There is wide consensus among scholars that Aramaic was the primary language spoken by the Jews of first century Palestine. The vast majority of Jews spoke it. Jesus spoke it. This has been the commonly accepted view since 1845, 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. There are two reasons most scholars believe Aramaic was the primary language of Jesus’s time—and the language Jesus...