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Aramaic, a Semitic language related to Hebrew and Arabic, was the common tongue of the entire Middle East when the Middle East was the crossroads of the world. People used it for commerce and government across territory stretching from Egypt and the Holy Land to India and China. Parts of the Bible and the Jewish Talmud were written in it; the original "writing on the wall," presaging the fall of the Babylonians, was composed in it. As Jesus died on the cross, he cried in Aramaic, "Elahi, Elahi, lema shabaqtani?" ("My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?")
But Aramaic is down now to its last generation or two of speakers, most of them scattered over the past century from homelands where their language once flourished. In their new lands, few children and even fewer grandchildren learn it. (My father, a Jew born in Kurdish Iraq, is a native speaker and scholar of Aramaic; I grew up in Los Angeles and know just a few words.) This generational rupture marks a language's last days. For field linguists like Khan, recording native speakers—"informants," in the lingo—is both an act of cultural preservation and an investigation into how ancient languages shift and splinter over time.
In a highly connected global age, languages are in die-off. Fifty to 90 percent of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken today are expected to go silent by century's end. We live under an oligarchy of English and Mandarin and Spanish, in which 94 percent of the world's population speaks 6 percent of its languages. Yet among threatened languages, Aramaic stands out. Arguably no other still-spoken language has fallen farther.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/how-to-save-a-dying-language-4143017/?all
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday August 01 2019, @04:20AM (1 child)
One final thing I'll just note is that my interest in this is primarily because I'm interested in the growth of conspiracy theories and fringe theories on the internet. The "Christ myth theory" is a theory like the Shakespeare authorship question that has always been "fringe" within actual scholarship and among people who actually understand a lot about how historical sources and historiography works. But such theories have grown a lot on the internet. I think the Jesus thing gets traction because there's a strong atheist contingent among folks on the internet who have been more aggressive than many atheists are in real life. (Note that I'm among these people who would claim to be atheist, though I've admitted this to very few people in real life.)
But they're not content to just show that the Bible is steaming pile of inconsistent nonsense in places -- no, they want to latch on to the wackiest fringe theories and say, "See, Jesus didn't even exist!"
As I said in my post, I'm not at all saying such an argument is impossible. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, especially when you're talking about non-famous, non-aristocratic people in a far-flung region off the main radar of the main record-keeping empires of ancient times. I truly wish the skeptics and atheists would devote their energies elsewhere rather than trying to promote fringe theories.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @09:02PM
Well, two things. First, of course the academia behind a historical Jesus says he is historical. For quite a long time, such thoughts could mean literal execution. Then, even when it was allowed, you then have the "this is fringe because no one ever talks about it; because no one talks about it, it is fringe." thing. In addition, in many ways, the repercussions of him being mythic goes straight to the core of their identity.
But it is true, that many atheists also have a "show me the proof" attitude. In addition, most Christians hold the Jesus narrative to be literally true. So the combination idea of "show me the proof that the Jesus narrative is literally true" naturally falls out of such an idea.