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Here’s the question: If Jesus and the Apostles all spoke, preached, and ministered in Aramaic, why don’t we study their words in the Aramaic?<br/>Jesus and the Apostles spoke Aramaic, the native language of Israel and surrounding territories at the time. Jesus and the Apostles, as religious Jews, also knew Hebrew because the Torah was written and read in Hebrew, but their everyday language was Aramaic.<br/>The Sermon on the Mount was spoken in Aramaic to the crowd on the shores of Galilee. Every parable Jesus shared was spoken in Aramaic. When Jesus sat with His disciples on the Mount of Olives and told them what would happen at the end of this age, He spoke to them in Aramaic.<br/>If Christians believe that every word written in the Bible is sacred, even though the Bible we read today is a copy of a copy, and a translation of a translation, shouldn’t we also at least consider that the actual words Jesus spoke, in the language He spoke them, are similarly inspired, and worth exploring?<br/>Join ancient languages scholar Chaim Bentorah as he guides in exploring the language of the New Testament.<br/><br/>A note from Chaim Bentorah:<br/>It is important that the reader understands some very real problems with attempting to translate the New Testament from the Aramaic. First, most biblical scholars do believe that the language Jesus and his disciples as well as the Apostle Paul spoke was an Old Galilean Aramaic or Jewish Palestinian Aramaic which is a dialect of the Western Aramaic also known as a Northern dialect. There are many modern Eastern Neo-Aramaic dialects but no known Western dialect exists today. It is believed to be a dead language although in recent years three villages in Syria still speak a dialect known as the Ma’lula dialect, which is believed to be a descendent of the Western dialect and possibly closely related to the Old Galilean. As this dialect is studied, grammars have been written and discarded. There is just no real certainty other than a few gr