Saving the language of Jesus

Growing up in New Jersey, Nehrin Akyon got used to strangers stopping her in the grocery store. She already knew what they were going to ask: What language was she speaking with her siblings?

Akyon didn’t hesitate to answer. “I speak Aramaic, the language of Jesus Christ,” she would say.

Akyon, 35, moved to the United States from Turkey when she was less than a year old. But she isn’t ethnically Turkish. She’s Suryoyo—a term for Aramean and Assyrian people historically belonging to the Syriac Orthodox Church.

Akyon’s ancestors preserved classical Syriac—a dialect of Aramaic descended from one of the languages Jesus spoke—in their liturgies for nearly two millennia. They trace their roots back to Antioch, the city the Book of Acts identifies as the place followers of Jesus were first called Christians. Over the centuries, Syriac Orthodox Christians survived persecution and the rise and fall of empires in the Middle East.

But since the turn of the 20th century, Christians of all traditions have been leaving the Middle East in waves. Since 1910, the share of Christians in the region has dropped from over 13% to about 3%.

Although there is no definitive count of Syriac Orthodox Christians globally, one 2016 report puts the number at over 5 million worldwide. An estimated 3 million of these live in India—where tradition says the Apostle Thomas carried the gospel in the first century. Less than 700,000 remain in the Middle East.

Approximately 1.5 million live scattered across Europe, North and South America, and Oceania. There, Syriac Orthodox Christians have found peace and prosperity. But now they face a subtler existential threat—the slow erasure of their identity, language, and religion as younger generations assimilate into their new communities and countries.

Nehrin Akyon at the entrance to the Mor Aphrem Center. Photo by Danielle Richards / Genesis

AKYON’S FAMILY SETTLED in Paramus, N.J., in 1990. This suburb of New York City is a hub for the Syriac Orthodox Church in the United States, with about 1,500 Syriac families living within a 10-mile radius of each other. Akyon grew up attending church regularly and especially loved celebrating Christmas and Easter there. The congregation felt like family.

School was a different matter. Akyon was outspoken about her faith, and some of her classmates made fun of her for it. Akyon didn’t let that stop her from sharing about God, but it did leave her feeling isolated sometimes.

At school, Akyon learned to speak English. But at home, she and her family used a colloquial dialect of Aramaic with each other. And at church, services were in an older, more liturgical version of the language. Even after three decades living in the United States, Akyon said, Aramaic still comes a lot more naturally than English.

But that’s increasingly rare among young people in Akyon’s church.

Archbishop John Kawak is Akyon’s bishop and oversees the Syriac Orthodox Church’s Eastern U.S. diocese. Kawak estimates only between 30% and 40% of the young people in his community speak Aramaic fluently anymore. In fact, researchers say almost all Aramaic dialects spoken by Syriac Orthodox Christians from regions of Turkey, Iraq, and Iran are now on the brink of extinction.

Once the lingua franca of the Middle East, Aramaic first emerged somewhere between 1000 and 600 B.C. and is the language most scholars agree Jesus primarily spoke with His disciples. Over the centuries, the language evolved and splintered into more than 100 dialects spoken by Jewish and Christian minorities.

But today, only an estimated half million people still speak any of these Neo-Aramaic dialects.

One reason for this—a brutal genocide of Syriac Orthodox Christians. In 1915, the Ottoman Empire carried out a sweeping massacre of its Christian minorities. Before World War I, there were an estimated 500,000 Suryoye living under the Ottoman sultan’s rule. Many of these lived in a region of Turkey called Tur Abdin—“Mountains of the Servants [of God].”

Four years later, about half of those Christians were dead.

Scholars call this the Assyrian Genocide, and it coincides with the more widely known Armenian Genocide. Aramean Christians remember it simply as the Sayfo—literally, “the sword.”

Archbishop Kawak’s father was born in 1929 in Mardin, Turkey. But he didn’t talk about his early childhood much. Life was difficult for Syriac Orthodox Christians in the decades after the genocide, and Kawak said his father didn’t have a lot of good memories from that time.

Eventually, Kawak’s father left for a Syrian border town with his parents and three siblings. Later, they made their way to Damascus, where Kawak grew up.

Since becoming a priest, Kawak has been back to visit Tur Abdin many times. Some of the original fourth- and fifth-­century Christian monasteries still stand there, but the Syriac communities are sparse. Only about 30,000 Syriac Orthodox Christians still remain in the regions of Turkey they once called home.

“It’s a beautiful place,” Kawak said. “But it is not our land anymore.”

