by Al Shaw

Created on: December 31, 2006   Last Updated: May 08, 2007

Discovering who who spoke which language in first century Palestine is not as simple as it may seem, not least because of the reality of multi-lingualism.

Many Jews, especially in Galilee, used Aramaic as their household language. The use of the prefix bar ("son") instead of the Hebrew ben is evidence of this usage (e.g. Bar-tholomew, Bar-timaeus and Simon Bar-Jona). Jesus undoubtedly spoke Aramaic: when the gospel writers (who wrote in Greek) chose to quote Jesus' words in their original form, they invariably did so in Aramaic. Examples include "Talith kum" (Little girl, arise) "Ephphatha" (Be opened) and "Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani" (My God, my God, why have you forsaken me".)

Aramaic was also used by non-Jews. Several Arab tribes to the east and south of Palestine spoke an Aramaic dialect as their first language as did the residents of Palmyra in Syria.

Elsewhere in Judea, we find Hebrew more widely used. The view that Hebrew was solely the language of law and the Temple is now generally disregarded. Much evidence exists for the vernacular use of Hebrew by Jews in Judea in the first century. Late in the second century, Hebrew died out as an everyday language but continued to be used as a religious, scholarly and literary language. After its revival in the 19th century, Hebrew is now of course the living language of the state of Israel.

By the 1st century, Koine had emerged as the most popular form of the Greek language and was widely spoken in the eastern Mediterranean. Many Jews of this period were Greek-speaking, some exclusively so. The creation in Alexandria of the Septuagint (the Greek version of the Jewish scriptures) powerfully illustrates this trend among the Jews of the diaspora. The use of Greek in this way paved the way for a distinctly Semitic version of Koine as Hebrew thought forms struggled to find expression within the structures of Greek language.

As the language of imperial Rome, Latin was unpopular among Palestinian Jews, though a knowledge of it was useful in many practical ways. Latin inscriptions appeared on road signs, distance markers and official buildings. John records that the charge for which Jesus was condemned was written above his cross in Greek, Hebrew and Latin.

Census, centurion, legion and denarius are all examples of Latin terms found in the gospel records, and it was, of course, the language of the armies, officials and governors of the empire. Interestingly, when the apostle Paul wrote his letter to the Christians in Rome, he did so in Greek, despite his recipients living within sight of the imperial palace.

As in so many parts of the world today, people in the first century were multi-lingual, a fact often missed by those for whom English is a first language.

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