What language did Jesus speak?
Aramaic was the lingua franca in the Holy Land, not Hebrew or
Arabic.
This
ancient mosaic of Jesus Christ is from Turkey, where Aramaic was the common
language at the time of his life. Photo by Wikimedia Commons
Benzion
Netanyahu, the late historian of Jewish history, would have probably been
dismayed to hear his son, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, claim during a
meeting with Pope Francis this week that Jesus’ native language was Hebrew.
“Jesus
was here, in this land. He spoke Hebrew,” Netanyahu told Francis at a meeting
in Jerusalem on Monday.
The pope
was quick to correct the prime minister and tell him that Jesus in fact spoke
Aramaic, as mainstream biblical scholars generally agree.
There is
compelling evidence for this: evidence from the Christian Bible itself, and
historical evidence about the linguistic milieu Jesus was raised and lived in.
The evidence is in the Bible
The New
Testament of the Bible was written entirely in Greek − but is speckled with Aramaic
words and phrases, many of them quotes from Jesus himself that were
transliterated rather than translated. In other words, they were written in
Aramaic but spelled out in Greek.
For
example: “She [Mary Magdalene] turned herself, and saith unto him [Jesus],
Rabboni; which is to say, Master” (John 20:16). Had Mary been speaking Hebrew,
she would have said ravi, the Hebrew equivalent of the Aramaic rabboni, both of
which could be translated “my teacher.”
But the
most compelling argument from the Christian Bible is a quotation by Jesus on
the cross, preserved in two separate gospels and in both cases written in
Aramaic − not Hebrew. “Around the ninth hour, Jesus shouted in a loud voice,
saying ‘Eli Eli lema sabachthani?’ which is, ‘My God, my God, why have you
forsaken me?’” (Matthew 27:46). The quote in Mark is almost identical with the
Aramaic phrase, written as “Eloi Eloi lama sabachthani?” (15:34).
Mainstream
biblical scholars agree it is very likely that this quote by Jesus is
authentic, not only because it appears in the two earliest extant gospels, but
also because it is very unlikely to have been made up by early Christians, who
would have surely preferred an account that does not depict Jesus as despairing
and questioning God.
Assuming
this was in fact a quote by Jesus, he was quoting from Psalms: “My God, my God,
why hast thou forsaken me?” (22:1) in which the Hebrew reads “Eli eli lama
azavteni?” Had Jesus been quoting Psalms in Hebrew, the gospels would have used
the Hebrew word azavteni, not the Aramaic sabachthani.
But could Jesus have been bilingual?
Sure, you
may say, Jesus spoke Aramaic, but it’s possible he spoke Hebrew too. Well, to
answer this we ought to look at the linguistic milieu Jesus would have lived
in. At the time of Jesus − that is, the first century C.E. − the spoken
language in the Holy Land was Aramaic. Already we can see in that the upper
strata of Judeans spoke Aramaic, the lingua franca of the Near East, already at
the close of the First Temple period. This can be learned from the episode in 2
Kings in which Sennacherib’s messenger comes to Jerusalem’s gates in the
seventh century B.C.E. “Then said Eliakim the son of Hilkiah, and Shebna, and
Joah, unto Rabshakeh, Speak, I pray thee, to thy servants in the Syrian
language [Aramaic]; for we understand it: and talk not with us in the Jews’
language in the ears of the people that are on the wall” (18:26).
During
the Babylonian exile in the sixth century B.C.E., the exiled Judeans picked up
Aramaic. Indeed, parts of the later books of the Bible, Ezra and Daniel, are in
that language, indicating that the Judeans were slowly shifting languages. This
was a gradual process that took hundreds of years, but slowly Hebrew was dying
out. In the Galilee, where Jesus lived, Aramaic had taken over by the time
Jesus was born. In the south, in Judea, archaeological evidence shows that some
pockets of Hebrew still remained during the first century C.E.
In
addition to these Hebrew-speaking settlements in Judea, the priests in the
Temple were for the most part still speaking Hebrew, and Hebrew remained a
language of the law spoken and studied by the rabbis. But this was only the
upper class of Judean society. Most people couldn’t read in any language.
Modern scholarship estimates that the literacy rate in Roman Palestine was 3
percent and probably much lower in a rural backwater town like Nazareth. It is
extremely unlikely that a carpenter’s son from Nazareth would be literate in
any language, let alone Hebrew, a language he and the people he preached to
probably didn’t know at all.
This may
be shocking, especially since the gospels have accounts of Jesus reading from
the Bible, but one must remember that the writers of these gospels never met
Jesus and were writing their accounts based on an oral tradition. From what we
can surmise, the law and the Bible most likely had to be interpreted and read
by the rabbis for nearly all Jews, Jesus included. Even among the literate
minority, Hebrew was becoming less common, as can be evidenced by the
appearance of Aramaic translations of the Bible.
After
Jesus was crucified, the Temple was destroyed in 70 C.E. Hebrew lost its
bastion in Jerusalem and was slipping away. During the Bar Kochba revolt in the
second century C.E. an attempt was made to revive the Hebrew language, but this
did not bear fruit as the revolt was crushed by the Romans. Hebrew died off as
a spoken language by the end of the century, but continued to remain an
important religious language for the Jews, though later religious texts − most
notably the Talmud − would be written in Aramaic.
Still,
Hebrew remained as a literary language much like Latin remained throughout the
Middle Ages. But it would only become a living language in the end of the 19th
century and the beginning of the 20th century when, as a part of the Zionist
Movement and under the leadership of Eliezer Ben Yehuda, Jews in Palestine took
up their ancient tongue.
Where did
Aramaic come from? The Aramaeans lived in the area that is now the border
region between Syria and Turkey. They began to settle in large numbers in
Babylonia and Assyria, and Aramaic eventually became the main language in
Mesopotamia. When the Persians took over the region, they made Aramaic the
official language of their vast empire, spreading the language as far as Egypt.
Even after the Persian Empire was taken over by the Alexander the Great,
Aramaic remained the region’s main language, with Greek taking its place only
as an administrative language used by government officials and the language of
the elite.
Aramaic’s
dominance in the region declined rapidly with the rise of Islam in the seventh
century C.E. Aramaic was being pushed out by Arabic in a gradual process which
continues to this very day, with only small pockets of Aramaic remaining. There
are still a couple towns in Syria that speak Aramaic, and it is spoken in some
mountainous regions of Kurdistan, as well as some other small communities
scattered throughout the Middle East. In addition, some pockets of immigrants
from these communities still speak Aramaic, but this surely will not last
forever. An estimated 400,000 people speak Aramaic today, though they speak
various dialects and would find it difficult to communicate with one another.
None, by
the way, speak the Aramaic dialect spoken by Jesus.
