DailyHebrew.com

Mark Roberts has posted an intriguing article, What Language(s) Did Jesus Speak? The Circumstantial Evidence.  The content of the article proposes a not too unusual answer–Aramaic and possibly Hebrew and/or Greek.  He seems to be more keen on the idea of Jesus speaking Greek instead of Hebrew, but nonetheless capitulates that Hebrew is a possibility. 

 

There are several problems with such a suggestion, not the least of which is that saying Jesus spoke "Aramaic" or "Hebrew" (or even for that matter "Greek") is not really telling us what language he spoke.  Aramaic was not a single linguistic unit in the first century: what is generally labeled "Aramaic" includes a very wide range of languages and dialects.  A similar problem arises for the Hebrew of the first century–when comparing the evidence from two examples closest to first century Hebrew, the Dead Sea Scrolls and Tannaitic literature, one finds quite divergent characteristics.  (Even though I am no expert, there is evidence for different linguistic strata within Greek as well.) 

 

Further, there is very scant evidence not only for the linguistic community in which he was raised (which the article does well to point out), but the internal evidence within the NT is limited to only a handful of "Aramaic" sayings which do not provide enough data to assess definitively the appropriate dialect/language of one particular individual (setting aside the idiolect problem).

 

So what can we say about the language(s) of Jesus?  The NT evidence points to a dialect of Aramaic, but at our present knowledge of first century Aramaic it would be pure supposition to move too far beyond this point.

 

UPDATE: Roberts on Jesus' use of Hebrew