What Language Did Jesus Speak?

Saturday 20 March 2004 3:45PM

In Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ the Romans speak Latin and the Jews speak Aramaic. The movie has been criticised for historical inaccuracy because Greek, not Latin, was spoken by Romans in the eastern part of the Empire. But what about Aramaic? Was it the language of Jesus?

Ian Young teaches Aramaic at the University of Sydney. He discusses the Aramaic language and the historical evidence for the language or languages most likely to have been spoken by Jesus and his contemporaries.


Amanda Smith: This week on Lingua Franca, what language did Jesus speak?

Hi, I'm Amanda Smith and the question's been prompted by the release of the Mel Gibson film The Passion of the Christ. In the film, the dialogue is in Latin and Aramaic:

[From film soundtrack, Jesus speaks Aramaic...Translation: Father, you can do all things. If it is possible, let this chalise pass from me. But let Your Will be done, not mine.]

Now it's not often that Aramaic enters the realm of 21st century popular culture or mainstream media, but with The Passion of the Christ, and the controversy surrounding the film, Aramaic has attracted a bit of attention and interest of late.

Even so, there is only one university course in Australia where you can learn this language nowadays, and that's at the University of Sydney. Aramaic is taught there by Ian Young. He's a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Hebrew, Biblical and Jewish Studies.

Ian Young: The Aramaic language has been in the news recently. In Mel Gibson's highly publicised movie The Passion of the Christ, Aramaic is the language of the Jewish characters, ranging from Jesus to his opponents, whereas Latin is the language of the Romans, such as the governor, Pontius Pilate. The movie has been criticised for choosing Latin, since it is generally believed by scholars that Greek, not Latin, was the lingua franca of the eastern part of the Roman Empire.

So what about Aramaic? What is Aramaic, and was it in fact 'the language of Jesus?'

Aramaic belongs to the Semitic language group historically centred in the Middle East. Within Semitic it is classified with the Northwest Semitic languages. Thus it is much closer to other Northwest Semitic languages such as Hebrew or Phoenician, than to languages outside that group, such as Arabic or Babylonian.

A people called 'the Arameans' is first mentioned in Assyrian sources in the 12th century BC. We have Aramaic inscriptions of some length beginning from the 9th century BC. These stem from various kingdoms situated in modern Syria, southern Turkey, and Northern Iraq. One of the most powerful Aramean kingdoms in this period was the kingdom of Damascus.

Due probably to the large Aramean population in Mesopotamia itself, by the 8th century BC Aramaic began to be used as an official language of the Assyrian empire, alongside the Assyrian brand of Akkadian. Akkadian is written with wedges on clay, and has a syllabary containing several hundred signs. In contrast, Aramaic was written using an alphabet of just 22 signs, which it shared with the other Northwest Semitic languages like Hebrew.

During the time of the Persian empire, which ruled the Middle East from the 7th to the 4th century BC, Aramaic rose above all other languages to be the sole official language of the imperial administration. This was its high water mark as an official language, however. After the conquest of the Persian Empire and hence much of the Middle East by Alexander the Great, Greek took over as the official language of the region.

Nevertheless, Aramaic in its various forms persisted as an important language for many centuries. Even today it survives in various areas. Even in modern day Sydney, Aramaic dialects are used by the local Assyrian and Mandaean communities.

Aramaic is thus one of the most important languages in human history. There is no doubt that Aramaic was still an important language in the Middle East in the time of Jesus. But was Aramaic 'the language of Jesus'?

As much as there is any popular opinion on the topic, most people seem to assume that Aramaic was the Jewish language of the time. Hence it is assumed that it must have been Jesus' language. In a similar vein I have found many people quite surprised to discover that the overwhelming majority of The Dead Sea Scrolls are in Hebrew, not Aramaic.

Three main candidates have been seriously proposed by scholars for 'the language of Jesus': Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic. Putting the question in this way may, of course, already create a false expectation that only one of these could have been used by Jesus. We in fact know of many societies, both ancient and modern, where multilingualism is the norm. Jesus could have used all three of these languages. The question then would be, in which contexts did he use which languages?

Greek was the lingua franca of the eastern Roman empire. It is thus considered likely that Roman administrators like Pontius Pilate would have used Greek, and not Latin as in the movie. Strangely to me, the movie chooses to portray Pontius Pilate and the other Romans communicating with the Jewish characters - due to the Romans' thorough knowledge of Aramaic. Not even the leaders of the Jews are able to speak a word of Latin. The only Jewish character I noticed being portrayed as knowing Latin was Jesus!

On the contrary, scholars generally consider that all the better educated Jews, especially the rulers of Judea and Jerusalem, such as the chief priests who feature so prominently in the passion story, would have known the lingua franca Greek, and would have habitually used this language when communicating with their overlords. Even the uneducated would likely have known at least a smattering of Greek.

Greek is well attested on written remains of the time. For example, Greek turns up on a fifth of the Jewish inscriptions from the region, and even a majority of burial inscriptions. The Dead Sea Scrolls, which are in my opinion all a bit earlier than the time of Jesus, also include some Greek manuscripts. The seventh cave discovered at Qumran in fact contained only Greek texts.

The New Testament is written in Greek. Greek was certainly widespread in Galilee and Judea in Jesus' time. Could Jesus have actually spoken Greek?

