"Thank you, come again!"
Posted on 09/18/2009 12:54:26 PM PDT by Nikas777
What Language(s) Did Jesus Speak and Why Does It Matter?
by Rev. Dr. Mark D. Roberts February 2004 (updated 2/2007)
Copyright © 2004 by Mark D. Roberts Note: You may download this resource at no cost, for personal use or for use in a Christian ministry, as long as you are not publishing it for sale. All I ask is that you give credit where credit is due. For all other uses, please contact me at mark@markdroberts.com. Thank you.
Part 1: Introduction
Although responses to Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ movie varied widely, every viewer was struck by the fact that not one word of English was spoken in the film. All dialogue was in one of two ancient languages, Aramaic or Latin. Without the English subtitles, most of us wouldn't have been able to understand a word in The Passion of the Christ .
I expect that many people who aw this movie wondered about its odd languages. What is Aramaic, anyway? Was this really the primary language of Jesus? Didn't he speak Hebrew? And, since the New Testament gospels were written in Greek, is there any reason to believe that Jesus also spoke Greek?
These questions are not merely matters of intellectual curiosity, however. Knowing something about the language (or languages) of Jesus will do much more than help you win a game of Trivial Pursuit. In fact this knowledge opens up new windows of understanding into the world and ministry of Jesus.
In my next few posts I will address the questions: What language(s) did Jesus speak and why does it matter? But before I begin to address these questions, I want to begin by saying something that seems so obvious that it doesn't need to be said. Are you ready? Jesus didn't speak English.
(Excerpt) Read more at markdroberts.com ...
Aramaic
Of all the crazy things overheard on a public bus this one had to take the cake.
Old batty woman complaining about some foreigner with bad language skills “If English was good enough for Jesus, it should be good enough for everyone else!”
The question is because He is who He is, he could speak any language. The thing is, what languages did he speak? And Mel Gibson is probably right. Aramaeic and Latin.
The woman is correct. Just ask your local 7-11 clerk, he will tell you.
lol She probably also believed Jesus was tall, blue eyed, light skinned and fair haired.
You missed a “He.”
Greek was also fairly common throughout the eastern mediterranean at the time of Christ. John 19:19-20) describes the titulus as follows:
And Pilate wrote a title, and put it on the cross. And the writing was JESUS OF NAZARETH THE KING OF THE JEWS. This title then read many of the Jews: for the place where Jesus was crucified was nigh to the city: and it was written in Hebrew, and Greek, and Latin. (King James Version)
LOL, how dumb can you be and still breath. You can tell by his name, Jesus spoke Spanish.
Generally Aramaic I believe, but also on occassion in a “language” that anyone who saw and heard Him could understand as if it were their native tongue.
"Thank you, come again!"
Aramaic is one of the Semitic languages, an important group of languages known almost from the beginning of human history and including also Arabic, Hebrew, Ethiopic, and Akkadian (ancient Babylonian and Assyrian). It is particularly closely related to Hebrew, and was written in a variety of alphabetic scripts. (What is usually called “Hebrew” script is actually an Aramaic script.)
The other question is “does it matter”? The answer would be no.
Yes Greek and Hebrew as well....
Even the coins Pilate mined for the region were in Greek not Latin.
Most of His teaching was in Greek. It was the lingua franca of the day, the Gospel writers recorded all His conversations as in Greek, and they made a special note of those occasions when He spoke Aramaic ("Abba," "Talitha kum," "Ephphatha," and so forth).
Of course it matters.
stop it. everybody speaks english! even in galaxy’s far, far away and all aliens that the starship enterprise came into contact with!
I believe he spoke King James English, and then it was translated into latin or some such thing...
Not a surprising question considering how many people think the Bible was originally written in Latin.
Asserting without direct evidence that Jesus' primary language was Aramaic, he goes on to explain something Jesus taught in Greek, by appealing to what (he thinks that) the Aramaic that (he thinks that) Jesus spoke would have meant.
Get that. He takes the only record we have of Jesus' words — which is Greek — and pushes it aside in favor of an interpretation based on a wholly-conjectural Aramaic original.
So yeah. It matters.
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