ABSTRACT
The mid-nineteenth century hymn by Horatius Bonar “I heard the voice of Jesus say …,” enlivened by Ralph Vaughan Williams’ arrangement of the English and Irish traditional melody (Bonar 1996), begs an old question: Who has heard the voice of Jesus? Certainly, there are no recordings of the actual timbre of his voice, so what remains are his words recorded in the Gospels. A Semitic Christian tradition continues insisting one can still hear the quality of Jesus’ voice through its Syriac dialect of Aramaic, closest to the language he spoke. Syriac-speaking Christianity is centered about the heritage of its language, not around its theology. Many strands, theological, ecclesiastical and literary, are woven together to produce the distinctive Syriac tradition of Christianity which never forgets whose language it speaks.
