I went to see The Passion over the weekend. The merits and problems of the film have been covered by others, but I don't remember anyone offering specific assessments of the Aramaic. I have to say that I found the Aramaic very strange. Often Hebrew vocabulary was used; e.g., in the Last Supper scene Jesus speaks of the "new covenant" as "berit hadathah" (instead of "keyama hadatha"); in a flashback, Jesus the carpenter refers to a "tall table" as "shulhan illay". Huh? I would expect "patur ram." On the cross, when Jesus says "ana sameh" (I thirst), again the vocab is Hebrew. And frequently, people say "adoni" for "my lord." I don't want to be pedantic -- maybe William Fulco was aiming at some kind of Hebrew-Aramaic patois in his reconstruction -- but I found it all very distracting.
UPDATE: Seth Sanders e-mails:
Dr. Cook is right that there's a good bit of Hebrew vocabulary in the movie, which I imagine Father Fulco (who studied with Jonas Greenfield, to my mind the greatest Aramaist of the previous generation) is presenting as loan words. For example, Robert Alter complained http://slate.msn.com/id/2095946/entry/2096184/ that mashiakha "messiah", with Biblical Hebrew phonology and the Aramaic determined ending, is a "conflation," but it is plausible as a religious import (cf. terms such as Elyon, with Hebrew morphology, in Daniel). For the everyday lexicon, I imagine he is presenting a language variety basically Aramaic in grammar but which overlaps with Hebrew in vocabulary. It is worth remembering that the neat division between official languages is more a product of schools and political units than it is a product of daily human interaction.
I have bigger questions about the *theology* of this language choice, which I'm preparing for the University of Chicago Divinity School's electronic Sightings op-ed format and which I'll deliver at the SBL or AJS.
Stay tuned.
UPDATE (9 March): More here.
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