An open Bible inside a church. (Photo: Reuters)
ishtartv.com - christianpost.com
By Eric
Metaxas and Roberto Rivera | Thu 8 Mar 2018
How
cool would it be to walk into a church filled with worshipers all speaking the
same language that Jesus and His apostles spoke? Take a drive up the New Jersey
Turnpike to find out!
To
catch a glimpse of just how ancient—and strong–our Christian faith truly is,
take a drive up the Jersey Turnpike. Say what? How cool would it be to walk
into a church filled with worshipers all speaking the same language that Jesus
and His apostles spoke? You might think that you need a time machine. You
don't. You don't even need to go to the Middle East. New Jersey will do.
A
recent article in America magazine told the story of an Aramaic-speaking
Christian community 15 minutes west of Manhattan in Paramus, New Jersey. They
are known variously as Chaldeans, Assyrians and Syriac Christians (Syriac being
a dialect of Aramaic).
You
may be thinking "Aramaic?" Well, Aramaic, not Hebrew, was the
language of everyday life in first-century Palestine. We see evidence of this
in the Bible. Parts of the Old Testament, most notably the book of Daniel, are
written in Aramaic. When Mary Magdalene encounters the risen Jesus, she calls
him "rabboni." And on the cross, Jesus recited Psalm 22 in Aramaic.
As
the names "Chaldean" and "Assyrian" suggest, they are an
ancient people from what the Bible calls "Assyria" and
"Babylon," the part of Iraq known as the "Nineveh Plain,"
as well as southern Turkey and Syria.
Their
ancestors lived in the area long before the Arab invasions and the coming of
Islam. They are probably our closest living link to the Patriarchs of the Old
Testament. In Genesis 12, we are told that Abraham, on his way to the promised
land, settled for a time in Haran, which became a "centre of Assyrian Christianity"
before the fourth century.
Deuteronomy
26 instructs the Israelites to say, "A wandering Aramean was my
father," when offering their first fruits.
To
quote the psalmist, these Christians have a "goodly heritage." But
it's one that has been passed down at a very high cost. The Islamic conquest in
the seventh and eighth centuries reduced them to second-class status.
But
despite hardships, they made enormous contributions to what is called
"Islamic civilization" in the fields of philosophy, science and medicine.
The works of Greek philosophers that Arab Muslims are credited with preserving
were first translated into Syriac and then into Arabic by Syriac-speaking Christians.
If
life under Islamic rule was hard from the seventh through 19th centuries, it
turned lethal in the early 20th, in what came to be known as the Sayfo—the
Syriac for "sword." Between 1914 and 1920, some 150 to 300 thousand
Syriac Christians were murdered by the Turks.
Most
recently, there was the aftermath of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. As Lawrence
Kaplan wrote in the New Republic at the time, "Sunni, Shia, and Kurd may
agree on little else, but all have made sport of brutalizing their Christian
neighbors."
Then,
of course, there was ISIS. Two years ago, when then-Secretary of State Kerry said
that ISIS was guilty of genocide against Christians, he was talking about
Syriac Christians. The "infidels" in Mindy Belz's book They Say We
are Infidels, are mostly Syriac Christians.
And
that brings me to New Jersey. The group profiled in America magazine is
part of the Syriac diaspora created by the persecutions of the past century.
More Syriac Christians live outside their ancestral homelands than in them.
It's possible that if present trends hold, there will be more Syriac Christians
in the United States and Mexico than in Iraq.
These
are the people we have been praying for when we pray for the persecuted—and
they have a lot to teach us, not the least of which is how to remain faithful
in the face of unimaginable oppression and persecution.
It's
a lesson that might even be worth a trip to New Jersey.
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