Crass: Language Issues Regarding Biblical Greek, Aramaic, & More – Fr. John Hunwicke

[Michie]

Dunno if you read, a couple of months ago, of some two-millennia-old Biblical fragments recently discovered in caves in the Judean deaert. One of them (Zechariah 8:16-17) was ... except for the Tetragrammaton ... written in Greek.

Greek was the lingua franca of the Mediterranean world. Rome was the lergest Greek-speaking city in that world. Non-Greek languages survived in circumstances of bilinguality. Think Palestine ... think Wales ...

But we know that Christ spoke Aramaic. This raises an interesting question. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke contain long passages which are more or less verbally identical.

IF YOUR ARE SPEED-READING THIS, YOU MIGHT AS WELL SAVE YOURSELF TIME BY GIVING IT UP NOW.

Now: if you ask three people to translate a single text into a different language, it is highly improbable that their three renderings will be verbally identical, even reproducing the same word-order. In a classroom, you will work out whose work was passed around and then plagiarised by the other "students". Time was when, at this point, the cane came out of the cupboard. Not that I ever used one. I relied on Mental Cruelty.

So, clearly, one needs an answer to the problem of the Three Synoptic Gospels. Who did the originaltranslation of the words of the Lord from Aramaic into Greek? Mark is shorter and cruder, so he is clearly first. The other two borrowed from him. What about passages in Matthew and Luke which are not borrowed from Mark? It stands to reason that they were taken from a now-lost work which wiser men than me (or you) have called 'Q'.

Bingo! You have solved "the Synoptic Problem".

But do we know that Christ spoke Aramaic? Of course we do. Mark records him as using the Aramaic Talitha Coum(i) when raising Jairus' daughter. And Abba and Ephphatha. QED.

Um ...

But why does Mark only record a few odd Aramaic words? Modern Scientific Commentators go shifty at this point. Do these words safely record Christ as an Aramaic speaker ... or do they neatly record some rare occasions when a habitual Greek-speaker spoke Aramaic instead?

Continued below.
Fr Hunwicke's Mutual Enrichment: CRASS (1)

 

[archer75]

Please post the continuation of this if you see it!

 

[Michie]

Please post the continuation of this if you see it!

I’ll definitely keep an eye on it archer!

 

[dzheremi]

There's nothing that says He couldn't or wouldn't have been multilingual (the Middle East was then, as now, a multilingual environment), but I'm not buying this argument. It's one thing to focus on the presence of the Aramaic phrases that are transliterated in the texts, but I believe it misses some effective clues that are found outside of those specific examples as to the likely linguistic environment. St. Peter is identified as a Galilean by his accent, for instance (Mark 14:70), which marks him as "one of them" (a follower of Christ), as Christ was also identified with Galilee (Nazareth being in Galilee), and His first followers were local men who would have likewise been identified as such. Other dialects of Aramaic, such as that of Jerusalem, were known, or else passages like the already referenced portion of Mark wouldn't make sense (how else would someone be identified by his speech as coming from a particular region?). And it is not controversial to talk or write about Galilean Aramaic as its own unique dialect. One of our old posters here on CF, Steve Caruso (who sadly doesn't seem to post anymore), taught and professionally translated the Galilean dialect that is presumed to have been Christ's native tongue, based on what we know of the linguistic situation on the ground in that time and place.

NB: None of this is to wander into any kind Aramaic primacy argument (I don't buy those, either), as I do believe that the NT scriptures composed in Greek.

 

[archer75]

@dzheremi I didn't fully follow your argument, but that is my fault. Let me just ask this follow-up: is there any reason to think any of the following points are impossible or extremely unlikely?

• The Lord used Greek regularly (but not always) in His ministry
• He often used Aramaic in (but maybe not only in) "intimate" discourse (speaking to a young child semi-privately, healing someone, or when suffering on the Cross)
• St. Peter, or any of the Galileans, could have been pegged as Galileans by their speech while speaking Greek (including but not limited to some trick of intonation or voice quality?)

 

[dzheremi]

@dzheremi I didn't fully follow your argument, but that is my fault. Let me just ask this follow-up: is there any reason to think any of the following points are impossible or extremely unlikely?

• The Lord used Greek regularly (but not always) in His ministry
• He often used Aramaic in (but maybe not only in) "intimate" discourse (speaking to a young child semi-privately, healing someone, or when suffering on the Cross)
• St. Peter, or any of the Galileans, could have been pegged as Galileans by their speech while speaking Greek (including but not limited to some trick of intonation or voice quality?)

Yes, these are all plausible. I should have been more clear in my reply that what I am objecting to regarding the OP is that the Lord would have used Aramaic on "rare occasions", not the idea that He would have/could have spoken Greek. Greek was the high-status language of intercommunal communication in the much of the Near East at the time (even in a place like Osroene, whose official/state language was Aramaic, Koine Greek would've been spoken by many and been very useful in communicating with others from nearby Hellenized regions), so it would make sense to me that He could have spoken it. It does not follow, however, that He would have used His own language infrequently just because the transliteration of Aramaic words or phrases is comparatively rare in the Biblical text, however.

