Speakers of Jesus’s Native Tongue

In browsing the libraries of Christendom, it would be natural to assume that the native tongue of the first Christians was Greek or perhaps Latin. Yet, despite the luminous volumes laid out in these classical languages, and even before the compositions of the Gospels themselves, Christianity was originally a Syriac religion. The oldest fragments of Syriac culture can be seen with words like Abba, Rhaka, Hosanna, and Maranatha in the New Testament, distant echoes of the ancient Christian past. Indeed, the only language we know Christ to have spoken was the Galilean dialect of Aramaic, a form of Classical Syriac. Long before the great cathedrals of Rome, Kyiv, and Canterbury, Aramaic-speaking Christians established themselves along the muddy banks of Mesopotamia.