Tell me, if Aramaic was the language spoken by Jesus and all the Jews, why did Titus have to draft the services of Josephus and others to speak Hebrew to the people barricaded in Jerusalem? There should have been thousands of Aramaic speakers in Titus’s army. Apparently, there were thousands of Jews who neither spoke Greek or Aramaic.
There are several possibilities:
1) in ancient writings “Hebrew” and “Aramaic” are sometimes confused with one another.
2) Josephus might have been bragging.
3) Josephus was more polished in his Hebrew and Titus wanted to have the most able spokesman possible no matter what language was used.
4) Jerusalem was in the South. Aramaic might have been more common in the North where Jesus and the Apostles were from.
5) Even though only a few decades had passed, Hebrew might have experienced a resurgence in usage - which might partially explain Hebrew nationalist uprisings in the 60s.
6) Josephus might have been speaking only to an elite which knew Hebrew and little else or preferred to use Hebrew for their own particular reasons.
Martin McNamara writes: “All of Josephus’ four extant works are important sources for Jewish history and tradition. The first to be composed was The Jewish War—an account of the war of the Jews against the Romans. Josephus himself tells us that he wrote two versions of this. ********The first one was in his own vernacular, i.e. Aramaic, and composed for ‘the up-country barbarians’, i.e. the Aramaic-speaking Jews of the Parthian kingdom, especially those of Babylon. This edition is lost.********** The extant Greek version is an adaptation by Josephus himself of the Aramaic work. It was published about A.D. 78, when Josephus was about 40 years old. The next work to be published was The Jewish Antiquities, about sixteen years later (A.D. 94 or so). It appears that soon before the publication of The Antiquities Justus of Tiberias had published his history of the Jewish War, with serious accusation of misconduct during the war in Galilee directed against Josephus. It is possible that Josephus’ third and autobiographical work, the Life, was published at the same time as the Antiquities and as a reply to Justus. Some scholars, however, maintain that the Life was published about A.D. 96, and may have appeared together with a second edition of the Antiquities that appeared between A.D. 93/94 and 100. Josephus’ final extant work to be published was Against Apion, or to give its original title, On the Antiquity of the Jews. In the first part of this work Josephus sets out to refute the detractions and contentions of anti-Semitic writings. In the course of doing so he excerpts from a large number of works no longer extant. In the second part Josephus gives his positive defence of the Jewish people, setting forth the inner value of Judaism and its superiority over Hellenism. In this we have a rather full presentation of Jewish halakah as known to Josephus.” (Intertestamental Literature, p. 239) http://www.earlyjewishwritings.com/josephus.html
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Titus’s army, I believe was the 15th Roman Legion. Native Latin speakers? Just a guess.
My understanding is that Aramaic was the native language, Hebrew was the language of the synagog and Greek was the “lingua franca”- the language of commerce and trade. It was being supplanted by Latin at that time.
Sort of like modern Rome. Italian the native language, latin the language of the church, and English by those doing business with foreigners.