What was language of jesus

But language historians can shed light on what language a carpenter's son from Galilee who became a spiritual leader would have spoken.

Both the Pope and the Israeli prime minister are right, says Dr Sebastian Brock, emeritus reader in Aramaic at Oxford University, but it was important for Netanyahu to clarify. Hebrew was the language of scholars and the scriptures.

But Jesus's "everyday" spoken language would have been Aramaic. And it is Aramaic that most biblical scholars say he spoke in the Bible. This is the language that Mel Gibson used for The Passion of the Christ, although not all the words could be found from 1st Century Aramaic, and some of the script used words from later centuries.

Living the Bold Life for Christ. Today on Christianity. Is Thanksgiving Truly a Christian Holiday? About Christianity. All rights reserved. Greek culture was at its zenith, while nations like Egypt and Israel were waning.

Greek literature and philosophy along with the Greek tongue were fused with these cultures. This process came to be known as Hellenism. But Israel didn't merely soak up Greek culture—it recognized Greek culture as a "modern" culture and began to reinterpret their own traditional values and culture in light of what the Greeks offered.

This synthesis resulted in unique forms of Hellenistic Judaism. This Hellenism is what led to the translation of Hebrew scriptures in Greek. But these cultural changes didn't come without static. Many Jews were resistant to Hellenism on principle. So while many countries used Greek as a common linguistic thread between nations, some Jews refused to learn the language. So you might hear Greek spoken by Jews in Judea and Jerusalem, but you weren't likely to hear it in Capernaum or other Galilean areas.

Most Romans spoke Latin, so when they had to speak with Jews, they would use Greek. Consider this passage from Luke:.

And they began to accuse him, saying, "We have found this man subverting our nation. He opposes payment of taxes to Caesar and claims to be Messiah, a king. Then Pilate announced to the chief priests and the crowd, "I find no basis for a charge against this man. But they insisted, "He stirs up the people all over Judea by his teaching. He started in Galilee and has come all the way here" Luke —5. What language was Pilate speaking here?

He couldn't have been speaking his native Latin because the audience wouldn't have understood. In the same way, he probably didn't know Hebrew. The chance that a noble Roman leader would stoop to speak let alone learn Aramaic is small.

After all, Romans would have considered it an uncultured language that was beneath them. It's a pretty fair guess that Pilate was speaking Greek to this audience. Most of the non-religious documents and inscriptions discovered in this area were in Aramaic. And this is a critical point.

When contracts, invoices, and other normal communications are in a particular language, it's a strong sign that this was the region's primary language. Sometimes we see Jesus's Aramaic coming through in our Bibles. For instance, Jesus used the word Abba talking about God. This was the Aramaic word for father. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says this: "But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment.

Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister, 'Raca,' is answerable to the court" Matthew In Jesus's healings, the gospel writers sometimes use Jesus's exact phrasing. Additional evidence pointing to Hebrew as a living, spoken language comes, again, from Josephus.

Josephus delivered this message in Hebrew. But his choice to use Hebrew in this public way is telling. Josephus writes in the third person :. Upon this, Josephus stood in such a place where he might be heard, not by John only, but by many more, and then declared to them what Caesar had given him in charge, and this in the Hebrew language. It appears that, a generation after Jesus, Hebrew was still widely enough understood that not only could Josephus speak it, but he could do so knowing a large crowd would understand him.

We have seen that Hebrew was understood among the Qumran community and by many in Jerusalem. What about in Galilee? There is a statement in rabbinic literature that the Judeans retained the teachings of the Torah scholars because they were careful in the use of their language, while the Galileans, who were not so careful with their speech, did not retain their learning b.

While this saying is sometimes considered to be evidence for the dominance of Aramaic over Hebrew. Was this a distinct Aramaic-Galilean dialect, or a Hebrew-Galilean dialect? We can't be sure, but the dialect is noted twice in the Gospels:. Whatever the case, it's likely Jesus did speak Hebrew, but, like Greek, not as his first language. Imagine opening a copy of the Greek New Testament or the Hebrew Bible and being able to understand what it says in the original languages.

Learn More. There is wide consensus among scholars that Aramaic was the primary language spoken by the Jews of first century Palestine. This has been the commonly accepted view since , when Abraham Geiger, a German rabbi, showed that even Jewish rabbis from the first century would have spoken Aramaic. He convincingly argued that the Hebrew from the first century Mishnaic Hebrew only functioned as a written language, not as a living, spoken language.

Most Jews living in the heartland spoke Aramaic; almost nobody spoke Hebrew. It simply means the instances where Hebrew was spoken were the exception , not the rule. How did the status of Hebrew evolve from its use as the dominant language of Israel in the sixth-century BC to a highly localized language written and spoken in only very specific contexts in the first-century AD?

How did Aramaic come to replace it? As Hebrew was displaced by Aramaic, it transitioned from a living, spoken language into a language used first in the context of religion and liturgy and second for its symbolic importance— but it was not used by most people in common, everyday life for ordinary conversation.

Was he nearly bilingual, speaking Aramaic and Hebrew interchangeably?