Desert Oracle Radio, the voice of the desert.

Night has fallen on the desert, the desert that has given us so much.

Wildflowers and cactus blooms, hummingbirds and chuckwales,

or even water, even some water, in moderation, everything in moderation.

The desert is the birthplace of our ancient religions too.

Including the religion very much in the news this week,

the ancient church of Rome founded by St. Peter in the middle years of the first century AD.

Peter got his famous name from Jesus who called him Seifus.

Aramaic for rock tough rough and tumble

and in the Greek

spoken by so many

in those days it was Petros

from Petra for rock or stone. We have to figure that Jesus spoke at least three

languages day to day or week to week. The Hebrew, he read from Torah in the temple, that's one,

the Aramaic, and that was the everyday tongue of the Jews,

and the Greek spoken by the upper classes and the business world.

After all, the Levant had been ruled by the Greek and Macedonian descendants of Alexander for centuries

by that point.

And the Romans were relatively new in the area in the first century BC, and by that time

the Romans were completely enthralled by Greek culture, Greek language, Greek philosophy,

Greek architecture, Greek gods. Latin was mostly reserved for legal and bureaucratic business,

but there was enough regular trade with the capital that anyone who traveled in a wide social and professional circle probably spoke a little Latin too.

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