A few scholars have occasionally suggested that Greek was in fact the main language of Jesus. This would at least mean that when the gospels quote the words of Jesus in Greek, we might be dealing with the actual words spoken, and not a translation. However, most scholars consider it unlikely that both Jesus and the common people he mostly addressed could have used Greek as their primary language. All indications seem to point to the conclusion that Greek did not penetrate that deeply into the local cultures of the Middle East. But does that mean Jesus never used Greek?

The assumption that Jesus never used Greek is also not without problems. There are several incidents in the gospels where Jesus encounters, and converses with, non-Jewish officials, whether a Roman centurion or Pontius Pilate himself. No interpreter is mentioned as being needed at these times. A straightforward reading of these stories would indicate that Jesus knew enough Greek to communicate directly with these people.

Some scholars have pointed out that Jesus' homeland, Galilee, in the north of modern Israel, was at that time very cosmopolitan, with a heavy non-Jewish influence. If Jesus was, as the gospels indicate, a carpenter, he may have needed Greek to deal with customers. Certainly, disciples like the tax collector Matthew would have needed to speak Greek.

So it is plausible that Jesus knew Greek, and that he and his opponents might have had opportunity to use it during his last hours portrayed in the movie. Yet most scholars think that his normal language was a Semitic language, either Hebrew or Aramaic. Which is it?

In the movie I noticed Hebrew being used only for occasional quotations from the Old Testament or the liturgy. The idea that Hebrew was long dead as a spoken language by the time of Jesus underlay much of the early scholarship on the language of Jesus. However, as the 20th century progressed, more and more scholars began to suggest that rumours of its death had been greatly exaggerated. It is now accepted by most scholars that not only was Hebrew still the normal language of Jewish literature in Jesus' time, but that spoken Hebrew still survived, at least in some regions.

That Hebrew was still the main language of Jewish literature in Israel in the last centuries BC seems clear from the Dead Sea Scrolls which, as mentioned, are mostly in Hebrew. When not biblical texts themselves, the scrolls are generally in a biblical-style Hebrew. In contrast, a different dialect is used in the codification of Rabbinic law known as the Mishnah from c.200 AD. Traces of the ancestor of Mishnaic Hebrew, or its relatives, have also been found in the Dead Sea Scrolls and other texts from near Jesus' time. It has commonly been suggested that while biblical-style Hebrew was the written language, spoken Hebrew of Jesus' time was of the Mishnaic variety. Recently however, spoken biblical-style Hebrew has also been suggested. Because of the fact that virtually the only evidence that survives is of course written Hebrew, it is hard to guess about the nature and distribution of spoken Hebrew among the populace. But one frequently expressed educated guess is that Hebrew was most commonly heard spoken around Jerusalem, exactly where the movie The Passion of the Christ takes place.

We know that Jesus used a Semitic language because every so often the Greek gospels, especially the gospel of Mark, give us Jesus' words not only in translation but also in transliteration, that is, they render the sounds of the foreign words as best they can into Greek. One unresolved problem is why these words were chosen for transliteration. But another problem is due to the fact that Hebrew and Aramaic are so close to each other. Many of the words could be either Hebrew or Aramaic.

There are, however, in my judgement, some words that must be Aramaic, and cannot be Hebrew; whereas there are no words that have to be Hebrew and cannot be Aramaic. A good example is in Mark 5:41, where Mark translates Jesus' words rather prosaically, as 'little girl, I say to you, arise'. The words are also transliterated in Greek as talitha qumi. Now qumi could be a feminine singular imperative meaning 'arise' in either Hebrew or Aramaic. However one of the most noticeable differences between the two languages is the position of the definite article, 'the'. Aramaic places the definite article at the end of the word, thus the 'tha' at the end of 'talitha' is the Aramaic definite article on a feminine noun. Hebrew would have placed the definite article at the beginning, and produced something like 'Ha-talah', or perhaps 'ha-talyah'. The word talitha means both 'girl' and 'lamb', and the definite article is probably being used here as a vocative, so a possible translation of Jesus' words to the girl would be, 'Get up, little lamb'.

There are, therefore, good grounds for thinking that Jesus used Aramaic, some of the time. But we have also seen that there is a case that can be made that Hebrew and Greek could also have played a major role in the events of the last hours of Jesus' life. In the end we simply cannot be certain. It remains a matter of competing possibilities and probabilities. So I guess that the movie The Passion of the Christ can defend its choice to stick with Aramaic as the language of Jesus. But a movie about a completely trilingual Jesus would have been more fun for language scholars.

Of course, the final question is, what sort of Aramaic might Jesus have spoken? We have so few Semitic words in the gospels themselves. We do have an idea what written Aramaic of Jesus' time might have looked like from texts like The Dead Sea Scrolls. But we also have evidence that spoken Aramaic and literary Aramaic might be quite different dialects. Jesus heals a deaf and dumb man in Mark 7:34 with the words 'be opened' transliterated into Greek as ephphatha. If this is Aramaic and not Hebrew, it represents a grammatical form, 'ippatah', that only become common in written Aramaic hundreds of years after Jesus' time. In other words, spoken Aramaic of Jesus' time might have been quite different from what we see written at the same time.

So was Aramaic the language of Jesus? It certainly was one of the languages of Jesus. But under what circumstances it was used, and exactly what form of Aramaic, are questions open to debate.

Amanda Smith: Ian Young, who teaches Aramaic in the Department of Hebrew, Biblical and Jewish Studies at the University of Sydney.

And that's Lingua Franca for this week. I'm Amanda Smith. Pushon Bashlama. That's goodbye in Aramaic.


Amanda Smith
Martin Lawrence