What Jesus Spoke

And Jesus said unto them, Come ye after me, and I will make you to become fishers of men. , . . He saw James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, who also were in the ship mending their nets. And straightway he called them: and they left their father Zebedee in the ship with the hired servants, and went after him. And they went to Capernaum; and straightway on the sabbath day he entered the synagogue and taught. . . . --Mark, I: 17-22. In the Smithsonian Institution in Washington one day last week, a swart Assyrian-born scholar named Dr. George W. Lamsa bent over a photostat of a large block of weathered stone covered with squiggly characters. He immediately recognized these as Aramaic, quickly and easily translated them into English.

The strange stone was dug up last year in the ruins of a synagog in Capernaum. Built in 200 B. C. and destroyed by Romans in 200 A. D., the synagog is believed by archeologists to be the one in which Jesus preached his first sermon after calling James and John from their nets. The inscribed stone, only one yet found which could have been in existence in Christ's time, remained untranslated until Smithsonian's Dr. Lamsa deciphered it last week. He read: As a good memorial for Zebedee, son of John, who made this pillar as a memorial for himself. Amen. Presumably Memorialist Zebedee was the same father left by Disciple John and Brother James in the fishing boat with the hired servants.

Scholar Lamsa, who as an Assyrian belongs to what he calls "the only pure Semitic people in the Christian fold," went to an Anglican mission college in Persia, later to Virginia Theological Seminary. Recent years in the U. S. George Lamsa has devoted to trying to prove that Christ spoke not Hebrew but Aramaic. In that tongue, used today by only a few tribesmen in the Lebanon Mountains, Lamsa believes the Gospels were originally written before they were translated successively into Semitic-sounding Greek and Latin. Two years ago Dr. Lamsa translated the four Gospels into English from early Aramaic texts, arrived at such variants as: It is easier for a rope to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven.

Immensely pleased last week at finding the Smithsonian Aramaic inscription so corroborative both of Scripture and of his own thesis, Dr. Lamsa exulted: "I believe that, if Christ were alive today, He would speak in Aramaic and that I could talk to him."

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