8/9/2023 0 Comments Peace be with you in aramaic![]() What the Apostles did pass down to us, the earliest written records preserved of the Christian Church, are the New Testament Scriptures - written not in Hebrew, not in Aramaic, but in Greek. There are in fact Christians who have been speaking Aramaic for the past two thousand years, since the time of the Apostles, who have passed down the Christian faith in what can be called its native language: the Syriac Christians, whose liturgical language is essentially Aramaic as Jesus would have spoken it - but they pronounce the Lord’s name not “ Yeshua,” but “ Isho.” Yeshua was passed down by nobody at all, but invented from imagined traditions in modern times. Rather than adhering to the “true” name of the Lord, proponents of this are just as guilty of “translating” His name into their own language as the early Greek Christians were in calling Him Jesus. Even presuming the rabbinic tradition of pronunciation - Yeshua, like any other rendering, is at best an approximation. On top of this, there is the matter that Hebrew and other Semitic languages can only be transliterated incompletely into English, which lacks both the phonemes and the graphemes to fully express those languages’ sounds and meanings. Syriac Christians (see below), whose liturgical language is essentially Aramaic as it would have been spoken in the first century, pronounce these same characters, ישוע, not as “Yeshua” but as “Isho.” So a rabbi reading ישוע in a biblical text would pronounce it completely differently than a first-century Jew on the street speaking Aramaic, reading the same characters. The original Hebrew texts had no vowels the system of vowels and pronunciations we have of ancient Hebrew today was passed down (and in some cases made up, or at least formalized) by rabbis. Our transliteration of Hebrew is based on the rabbinical pronunciation of the biblical texts. ![]() * Jews wrote Aramaic with the Hebrew script, but pronounced it differently than the biblical Hebrew language. Yeshua is a modern reconstruction, based not on Aramaic but on Hebrew pronunciation.* Historians believe that Jesus and the Apostles probably spoke Aramaic as their primary language - not Hebrew. But they left us no record, no tradition of it. Proponents argue that the name Yeshua is what the Apostles themselves would have called the Lord and that might very well be true. And the truth is that there is no tradition - no writings, no hymns, no inscriptions, no traditional teaching or custom - of our Lord being addressed as Yeshua, passed down by the earliest Christians or by anyone else at all, until the beginnings of the “Messianic” movement in the nineteenth century. Tradition means what has been handed down. Proponents of “Hebrew Roots” often support their arguments with claims that they are returning to the “authentic traditions” of the first Jewish Christians. ![]() ![]()
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