Speaking Jesus Language

Only a handful of Middle Eastern communities still speak Aramaic, the language in which Jesus preached. One is the Syrian village of Maloula, most of whose 1,000 inhabitants are Christian. The roots of their everyday speech go back at least to the 10th century B.C.; Aramaic was the language of parts of the Old Testament books of Daniel and Ezra, much of the Jerusalem Talmud and of the common people at the time of Christ, when Hebrew was used principally by the upper classes. Maloula, isolated in the hills, held out for centuries against both the Moslem religion and the Arabic tongue. The isolation has now been broken by a nearby superhighway, but the village still evokes the mood of an ancient Christian bastion, as TIME Correspondent Gavin Scott discovered last week. His report:

An hour's drive north of Damascus into the russet foothills of the Anti-Lebanon range, the road curves past an elegant stand of cypress trees. Suddenly the village cascades into view. The flat-roofed houses of mud and stone climb up the walls of a dead-end canyon of brown rock. Nestled in a crevice is the dome of a small convent, and high above, on the crest of the ravine, looms the Byzantine cupola of a monastery that, according to its lone priest, is 1,700 years old. Below is a patchwork of tiny fields where villagers grow corn, tomatoes and grapes.

About 80% of the village's Christians are Eastern Rite (Melchite) Catholics who owe allegiance to Rome; the remaining 20% are Greek Orthodox and are loyal to the Ecumenical Patriarch in Istanbul. There are also about 80 Moslems in the village, all members of the Diab family. For years the Diabs sought to build a mosque. But every time they began construction, the Christians would destroy by night what the Diabs had built by day. The Diabs finally got official protection to build their mosque in 1958. "They put it right beside the police station," reports one young resident. 'That helped, because all the police are Moslem."

Some accounts credit St. Thomas with converting Maloula to Christianity. Others ascribe the conversion to a passing hermit, a fervent Christian who was horrified to discover lascivious goings-on at a Roman bath in the village and cursed the place, thereby causing the bath to collapse over the heads of the libidinous bathers. A church now stands on the site of the baths.

Still another legend has it that a woman named Takla, a follower of St. Paul, was driven into the desert by her pagan father in A.D. 45. Fleeing soldiers intent on raping her, Takla ran into the cul-de-sac of Maloula's canyon. Trapped, she raised her hands in desperate prayer to the Holy Virgin. Miraculously the mountains parted, creating a narrow passage at the top of the valley that permitted her to escape. Villagers still dip their hands in a fountain at the Convent of St. Takla, built into the rock face, in belief that the water has miraculous properties.

Perhaps the most enduring of Maloula's legends concerns Holy Cross Day, which the village celebrates on Sept. 14. In the 4th century, the Roman Emperor Constantine, a convert to Christianity, dispatched his mother Helena to the Holy Land to search for the true cross. He also ordered the lighting of fiery beacons from Jerusalem to Constantinople to flash the joyous news if she should find it. Two of these were placed on either side of Maloula's narrow canyon. In modern times, one beacon has been tended on feast days by Melchites, the other by Greek Orthodox. Today the feast is marked by the "throwing of fire"--in the form of flaming logs and foul-smelling burning auto tires--from niches in the cliff. "There is music and dancing and speeches by the mukhtar," says Habib Zaarour, a village youth. "They shoot guns in the air and everyone has a grand time."

On three occasions since 1850, Maloulans have protected themselves from attacks by outsiders by hiding in caves high on the cliff face, reached only by 60-ft. ladders, which they drew up behind them. A ladder still swings from one of the caves, giving the impression that villagers feel they may one day need to seek refuge in the caves again.

Everyone in Maloula is now bilingual in Arabic and Aramaic (which sounds roughly like Hebrew, much as Dutch, say, sounds like German). The villagers seem oblivious to the fact that they are among the last custodians of the language of Jesus. But don't they at least feel a kinship with Jesus at Christmas? "No," says Father Philipos, a Lebanese priest of the village, "the reason the language has survived is that all the surrounding villages are Moslem. A second reason is that, if the villagers speak Aramaic, others will not understand. It helps the Maloulans to keep their affairs to themselves."

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