Jesus taught the Lord’s prayer to his disciples in the Aramaic language. This comes as a surprise to some folk who think Jesus taught in Hebrew or in Greek. But all the evidence is that Aramaic was Jesus’ own tongue. The story of Aramaic is a big story. It went from being a tribal language of Syria to being the lingua franca of the entire east—from Egypt to India—in the period 600 BC to 200 AD. As a result, we now know it by many names—not only Aramaic, but Syriac, Chaldean, and Assyrian.
