A strip mall 15 minutes down the highway from Manhattan is the last place I expected to hear the language spoken by Jesus Christ. But northern New Jersey is one of the places where Syriac Christians, ...

A guide at St. Mark's Church in Jerusalem who moved more than a decade ago from her home in an Assyrian village in northern Iraq to work there (photo: Emily Mulder). Just a few hundred feet west of ...

In 2000 David Buttrick began a project that focused on the language of Jesus and the ways in which attention to Jesus’ language can inform and shape preaching. Speaking Conflict is the final volume in ...

What do these three locales have in common: a remote village in Syria; Sydney, Australia; and the Old City of Jerusalem? The answer is: Aramaic, a dominant language in the ancient world. Now, Jews, ...

Linda Güven. It is, says Linda Güven, a colorful community. "Secularly colorful," she stresses. The 35-year-old teacher belongs to the Syrian Orthodox church congregation "Mor Petrus and Mor Paulus" ...

You get asked some pretty strange things when you speak the language of Jesus. The calls come to my father’s office at UCLA several times a year, often around Christmas or Easter. “Professor Yona ...

Hunched over a thick book, George Zaarour uses a magnifying glass to decipher Aramaic script—the biblical language of Jesus that is starting to disappear from everyday use in his village. The ...

There are exceptions to the unwritten rules of Arabic hospitality. I quickly learned them when I asked the Cairo hookah bar proprietors where the bathroom was in my Midwestern Arabic. After a few ...

It was a sunny morning in May, and I was in a car with a linguist and a tax preparer trolling the suburbs of Chicago for native speakers of Aramaic, the 3,000-year-old language of Jesus. The linguist, ...

When Mang Sing, a Christian pastor born in Myanmar’s Chin state, first heard the characters of the film “Jesus” speaking in the Zo language of his people, his heart skipped a beat. “I couldn’t imagine ...