Journal: Journal of the Grace Evangelical Society
Volume: JOTGES 31:60 (Spring 2018)
Article: Greek As The Spoken Language Of Christ
Author: Jim Hitt

JOTGES 31:60 (Spring 2018) p. 47

Greek As The Spoken Language Of Christ

Jim Hitt

Assistant Pastor
The Main Place Christian Fellowship

Orange, CA

I. Introduction

The question “Did Jesus primarily speak Greek?” is crucial in its implications for the inerrancy of the Scriptures. If the only teaching language of Jesus was Aramaic, the Greek NT must be a translation from Aramaic to Greek. But translations by their very nature are mere approximations. As such they all but rule out the existence of the ipsissima verba (the very words) of Christ.1 In fact, only Aramaic quotes could remain exact. The independence view of the Synoptic Gospels is rendered precarious by this question, for as Tresham writes, “How likely is it that three independent witnesses would make the same translations from Aramaic into Greek?”2

To be sure, correctly estimating Jesus’ language preference involves almost a thousand years of language history. Historians have tried to solve this puzzle for over a century. In particular, the three languages, Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek, all have a claim to this distinction, each in its own way.

JOTGES 31:60 (Spring 2018) p. 48

II. The Aramaic View

One of the key events that shaped the linguistic world of first century Palestine was the Babylonian captivity. “[T]he deportation of Palestinian Jews to Babylonia in the early sixth century [BC] began a gradual but distinctive shift in the language habits of the people of Palestine.”3 In Babylon, Aramaic began to replace Hebrew among the Jews and became “the lingua franca from Egypt to Asia Minor to Pakistan.”4 Porter states,

The widespread use of Aramaic is substantiated, according to this hypothesis, not only by the Aramaic portions of the biblical writings of Daniel and Ezra and by noncanonical 1 Enoch, but also by a large amount of inscriptional, ossuary, epistolary, papyrological and literary evidence, especially now from Qumran but also from the other Judaean Desert sites (e.g. Murabba’at, Masada and Nahal Hever).5

The scholarly consensus of the first part of the twentieth century held that the dominant language of first century AD Palestine was Aramaic.6 Thus Aramaic would be the language spoken and taught by Jesus. Porter adds, “While it is likely that Jesus’ primary language was Aramaic, this posi...