Leaving kept them alive, but not safe from the threats to their identity: “The diaspora—it’s more dangerous than Sayfo.”

Archbishop Kawak reads from the Gospel. Photo by Danielle Richards / Genesis

IN THE MIDDLE EAST, Syriac Orthodox Christians had to stand together in the face of persecution and the near-­universality of Islam. “But America is a melting pot,” Kawak said. In the United States, Syriacs are more at risk of disappearing into the surrounding culture and dying out spiritually.

Iskandar Bcheiry serves as priest of a small Syriac Orthodox church near Chicago. Like Kawak, Bcheiry’s grandparents survived the Assyrian Genocide and moved to northern Syria. Bcheiry himself grew up in Lebanon and studied theology in Damascus and Rome before coming to the United States in 2005.

Bcheiry said secularization is a major challenge for Suryoye living in the United States. In America’s pluralistic culture, people often absorb secular notions of church and religion without even realizing it.

And the language barrier is accelerating that trend.

At Bcheiry’s church, about 70% of the liturgy is in classical Syriac, also called Kthobonoyo. The rest of the service is split between English and Arabic since most of his parishioners come from Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. Only a few youth at his church speak Aramaic fluently.

Those who do speak Aramaic at home use a more colloquial dialect called Turoyo, which differs significantly from classical Syriac. Because of that, it can be difficult even for people who know Aramaic to deeply engage with what’s happening at church.

As a result, some leave the church or silently distance themselves. Others stay for the sake of family and tradition but view their faith more as an ethnic heritage than a spiritual reality.

Bcheiry tries to teach the young people of his church Aramaic so they can participate more fully in services. His own children have a basic grasp of the language, and his three sons serve as altar boys and help him chant the liturgy.

“They sing, at least,” he said.

But it’s difficult to help teenagers retain a language they aren’t using much in their day-to-day lives. And Bcheiry has to compete with the many distractions of American life: TV, social media, video games, friends, school, and extracurriculars.

And the stakes are high—the struggle to win the hearts and minds of young people will determine the church’s long-term survival.

Around the globe, Orthodoxy is declining as a share of the overall Christian population, and today, only 4% of the world’s people belong to any kind of Orthodox tradition. Still, some Orthodox congregations in the United States have recently reported a burst of new conversions.

But Archbishop Kawak said the Syriac Orthodox Church hasn’t seen a similar uptick. He believes the language barrier is one of the biggest reasons why. People just don’t want to come to a church service they can’t understand.

By now, many of the Greek Orthodox churches in the United States are using English as their primary language. But Kawak said Syriac Orthodox believers would never accept a switch. “The people—they want to hear Jesus’ language,” he said.

But that creates a unique dilemma when an increasing number of Suryoye no longer understand the ancient language of their ancestral church. And Kawak admits some of them leave the Syriac Orthodox Church just because they want to hear the Word of God in a language they understand. “I’m their bishop,” he said. “My English is broken.”

ELKE SPELIOPOULOS IS ONE OF THE RARE CONVERTS to Syriac Orthodoxy. She decided to join the church after writing her dissertation on the history of the Aramean diaspora.

Speliopoulos’ husband grew up Greek Orthodox and recently rediscovered that heritage. As a result, she has a front-row seat to compare and contrast the two churches.

At her husband’s Greek Orthodox church, the entire service is in English. And Speliopoulos estimates about 75% to 80% of the congregation are converts, including the priest. At her own church in Phoenix, Ariz., most of the churchgoers are immigrants from Iraq. Even though Speliopoulos covers her head in keeping with Syriac Orthodox tradition, her blond hair and blue eyes make it obvious she isn’t Middle Eastern.

Speliopoulos is working hard to learn classical Syriac. But it’s difficult because she doesn’t have anywhere to speak the language outside of church. Unlike the Greek Orthodox who have Greece and the Russian Orthodox who have Russia, there is no country belonging to Syriac Orthodox Christians, she pointed out.

Speliopoulos isn’t the only one struggling to learn the language. Her language class started with 18 students, but dwindled down to about four.

Priests conduct services at Speliopoulos’ church in a combination of Aramaic and Arabic. And that makes it difficult for her to invite anyone to church with her. Once, she brought her husband to a Syriac Orthodox service in San Diego, Calif. “Honey, I’m sorry,” she apologized to him. “You’re going to be bored for an hour and a half.”

But the church had screens with English translations. Her husband was thrilled because it meant he could worship with them, too. Speliopoulos said displaying translations is one easy step congregations can take to make their services more accessible to non-Aramaic speakers.

