Aramaic was a mishmash of many dialects spanning geographically separated towns, villages from Jerusalem to Babylon. It was like a Pidgeon English used by travelers to communicate with villagers whose dialects were not understood.
When there is no mass communication, no national language, no education system to promote a uniform language, people resort to stringing together bits and pieces of words and phrases to get thoughts across.
“This afternoon we are traveling west to purchase bread”
becomes
“We go (points finger at the Sun and moves finger west) buy bread”.
Aramaic was more developed but it was not a written language. The Aramaic of the Bible is not the spoken Aramaic. It is a Hebrew-adapted Aramaic. Scholars agree that the Aramaic of the Bible is a Hebrew version of Aramaic.
Hebrew and Greek were the educated languages, the written word. Hebrew scholars adapted Hebrew to mimic spoken Aramaic because the writings involved Nebuchadnezzar, Babylon, the witnesses spoke in Aramaic. The Hebrew scribes worked to translate the spoken Aramaic witness accounts into Hebrew but went further to adopt Aramaic into the Hebrew structure. The written results were spread back out to those towns and villages in the thousands of miles between Jerusalem and Babylon so that a faithful record was established.
Can you imagine yourself, time-warped back to that place, standing in their downtown where the 10 Commandments hadn’t been so much as cast yet, let alone internalized and adhered to? What would the scene on the street look like?
Thanks, information I have not heard before!
From:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramaic_New_Testament
“Mainstream and modern scholars have generally had a strong agreement that the New Testament was written in Greek and that an Aramaic source text was used for portions of the New Testament, especially the gospels. They acknowledge that many individual sayings of Jesus as found in the Greek Gospels may be translations from an Aramaic source referred to as “Q”, but hold that the Gospels’ text in its current form was composed in Greek, and so were the other New Testament writings. Scholars of all stripes have acknowledged the presence of scattered Aramaic expressions, written phonetically and then translated, in the Greek New Testament. Although it was frequently suggested that Q was a written source, it could have been a collection of oral sayings, usually referred to as the “logia”.”
So, somehow we manage to bring this subject back around to Q before heading off to bed!
Long been interested in such. Thanks. Learned something.