Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [48]
The language of the group that formed after Jesus’s death clearly was Aramaic; and Samaritan Christians (Samaria is just south of Galilee) have gone on speaking the language to the present day. But the new faith had cosmopolitan aspirations, and their first public event (recorded in Acts ii) was the pentecostal feast at which its apostles miraculously became able to preach in all manner of languages. This sudden gift for languages did not persist, and so a convenient medium had to be found to publish the scriptures. Given that they were in the Roman empire, centred on the Mediterranean, Greek was a reasonable choice. It was also free of the Jewish associations that hung about Aramaic, and might have tarnished Christianity’s appeal to gentiles. Greek accordingly was the language in which the Christian scriptures, the so-called ‘New Testament’, were composed. It became the first language of the Church in the west.
Nevertheless, the world was bigger than Rome and the ‘circle of lands’ (orbis terrārum) that surrounded its sea. Significantly, the first foreigners mentioned as witnesses to the pentecostal miracle are Parthians, Medes, Elamites and dwellers in Mesopotamia, none of them at the time under Roman rule, and as we have seen by this time (seven generations after the fall of the Seleucid empire in the east) much more likely to understand Aramaic than Greek.
It took two hundred years to get established, but the early Christian Church did get a major wing oriented towards the east. It was based at Edessa (modern and ancient Urfa†), a city on the major route east from Antioch on the Mediterranean towards Nisibis (Nusaybin) in Aram Naharaim, and Agbatana (Hamadan) in Media. The language of Edessa and its believers was Aramaic, here known as Syriac. This is our first example of a radically new motive for language spread, the drive to win converts to a new religion. Although the originals were in Greek, the New Testament and most early Christian literature was translated into Syriac, and became the basis of a literature of its own, of hymns, sermons and wider disquisitions, continuing actively until the thirteenth century AD, despite the swirls of Islamic invasions that passed round and about it.§
As honey drips from a honeycomb,
and milk flows from a woman full of love for her children,
so is my hope upon you, my God.
As a fountain gushes forth its water,
so does my heart gush forth the praise of the Lord
and my lips pour out praise to him;
my tongue is sweet from converse with him,
my face exults in the jubilation he brings,
my spirit is jubilant at his love
and by him my soul is illumined.
He who holds the Lord in awe may have confidence,
for his salvation is assured;
he will gain immortal life,
and those who receive this are incorruptible. Hallelujah!
Odes of Solomon, no. 4057
The spread of a language has to be distinguished from the spread of the religion, of course. Edessa was the source, for example, of the Christianity that reached Armenia in 303. But the Armenians were not tempted to give up their own language, even if they were setting up the first national Christian Church in history, and even though without Aramaic script Bishop Mesrop Mashtotz would never have designed the Armenian alphabet, still in use today.
Still, the language did travel, at the very least in liturgical and written form, with the preachers. Christians of the Nestorian persuasion, judged heretical and exiled from Edessa by imperial order in 489, carried Syriac out to Persia, where as already seen Aramaic was still very much at home. Their next base was just up the road in Nisibis. But the Nestorians did not stop there. Their missionaries went on into India, where they established a bishopric in Kalyana (near Mumbai), and a cluster of monasteries farther south, especially in Kerala, joining forces with the St Thomas Christians, supposedly dating from the missionary activities of the apostle—another native speaker