Canter Bridge

The gospels narrate the words and deeds of Jesus in the common Greek vernacular of their time. This simple linguistic observation might obscure the fact that Jesus’ first and most commonly used language was almost certainly not Greek. He seems to have employed Aramaic as his lingua franca, though he was probably capable of managing Hebrew and Greek.

Nothing about this is extraordinary. We are accustomed to reading about the lives of great and less-than-great men and women in translation.

Yet at times the gospel writers depart from their ordinary routine when it seems they can only genuinely recall a moving moment in the time they shared with Jesus in the Semitic dialect in which he spoke the words. This is an anti-pedagogical move, for it does the reader little good to have his or her narrator lapse momentarily into a language that the reader does not understand.

Its very unordinariness throws the recorded moment into stark relief. Take Jesus’ encounter with a deaf man, for example:

They brought to him a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech; and they begged him to lay his hand on him. He took him aside in private, away from the crowd, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. Then looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, ‘Ephphatha,’ that is, ‘Be opened.’ And immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly. Then Jesus ordered them to tell no one; but the more he ordered them, the more zealously they proclaimed it.

Somebody—it is not clear just who—seems to have overheard the astonishing moment in which Jesus stuck his fingers in the man’s ears, looked with some fury of soul towards heaven, and cried out in Aramaic, ‘Ephphatha!’.

It would have done more good, perhaps, for our gospel writer simply to record Jesus’ exclamation in Greek, as he has narrated the story itself. It seems that he simply could not.

Mythic moments and neat philosophies require no abrupt reversion to original dialect. Only a person who was there, who cannot wipe from his memory the potency of the moment, cannot employ the customary filter we call translation on syllables that can only be recalled as they were spoken, only such a person reverts to ‘Ephphatha!’ or ‘Talitha, kumiy!’, or ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sebachtani?!’ when something more straightforward would have sufficed.

Footsteps can clearly be traced in such linguistic dust. Jesus astonished people, the broader narrative of stories like this one inform us. Indeed. The very foreign syllables cry out.