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Jan 4, 2022 · Hebrew was likely often read in the synagogues, so most people were probably able to speak and understand some Hebrew. Since Greek was the language of the Romans, who had power over Israel during Jesus’ time, Greek was the language of the political class and anyone who wanted to do business with the Romans.
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- Aramaic
- Overview
- Jesus Was Likely Multilingual
- Alexander the Great Brought Greek to Mesopotamia
- HISTORY Vault: Jesus: His Life
While historians and scholars debate many aspects of Jesus' life, most agree on what language he mainly spoke.
While scholars generally agree that Jesus was a real historical figure, debate has long raged around the events and circumstances of his life as depicted in the Bible.
In particular, there’s been some confusion in the past about what language Jesus spoke, as a man living during the first century A.D. in the kingdom of Judea, located in what is now the southern part of Palestine.
The issue of Jesus’ preferred language memorably came up in 2014, during a public meeting in Jerusalem between Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, and Pope Francis, during the pontiff’s tour of the Holy Land. Speaking to the pope through an interpreter, Netanyahu declared: “Jesus was here, in this land. He spoke Hebrew.”
Francis broke in, correcting him. “Aramaic,” he said, referring to the ancient Semitic language, now mostly extinct, that originated among a people known as the Aramaeans around the late 11th century B.C. As reported in the Washington Post, a version of it is still spoken today by communities of Chaldean Christians in Iraq and Syria.
“He spoke Aramaic, but he knew Hebrew,” Netanyahu replied quickly.
Most religious scholars and historians agree with Pope Francis that the historical Jesus principally spoke a Galilean dialect of Aramaic. Through trade, invasions and conquest, the Aramaic language had spread far afield by the 7th century B.C. and would become the lingua franca in much of the Middle East.
In the first century A.D., it would have been the most commonly used language among ordinary Jewish people, as opposed to the religious elite, and the most likely to have been used among Jesus and his disciples in their daily lives.
But Netanyahu was technically correct as well. Hebrew, which is from the same linguistic family as Aramaic, was also in common use in Jesus’ day. Similar to Latin today, Hebrew was the chosen language for religious scholars and the holy scriptures, including the Bible (although some of the Old Testament was written in Aramaic).
Jesus likely understood Hebrew, though his everyday life would have been conducted in Aramaic. Of the first four books of the New Testament, the Gospels of Matthew and Mark records Jesus using Aramaic terms and phrases, while in Luke 4:16, he was shown reading Hebrew from the Bible at a synagogue.
Alexander the Great.
In addition to Aramaic and Hebrew, Greek and Latin were also common in Jesus’ time. After Alexander the Great’s conquest of Mesopotamia and the rest of the Persian Empire in the fourth century B.C., Greek supplanted other tongues as the official language in much of the region. In the first century A.D., Judea was part of the eastern Roman Empire, which embraced Greek as its lingua franca and reserved Latin for legal and military matters.
As Jonathan Katz, a Classics lecturer at Oxford University, told BBC News, Jesus probably didn’t know more than a few words in Latin. He probably knew more Greek, but it was not a common language among the people he spoke to regularly, and he was likely not too proficient. He definitely did not speak Arabic, another Semitic language that did not arrive in Palestine until after the first century A.D.
So while Jesus’ most common spoken language was Aramaic, he was familiar with—if not fluent, or even proficient in—three or four different tongues. As with many multilingual people, which one he spoke probably depended on the context of his words, as well as the audience he was speaking to at the time.
The story of Jesus Christ through a unique lens—the people in his life who were closest to him.
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Jan 4, 2024 · Yes, He did speak Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek, but the fundamental languages Jesus spoke were love and compassion, not just for God but also for one another. In John 13:34, He declared: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another.
Dec 29, 2023 · If even these Greek-speaking authors, writing decades after Jesus’ death, preserve memories of Jesus’ speech in Aramaic, Aramaic was certainly Jesus’ primary spoken language. Besides Jesus’ own Aramaic name and the use of some Aramaic phrases in the Gospels, the names of some of his disciples are Aramaic as well.
Sep 7, 2016 · Whatever the case, it's likely Jesus did speak Hebrew, but, like Greek, not as his first language. We’ll discover more about how and when he may have spoken Hebrew in a moment. But first, let’s examine the third language of first-century Palestine, Aramaic.
Nov 7, 2024 · What language did Jesus speak? A typical Jewish businessman, like Jesus, who ran his business in Galilee, would not speak only one language. ... The people hearing the reading of the book of the ...
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Dec 25, 2005 · And he stood up to read; and there was given to him the book of the prophet Isaiah. He opened the book and found the place where it was written…” (Lk 4:16-17). When Jesus read from the Scriptures, He read in Hebrew. The Hebraic Jews of Israel generally knew both Aramaic (their daily language) and Hebrew (the language of their faith).
