In Mark 5 a synagogue leader named Jairus has a daughter who is twelve years old and dying. By the time Jesus reaches the house, the mourners say she is dead. He takes her by the hand and says two words. Mark writes them down in Aramaic, and then translates them for his readers: “Talitha koum, which means, ‘Little girl, I say to you, arise’” (Mark 5:41).
That small act of translation is worth stopping on. The man in the story spoke one language. The book that tells his story is written in another.
The words Mark kept
Scholarly consensus
Jesus of Nazareth spoke Aramaic, the everyday language of Galilee and Judaea in the first century. The four gospels were written in Greek. Mark, the earliest of them, keeps a few of the Aramaic words and glosses each one:
- Talitha koum, “little girl, arise” (5:41).
- Ephphatha, “be opened”, said to a deaf man (7:34).
- Korban, “a gift” dedicated to God (7:11).
- Boanerges, the name given to James and John, “sons of thunder” (3:17).
- Abba, in the prayer at Gethsemane (14:36).
- Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani, “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (15:34).
Matthew and Luke, who used Mark, drop most of these. Matthew keeps the last but turns Eloi into the Hebrew-sounding Eli (Matthew 27:46). Luke drops all six. The site’s page on the synoptic problem sets out how the three gospels used one another, and this is one of its small signs: the later writers smoothed away what a Greek reader would trip on.
A language between the lines
So what do the Aramaic words prove? Less than is sometimes claimed, and still something.
No Aramaic gospel survives, and the Syriac Bible (the Peshitta) is a translation from the Greek made centuries later, so it cannot stand in for one. What the words do show is that the tradition Mark worked from still carried the sound of the man’s voice in a few places. Everywhere else, the speech of Jesus reaches us through someone else’s Greek.
One case shows how much can hang on that. Joachim Jeremias argued in the 1960s that abba was a child’s word, “daddy”, and that Jesus used it for God with an intimacy no Jew before him had dared.1 The idea spread into a thousand sermons. Then James Barr took it apart in a paper whose title says it all: “Abba isn’t ‘Daddy’.” He showed that abba was the ordinary adult form of address, used by grown men of their own fathers.2 A large doctrine had been built on a misreading of one word in a language the gospels themselves had already translated.
Minority view
Some scholars, Maurice Casey among them, have tried to reconstruct the Aramaic behind whole passages of Mark.3 The work is careful and often illuminating. It is still reconstruction: the Aramaic is his, and only the Greek is Mark’s.
The crowd that misheard
At the cross, Mark says, some of the bystanders heard Eloi and thought he was calling Elijah (15:35). Even in the moment, in his own language, people around him misheard the words.
The site’s position on what happened at the end is set out on the page on the end of his earthly mission, following 4:157-158. Here I only note what the text of Mark itself concedes: the gospel writer translates, the crowd mishears, and Matthew changes the spelling.
What this means for the Injīl
Islamic position
The Qur’an says: “We have not sent any messenger except in the language of his people, so that he may make things clear to them” (14:4). The Injīl that God gave to Jesus (5:46) was given in the language Jesus spoke and preached in. On the site’s reading, set out on what is the Injīl, the Injīl is that message, and the four Greek gospels are later books that carry parts of it.
The Aramaic words in Mark are the closest any reader can get to the sound of that message. There are perhaps a dozen of them. Everything else is translation, and every translation is a reading.
That is a reason to read the gospels closely, which is what this site tries to do. It is also a reason not to build doctrine on a single Greek word that Jesus never said. Barr’s correction of Jeremias is the cautionary tale, and it came from inside Christian scholarship.
The Abrahamic Religions journal has a broader piece on Jesus across the traditions, if you want the wider frame. The glossary here has the Greek and Arabic terms the site uses most.
Sources
- Joachim Jeremias, The Prayers of Jesus (London: SCM Press, 1967)
- James Barr, “Abba isn’t ‘Daddy’”, Journal of Theological Studies 39 (1988)
- Maurice Casey, Aramaic Sources of Mark’s Gospel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)