an Ayin here, and instead of a Shin, you’re going to have something like a Samekh or something, I guess?
Kim: No. Well, let me show you. If I can share my screen, then I can show you the…
Nehemia: Yes, please. Go ahead. This is exciting stuff. Look, this is the kind of thing that the average listener doesn’t get access to. If they downloaded this book, they wouldn’t understand most of it. And to have the editor of this book explain it to us is such a privilege. Thank you so much, Kim. This is amazing.
Kim: It’s a real honor to do so, so, thank you. So, here is Colossians 4:11 in Christian Palestinian Aramaic, and there you can see Ve’yeshu written in exactly the same way as in the Peshitta, horthen dmithimar yustus. “Horthen”, this one, “dmithimar”, who was known as, justice.
Nehemia: So, we’ve got five letters there in the name Jesus. Can you break down and tell the audience… I don’t know if you can highlight it. You have that or something?
Kim: Let’s have a look. Yeah, I probably can do it.
Nehemia: Highlight each letter and tell them what they are, so…
Kim: I can even zoom in a bit. There we go, then we can really see.
Kim: [Laughter] So, this is a Wauw. That’s just “and”, this is a Yod, so, “yuh”. “Shuh.” “Ooh.”
Nehemia: That’s another Vav, or they call Wauw, I guess, in Syriac.
Kim: Yeah, ye-shu, and then this aw, Ye-shu-aw.
Nehemia: So, that’s the Ayin.
Kim: The Ayin. Yeah, there we go.
Kim: Now, I don’t want to get into too much detail, but I will just say that I had to write this book using Syriac script. This is not identical to the script that Christian Palestinian Aramaic is written in, but it’s close enough.
Nehemia: Do you have an image of that, that you can show us this particular word? Or is that too complicated? I know I’m putting you on the spot here.
Nehemia: And again, this is the less famous Jesus, who’s known as justice. In fact, the text itself has to tell us, “Guys, this isn’t the one you guys know about. It’s the one known as justice.”
Kim: So, the page that I’m showing here, I deliberately chose because it’s one of the hardest pages to see anything written underneath.
Kim: So, the text that you can see here, written in dark brown, is the Syriac text of John Climacus.
Nehemia: We don’t see that. We still see the book.
Nehemia: The nice, typeset, beautiful book.
Kim: Yeah. Okay, So, let me share another and then you’ll be able to see.
Nehemia: Guys, it’s exciting. We’re going to see a real palimpsest.
Kim: There we go. Can you see that now?
Nehemia: I can see it. Oh, okay. So, that’s not the… what is it? Estrangala script. That’s a different script. Okay.
Kim: So, this script, yeah… So, what we’re seeing here in dark brown, as I say, is the upper-level text written in…
Nehemia: Oh, that’s the… from around the year 1000, okay.
Kim: Roughly, yeah, yeah, yeah. And as I say, I chose this page to show precisely because it’s really difficult to see what’s written underneath. So, I wanted to show off how the multispectral imaging has really helped us. But if you just look here, you can…
Kim: I’ll zoom in so that you can see something a little bit more. Now, if you look here, can you see that there are… there’s a script underneath that you can see in very, very light brown.
Kim: But you can see a letter there. That’s probably a Bet. You can see a letter here with a diagonal stroke there. You can see a letter here that looks like a square, but it’s got a little roof off to the left. You can see a Waow there. That is the Christian Palestinian Aramaic undertext. That’s what we needed to recover. But I’ll zoom out again so you can see.
Nehemia: And although the undertext is in some form of Syriac script, it’s not Syriac.
Nehemia: It’s Western or… Yeah, Western Aramaic CPA, Christian Palestine Aramaic.
Kim: Yeah. Exactly right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Nehemia: And “Palestine” here refers to the Land of Israel, the Roman province of Palestine…
Nehemia: …not to an ethnic group called Palestinians. Am I right about that?
Kim: Not to an ethno, no…
Nehemia: Not necessarily, at least.
Kim: Not necessarily. Well, it’s…
Nehemia: I don’t want to get you in trouble. Not necessarily, let’s say.
Kim: Okay, sure. It’s referring to the Roman nomenclature for the region, yeah.
Nehemia: Okay. Which, after Hadrian, was called Sierra Palaestina, or something like that.
Kim: There we go, yeah. So, it’s purely that. It’s not related to anything political today.
Nehemia: And it’s interesting, just the other day, I was looking with Nelson at an article by… We were looking for an article by Bar Asher that ChatGPT told me about. And it turned out it made up the article; it doesn’t exist. But I ended up looking at everything from Moshe Bar Asher, who’s the head of the Academy of the Hebrew Language, that I could find at least, and he has an article, and it’s in Hebrew. It’s called Surit Eretz-Yisraelit, or something like that.
