MOTHER TONGUES

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February 22, 2026

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“So they read from the book, from the law of God, with interpretation. They gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.” – Nehemiah 8:8

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This weekend marks International Mother Language Day, a relatively new celebration, recognized by the UN in 2002. The day was established to promote awareness of linguistic and cultural diversity and to promote multilingualism. As a minister and former linguist myself, observances like this often make me wonder how the mother tongues of both the writers of our scriptures and those whom the writings depict affected how they viewed the world and the messages they sought to convey, as well as whether our own interpretations in a very different mother tongue misses any of the nuances delivered in the original languages.

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When we read scripture, it’s easy to forget how many times the words before us have already traveled. We meet these words in English, shaped by translation, interpretation, and long familiarity, not to mention our own cultures. These words often arrive to us already settled, already explained, already framed as religious language, through centuries of interpretation by people with their own narrow religious viewpoints. Yet the words in scripture were not born that way.

 

Our scripture is a multilingual and multicultural anthology. Its stories were spoken orally, remembered generationally, translated imperfectly, and written across centuries, communities, and empires. What we read today is often a translation of a translation of a translation, copied by hand by fallible men countless times. And while this does not make scripture any less useful for our edification, it does invite humility. Translation in particular is never perfect. As words move from one language to another, something of their original feel… their tone, rhythm, intimacy, or cultural weight… is inevitably altered or lost.

 

For this reason, it can be helpful to pause and ask not only what scripture says, but how it once sounded. To consider its words in their mother languages, the languages in which they were first spoken and heard, can draw us closer to the human experience out of which they emerged.

 

Scripture was also not written in a single language the way we often encounter it, nor does it imagine a single way only of speaking about God. The Torah reflects a world shaped by covenant, memory, and communal identity. Wisdom literature often speaks through contrast and tension, placing truths side by side rather than resolving them neatly. The writings of the early Jesus movement reflect Greek rhetorical habits, shaped by explanation, persuasion, and cultural translation. Even within scripture itself, different languages carry different assumptions about how meaning is held and shared.

 

I believe this matters, because the people depicted in scripture often speak in languages different even than those in which their stories were written and are preserved. The voices we hear are mediated voices. What we receive is memory, not unfiltered transcript.

Jesus lived and taught within this layered world. His everyday spoken language was probably Galilean Aramaic, which was an informal regional dialect and the language of home, work, and everyday village life. It was certainly not a formal, legislative, or literary language. It was oral, relational, and shaped by daily experience. Much like the spoken dialects of Arabic today, it existed alongside more formal written registers without aspiring to replace them. It was the language people used to live, not the language they used to codify.

 

This helps explain the shape of Jesus’ teachings. He spoke in parables. He relied on contrast and reversal. “So the last will be first, and the first will be last” (Matthew 20:16), and “Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 10:39) are two examples. These are not contradictions to be resolved but tensions to be held. This way of speaking is deeply at home in Semitic oral and literary traditions, where meaning is often carried through parallelism, contrast, and lived paradox rather than linear argument. Wisdom is not always stated outright; it is drawn out through attention.

 

Jesus’ language reflects this orientation. When he speaks of God, he often uses Abba, an Aramaic word of intimacy and closeness. It is not formal; it is not liturgical. It is not the language of temple address. It is the language of relationship, of love. This doesn’t redefine God in abstract terms, but reshapes how people stand in relation to God. Jesus’ listeners would have understood this implicitly.

 

Similarly, when Jesus begins his saying with a word often translated as “truly,” as in “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:40), is actually “Amen” in the Greek. “Amen” is an Aramaic word related to the Hebrew word of the same pronunciation. In Hebrew usage, “amen” often comes at the end of a statement as a response or affirmation, much the way we typically use the term to end prayers. In true Aramaic style, though, Jesus did not place it at the end, but at the beginning. He is not saying, “What I am about to say is factually correct,” which the translation “truly” may imply;” he is saying, “What I am about to say is trustworthy; you can rely on it.” The difference is subtle but important. One appeals to legal correctness, the other to experiential or lived reliability.

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Alongside spoken Aramaic, the trained Rabbi Jesus was also immersed in Hebrew, the language of scripture and prayer. Hebrew and Aramaic were closely related, but in the first century Middle East, they served different purposes. Hebrew functioned primarily as a liturgical and scriptural language, carrying sacred memory and communal identity. It was heard regularly, revered deeply, and associated with authority, even when it was not spoken conversationally. For an imperfect English analogy, think something in between the King James Bible and the Latin Mass. Jesus, though, would have known Hebrew well enough to read and interpret scripture; yet his work was not simply to repeat sacred words. It was to bring them into living speech, translating memory in to meaning for those who needed to hear the messages in Galilean Aramaic, the language of the day.

 

By the time the Gospels (and the rest of the writings we call the New Testament) were written, Greek had entered decisively into the picture, not only because more people in the area understood Greek in addition to Aramaic, but because the writings were intended for a wider audience and Greek was the most widely spoken language in the world at the time. It was the shared language of the Mediterranean world. It allowed stories to travel beyond local communities and cultural boundaries. And Jewish scripture already existed in Greek form, with Jewish communities accustomed to navigating meaning across Greek and Semitic languages. Writing the Gospels in Greek was an act of transmission.

 

Yet translation always shapes what it carries. Greek excels at explanation and structure. Spoken Aramaic, by contrast, excels at immediacy and relationship. As Jesus’ words moved into Greek, some of their original texture was inevitably altered. But something else was gained as a trade-off: reach, continuity, and endurance. What was once spoken to a small crowd became available to people far removed in time and place.

 

Jesus, then, stands between languages. He spoke in Aramaic, the language of lived experience. He drew from Hebrew, the language of sacred memory. And he was remembered in Greek, the language that allowed the story to travel. This layered reality reminds us that meaning is not born fully formed in words. It emerges through relationship, context, and attention.

 

For us, this may offer a gentle invitation. We inherit religious language that can sometimes feel rigid, settled, elevated, and distant from everyday life. But Jesus’s teaching suggests another way. He never spoke from above. He spoke from among. He trusted that meaning would take root not through perfect phrasing, but through honest engagement with lived reality.

 

Perhaps listening remains our foremost task. Listening for the voice between words. Listening for meaning that is not always resolved but held in tension. And remembering that before Jesus was written, before he was translated, before he was explained, he was heard. Next time we sit with the words of Jesus, let’s put ourselves in the shoes of his immediate listening audience and think about what his words may have meant from a lived experience point of view, rather than the point of view of rigid religion or Platonic argument.

 

“The purposes in the human mind are like deep water, but the intelligent will draw them out.” – Proverbs 20:5

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Rev. Brian J. Kelley

Director of Ministry Resources, Unitarian Christian Church of America (UCCA)