Aramaic as the Language of the Primary Church
7/31/24 8:32 PM
Lloyd Immanuel Acree
July 31 2024
The following may serve as a quick summary for Christians to understand why we must look to Aramaic for our best-possible approach to obtaining precisely canonical and properly interpreted Scriptures. I have written this article for 444prophecynews.com because I did not learn this approach to Scripture from the Church or historians, but from the dreams I received and prayer following up on those dreams. This is a conclusion I came to thanks only to the Holy Spirit.
First, we can start with extra biblical history for full context and then work back into the Bible. We examine why Aramaic should be the central language of the region as opposed to that of its more recent conquerors, the Romans, Greeks, and Persians respectively going back in time. Only so far back do we then arrive at the Babylonians and Assyrians, the latter from which came Aramaic dominance but which were eclipsed by all these.
It could seem counter-intuitive to keep Aramaic as the common language at the time of Christ, and certainly reasonable to doubt it as the business language. But history is not ambiguous.
We can skip Persian and Latin for the simple reason that Christians have never even supposed that these might be the original languages of the apostles. We can also skip Hebrew since no one has ever claimed to possess a prime Hebrew New Testament worthy of the first church’s original writings. The main contender has been Greek. For that question we should examine the Greek effect on the region’s culture and common language (lingua franca):
“After two centuries of serving as a vassal state to Persia, Judah suddenly found itself the vassal state of Macedonia, a Greek state. Alexander the Great had conquered Persia and had, in doing so, conquered most of the world. For most of the world belonged to Persia; in a blink of an eye, it now fell to the Greeks.
“This great Greek empire would last no longer than Alexander’s brief life; after his death, altercations between his generals led to the division of his empire among three generals. One general, Antigonus and then later Ptolemy, inherited Egypt; another, Seleucus, inherited the Middle East and Mesopotamia. After two centuries of peace under the Persians, the Hebrew state found itself once more caught in the middle of power struggles between two great empires: the Seleucid state with its capital in Syria to the north and the Ptolemaic state, with its capital in Egypt to the south. Once more, Judah would be conquered first by one, and then by the other, as it shifted from being a Seleucid vassal state to a Ptolemaic vassal state. Between 319 and 302 BCE, Jerusalem changed hands seven times.”
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-ancient-greeks-and-the-jews-jewish-virtual-library
These evanescent Greek authorities clearly had little time and even less power than all their predecessors to have done anything against the Aramaic ocean spread before them. It is clear that Aramaic had saturated the entirety of Israel territory, including Edom, since perhaps even the 6th century BC and certainly became the imperial choice for the lingua franca since the time of the Achameanids. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramaic_alphabet). This language the Persians inherited from the Assyrians and chose not to oppose it, but to rather promote and enhance Aramaic. Even after governing the area for centuries they still did not replace Aramaic with Persian (etc). So at the time of Christ, Aramaic had been the common mother language of the entire region.
The fact that this language persisted for so long throughout five separate empires up to the time of Christ solidifies that there was no language preferable to the very Aramaic-Hebrew disciples than these two Semitic/eastern languages. Greek would be quite a stretch if not simply an absurd choice, given that Greeks no longer governed the country either. Greek would have been similar to choosing Arabic or Latin. It wasn’t theirs at all.
Even further, Acts chapter 2 lists the foreign language speakers that did not understand the apostles until Pentecost. Among them are Jews (Judeans), Greek Cretans, Romans, Turks, Persians, and Arabs.
The evidence clarifies that Pentecost was an Aramaic event. It was so Aramaic that the Judeans, Greeks, Romans, and Arabs needed a translator. This bears out perfectly with the fact that Peter was singled out easily in Jerusalem as a Galilean and not a local Jew:
“And after a while came unto him they that stood by, and said to Peter, Surely thou also art one of them; for thy speech bewrayeth thee.”
Mat 26:73
There can be no other conclusion than that the New Testament should have been written in either Hebrew or Aramaic. Yet Aramaic would be Peter’s natural tongue, and that of the first Pentecost: the first church. The apostles certainly wrote to each other in Aramaic first.
Lloyd Immanuel Acree
