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To: SunkenCiv

People of that time and place were multilingual. Aramaic was the common street language. Koine Greek was the language of the educated and it is what the New Testament was written in.

Hebrew had become a dead language. Jewish scholars had translated the OT into Greek after the conquests of Alexander the Great.


8 posted on 07/07/2026 9:00:02 AM PDT by Pelham (President Eisenhower. Operation Wetback 1953-54)
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To: Pelham

“Hebrew ceased to be a regular spoken language sometime between 200 and 400 CE, as it declined in the aftermath of the unsuccessful Bar Kokhba revolt, which was carried out against the Roman Empire by the Jews of Judaea.[21][22][note 4] Aramaic and, to a lesser extent, Greek were already in use as international languages, especially among societal elites and immigrants.[24] Hebrew survived into the medieval period as the language of Jewish liturgy, rabbinic literature, intra-Jewish commerce, and Jewish poetic literature.”

Wiki

Also: https://unpacked.media/hebrew-a-dead-language-revived/

https://www.jesusfilm.org/blog/what-language-did-jesus-speak/

“The Greek New Testament does preserve some Hebrew and Aramaic words, but they were written in Greek letters that preserve the approximate sounds of the original Hebrew or Aramaic words, (i.e., they’re transliterated). There is uncertainty on whether some of these transliterated words reflect an Aramaic or a Hebrew origin. This is common for languages in the same family.

The use of Hebrew & Aramaic words in the original Greek of the New Testament reflects normal practice in multicultural, multilingual contexts. For example, Paul is recorded as seamlessly switching from Greek to Aramaic in Acts 21:37-22:2, depending on the audience he is addressing. This entire passage is written in Greek in the Book of Acts, but Paul’s linguistic dexterity reflects the normal code-switching practices of bilingual people.”

https://bibtheo.com/2020/02/04/aramaicgnt/


11 posted on 07/07/2026 10:04:06 AM PDT by Mr Rogers
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