What language did Jesus actually speak, or what has been controversial over the centuries

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

While scholars generally agree that Jesus was a real historical figure, controversy has long raged over the events and circumstances of his life described in the Bible. Among other things, one of the most weighty and widespread disputes was the dispute regarding the language in which he spoke.

In particular, there has been some confusion in the past as to what language Jesus spoke as a person who lived in the first century AD in the Kingdom of Judah in what is now southern Palestine.

The question of Jesus' preferred language came up forever in 2014 during a public meeting in Jerusalem between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Pope Francis during the pontiff's tour of the Holy Land. Addressing the Pope through an interpreter, Netanyahu said:.

- said the pontiff, referring to the ancient Semitic language, now largely extinct, which arose among the people known as the Arameans, around the end of the 11th century BC. NS. As reported in the Washington Post, his version is still spoken by the Chaldean Christian communities in Iraq and Syria. But according to a recent report in the Smithsonian Journal, Aramaic, once widely used in commerce and government, is likely to disappear within a generation or two. Netanyahu quickly replied.

News of the linguistic controversy made headlines, but it turned out that both the Prime Minister and the Pope were most likely right.

Leading scholar of modern Aramaic, University of Cambridge linguist Jeffrey Hahn, attempts to document all of its dialects before their final speakers die out. As part of his work, Khan interviewed subjects in the northern suburbs of Chicago, home to a significant number of Assyrian, Aramaic-speaking Christians who fled their home countries in the Middle East to escape persecution and war.

The Assyrian people adopted the Aramaic language (which originated from the desert nomads known as the Arameans) when they founded an empire in the Middle East in the eighth century BC, even after the Assyrians were conquered, this language flourished in the region for centuries. (As you know, the dialogues in Mel Gibson's 2004 film The Passion of the Christ about the last twelve hours of Jesus' life were written in Aramaic and Latin).

Aramaic remained the common language in the Middle East until the seventh century AD, until it was replaced by Arabic when Muslim forces invaded from Arabia. Subsequently, only non-Muslims in the remote mountainous regions of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey continued to speak Aramaic. Over the past century, as speakers of the Aramaic language fled from their villages to cities and other countries (for example, the Assyrians from Chicago, interviewed by Khan), this language has not been passed on to younger generations.

Today, up to half a million Aramaic speakers may be scattered across the planet, but this figure is deceiving. Researchers believe that there are over a hundred different dialects of the native language known as Neo-Aramaic, some of which have already become extinct. Other dialects have few living speakers, and in most cases Aramaic is used only as a spoken language, not a written language.

Some assumptions are based on a found burial box from the first century AD with an Aramaic inscription that reads:. Archaeologists say that this box may have contained the remains of James, the brother of Jesus of Nazareth, dating from AD 63. NS.

Jesus was likely multilingual

Most religious scholars and historians agree with Pope Francis that the historical Jesus primarily spoke the Galilean dialect of the Aramaic language. Thanks to trade, invasions and conquests, Aramaic had spread far beyond the borders of the country by the 7th century BC and became the language of the Franks in most of the Middle East.

In the first century AD, this language was the most commonly used language among ordinary Jews, as opposed to the religious elite, and it is most likely that it was used by Jesus and his disciples in their daily lives.

But Netanyahu was also technically right. Hebrew, which comes from the same language family as Aramaic, was also widely spoken in the time of Jesus. Like Latin today, Hebrew was the language of choice for religious scholars and scriptures, including the Bible (although part of the Old Testament was written in Aramaic).

Jesus probably understood Hebrew, although his daily life was most likely in Aramaic. Of the first four books of the New Testament, the Gospels of Matthew and Mark describe Jesus using Aramaic terms and phrases, while in Luke 4:16 he was shown reading a Hebrew text from the Bible in a synagogue.

In addition to Aramaic and Hebrew, Greek and Latin were also common in Jesus' time. After Alexander the Great conquered Mesopotamia and the rest of the Persian Empire in the fourth century BC, Greek supplanted other languages as the official language in much of the region. In the first century AD, Judea was part of the Eastern Roman Empire, which adopted Greek as its lingua franca and retained Latin for legal and military matters.

According to archaeologist Ygael Yadin, Aramaic was the language of the Jews before the revolt of Simon Bar Kokhba. Yadin recognized in the texts he studied the transition from Aramaic to Hebrew, which was recorded during the Bar Kochba uprising. In his book, Ygael Yadin notes:.

It is likely that Jesus knew three common languages of the surrounding cultures during his earthly life: Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek. Based on this knowledge, it is likely that Jesus spoke whichever of the three languages was most appropriate for the people with whom he spoke. Therefore, as linguists and historians argue, disputes on this topic are often useless.

And in continuation of the topic, read also about how his fate developed in the future. Perhaps he not only got married, but also lived in Japan …