Kim: Ha’Surit Shel Eretz Yisrael, that’s right. The Syriac of the Land of Israel…
Nehemia: But in English it was translated as “Palestinian Syriac” or something like that. And I’m like, “Wait. I’m sure that’s not correct!”
Nehemia: No, Syro-Palestinian, that’s what it was called, instead of Palestinian Syriac, maybe. I’m not sure. How would you translate that?
Kim: Well, Bar Asher wrote his PhD on this dialect of Aramaic, so, I don’t know if that’s what you were getting to, but…
Nehemia: No, it was an article that obviously came out of the PhD. It wasn’t the whole PhD.
Nehemia: It was something on JSTOR that we were looking at.
Kim: Okay, yeah. So, the Hebrew language name for this dialect of Aramaic is Surit Shel Eretz Yisrael.
Kim: Syriac of the Land of Israel.
Nehemia: There you go. Any final words? Guys, go download this book. We’re going to put the link on nehemiaswall.com. That also helps Kim, because, you know, this is how scholars, or maybe the publishers decide, “Hey, if we had a lot of downloads of this… let’s do more of this research because apparently people are interested in it.” So, guys, this is worth downloading. It’s a free download. Share it with your friends, even if you don’t understand most of it. Hopefully you can understand some of it, because look, some of it is in Syriac. But there’s also, or sorry, it’s in Christian Palestinian Aramaic.
Kim: Not Syriac! None of it is in Syriac! [Laughter]
Nehemia: Is it correct to call it the Syriac script? Would that even be right in this context?
Kim: Yeah, no, it would exactly be right because, and this just comes down to modern typography, there is a typescript for Christian Palestinian Aramaic. But it’s very difficult to get hold of, and so most people who are writing about Christian Palestinian Aramaic just use the Syriac script, as I’ve done, just to cut out all of the…
Nehemia: So, I hope next time when you come on this program in the future, you’ll explain what some of those differences are between CPA script and Syriac script, because that’s fascinating as well. But guys, there’s so much. I only was able to peruse the book, and there are so many interesting things that popped out that, hopefully we’ll have Kim back. Let us know if you want to hear more about this, and we’ll do a future episode about it. There’s so much Kim can talk about. Guys, if you remember, Kim is the expert who identified manuscripts written by Samuel Ben Jacob, the same scribe as Leningrad Codex. That’s what we had him on in the past. And here he’s… look at the… he’s a polymath. He’s doing Christian Palestinian Aramaic, and he’s doing the Leningrad Codex, and identifying the handwriting. This is amazing stuff, guys. I hope you come back on. Thank you, Kim, for your research and for sharing. Any final words for the audience?
Kim: Thank you. I’m really grateful for your interest and your enthusiasm, and, uh, yeah. So, thank you for all that you’re doing through your podcast to make all of these sorts of things more accessible to people for whom otherwise they’d just be a closed book. So…
Nehemia: Amen. Well, thank you so, much. Thanks for being on the program, shalom.
Nehemia: All right. So, underneath there’s a text, and you’re using multispectral imaging to try to decipher this.
Kim: That’s right, yeah. And I can take you through a little bit of how that would work, actually…
Kim: …if that would… if that would be helpful.
Nehemia: Can you show us the name Yeshua, even though it’s referring to justice?
Kim: I can’t on this page…
Kim: …because this isn’t the right page, but…
Nehemia: Ah, okay. That’s fine.
Kim: If you give me a few minutes, I can find that image as well.
Nehemia: No, no, no, show us what you have here. Actually, if you could do that, that would be amazing. That would be very cool!
Kim: Okay. Yeah. All right. So, in that case, just give me a moment and I’ll bring that image up now.
Nehemia: I think that would be much more engaging for the audience to see what the name Jesus would have looked like if it had come from Aramaic itself, as opposed to going through the Greek intermediary. Actually, if you can show us Yesus as well, I think that’s also quite interesting.
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VERSES MENTIONED
Jeremiah 36:23
Talmud Megillah 24b
Colossians 4:11
BOOKS MENTIONED
Two Early Byzantine Bible Manuscripts in Christian Palestinian Aramaic: Codex Climaci Rescriptus II & XI
by Kim Phillips
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OTHER LINKS
https://www.youtube.com/@KimLPhillips
https://1000words.academia.edu/KimPhillips
Codex Climaci Rescriptus I: Text, Codicology, and Paratextual Features
https://www.academia.edu/123575312/Codex_Climaci_Rescriptus_I_Text_Codicology_and_Paratextual_Features
How did Jesus pronounce his own name? Evidence from 1st Century Inscriptionshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=na22KkydPRs
The post Hebrew Voices #220 – The Aramaic Dialect of Jesus: Part 1 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.