In the long run, Speliopoulos believes Syriac Orthodox churches in the United States are on the same trajectory as the Greek Orthodox churches. Once, she was talking with one of her church leaders about the language problem. He told her the churches would probably be English-speaking in the next 25 years or so anyway.

“In 25 years, you’ll have lost a generation of young people,” she told him.

Back in New Jersey, Archbishop Kawak recognizes passing on faith in Christ is the most important thing his church can do. “We are aware that we are preaching Jesus Christ, not the language,” Kawak said. “But we also want to preserve our language.”

Although these aims sometimes seem at odds with each other, Kawak is doing his best to hold both in tension. When it comes to language skills, he encourages young people to start small—just swapping out a few English words for Aramaic ones as they are able. “To say, ‘Good morning,’ say, ‘Brikh ṣafro,’” Kawak tells them. “To say, ‘Hi, guys,’ say, ‘Shlomo.’”

Kawak also encourages weekly Bible studies to help young people grow in their faith even if they can’t understand Sunday services. About 80 or 90 attend every week. Although this is still a small percentage of the overall student population, Kawak said it’s an improvement from the previous decade.

This year, Kawak also sent young people from his region to the Suryoyo Youth Gathering in Los Angeles. There, Kawak said, youth from all across America gather “in one place: talking, laughing, praising, dancing, attending Bible studies.”

“So, we are trying to do everything,” he said.

From left: Jenna Hannawi, Megan Akdemir, Nehrin Akyon, Maryrose Chamoun, and Stepheny Kallah, discuss an upcoming podcast. Photo by Danielle Richards / Genesis

JENNA HANNAWI IS A 21-YEAR-OLD who credits one of these Syriac Bible studies with helping bring her to faith in Christ.

Hannawi’s family has roots in Turkey and Syria, but she grew up in New Jersey, speaking mostly English at home. She said her family attended Suryoyo summer camps and Syriac Orthodox services on holidays, but she wasn’t very involved otherwise. “We went to Sunday school,” she said. “But it was a fight.”

In middle school, Hannawi started to regularly attend Bible study hosted by a nearby Syriac Orthodox church. She loved her friends there, and she started to dive into Scripture more and more. “Am I fully understanding everything? No, probably not,” she laughed. “But am I sitting there with my highlighters and highlighting the whole Bible? Yeah.”

Hannawi said her friends from school were surprised when Friday night rolled around and she told them she couldn’t make plans because she was going to Bible study. Over time, Hannawi also started listening to more Christian podcasts, like the program Girls Gone Bible.

But she couldn’t find many online resources from a Syriac Orthodox perspective. As a joke, she suggested to Nehrin Akyon and two of their other friends, Stepheny Kallah and Maryrose Chamoun, that they should start their own podcast.

Her friends loved the idea. And in April 2024, they launched the Voices of Syriac Faith podcast. Together, they started interviewing Syriac clergy and scholars about different theological topics and posting the conversations online. They hoped to reach other young people and help them better understand the reasons behind their faith.

Instead, they found all kinds of people—including older adults—started tuning in from around the world. Today, they’ve heard from listeners as far away as Brazil, Australia, and Germany.

About the same time they launched their podcast, Hannawi said, she experienced an awakening in her faith and fully surrendered her life to God. She also got engaged to another member of the Syriac Orthodox church and is currently trying to learn Aramaic for her fiancé and his family.

She hopes to be able to teach the language to her own kids someday.

In the meantime, Nehrin Akyon keeps herself busy tracking down Syriac clergy for the girls to interview on their podcast. Often, people are reluctant at first—many of them are busy or don’t speak English as their first language. Sometimes, she has to follow up with them several times to schedule a single interview.

But Akyon is persistent. She knows it’s an important way to bridge the gap between church leaders and everyday Syriac Orthodox believers.

When she’s not chasing down interviewees, Akyon works as Archbishop Kawak’s office manager at the Mor Aphrem Center, the archdiocese headquarters. She said the center is always fully booked for Bible studies and community events. And they host a local Syriac preschool and annual Suryoyo summer camps.

This year, 370 people came to the church’s annual Suryoyo Family Gathering weekend event, an increase from the previous year.

Akyon said the pace of life at the Mor Aphrem Center can be exhausting. But it’s also beautiful. And she’s happy to do whatever she can to help plant faith in the hearts of young people. “Our heritage, our faith—it’s not just like in the past,” she said. “But it’s still alive for us.”