ABSTRACT
Although Christianity was born in the Middle East, and it is now widely known (thanks to Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of Christ) that Jesus spoke Aramaic, nevertheless only very few people are aware that there has been a continuous presence in the Middle East, throughout the centuries, of Christians speaking, or using as their liturgical language, Syriac, which is just a form of Aramaic. Before the advent of Islam, and the spread of Arabic as the standard language from the seventh century AD onwards, the majority of the population of the Middle East had spoken, and/or written in, some dialect of Aramaic for well over the previous millennium; thus it is not surprising that, from an early date, Aramaic-speaking Christians should have adopted as their literary language one of these dialects (Syriac).