I could call myself a "habitual Spanish speaker" if I wanted to (it's true, after all), but that wouldn't change the fact that my first language, and the one I use most often and default to in thinking, writing, and speaking is English, which is not a language I use on rare occasions.

More generally, Aramaic was the common language of Jesus' native region (I'd have to double check, but off the top of my head I believe I've read that the Jews made the switch to Aramaic as a native language c. 6th century BC), so He would have grown up speaking it. He could have also grown up speaking Greek (again, I myself was raised in two languages: English from my immediate family, Spanish from my grandmother and at school), but there's no reason to think that Aramaic was thereby rarely used. Rarely transliterated in the scriptures, sure, but that's a different matter, and I don't take that as evidence of anything in itself.

 

[archer75]

@dzheremi Thank you for the clarification. Now it all makes sense.

Certainly an interesting topic, especially for those of us who grew up being told there was NO WAY He spoke ANY Greek at all...

 

[Quid est Veritas?]

Right next to Galilee was the Decapolis, a league of 10 cities that were mostly Greek colonies. Jesus even went to some of them. In the 1st century there were lots of friction between the Greek speaking Jews, Hellenistai, and the Aramaic speaking Jews - which often manifested in pro-Roman vs pro-Parthian camps as to the High Priests just prior to Roman annexation.

The chance that Jesus spoke no Greek seems utterly implausible based on His biblical interactions and the mileau, but His home language was probably Aramaic. I would say this not only based on His name and those of His near relations, but because He came from a little backwoods town - larger places first adopt a language, and it takes a long time for it to diffuse to smaller ones. There was probably a sprachbund, with large-scale bilingualism though. The Gospels contain frequent Aramaicisms, where the Greek constructions are odd and point to an underlying Aramaic substratum - either as a Greek dialect that was adopted by previous Aramaic speakers or someone that had Greek as a second language and on occasion his Aramaic grammar slips through.

 

[Bob Crowley]

Good luck convincing the Protestants that the Popes are St. Peter's spiritual descendants if Christ was speaking Greek when He declared Peter the Rock.

 

[Bob Crowley]

I'm certainly not an expert on the languages of the time of Christ But I tend to go with Christ speaking Aramaic. He said Himself that He was only sent to the "lost children of Israel", that is, Jews, most of whom in the area where he lived would have spoken Aramaic.

What Language Did Jesus Speak? | Zondervan Academic

There are two reasons most scholars believe Aramaic was the primary language of Jesus’s time—and the language Jesus spoke:

1. The overwhelming majority of documents and inscriptions recovered from the era are in Aramaic. Although documents do exist in Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and other languages, they are a minority. And even though many religious texts are in Hebrew (for example, of the Dead Sea Scrolls, 15% are in Aramaic, 3% are in Greek, and the rest in Hebrew), most nonreligious texts—contracts, invoices, ownership claims, and other kinds of ordinary communication—are in Aramaic. Moreover, of the Hebrew inscriptions found, almost all have been found in and around Jerusalem and the Judean wilderness—and virtually none have been found in Galilee. If Hebrew was spoken regularly in ordinary conversation, there is little written evidence to support it.
2. The second, and perhaps most convincing evidence of Aramaic primacy is that the Hebrew Scriptures were being translated into Aramaic. There may be many reasons why the Scriptures were being translated, but the most likely one is the simplest: most ordinary people could no longer understand the Scriptures in Hebrew.

 

[Michie]

@archer75


It is truly remarkable how often people competent in relevant fields, but not technically "NT Specialists", easily spot the crass nature of "Modern Biblical Scholarship"... while the 'experts' are blind to it. Because, for the 'experts', their livelihood and academic standing depend upon acceptance of all the accumulated claptrap. 'Experts' have their 'academic periodicals', their societies, their conferences, acceptance of which binds them all together and relieves them of any obligation to take seriously any writer who doesn't swallow the main corporate conclusions of their narcissistic clerisy.

C S Lewis (Fernseed and Elephants) did an elegant (and hilarious) demolition of such 'Scholarship' to an audience of Anglican seminarians. He had, he said, been studying literary genres all his life; and what the Biblical 'experts' wrote about such things was nonsense.

Anthony Kenney, former Catholic Priest but for most of his life a secular and agnostic philosopher, demonstrated by stylometric analysis that (contrary to the certainties of the 'experts') all but one of the 'Pauline' letters really were by one writer.

Tom Skeat, an eminent Codicologist, showed grounds for thinking that it was in Rome around 100ish that the decision was made to acknowledge a Gospel Canon of Four Gospels. I do not know of any NT 'experts' who incorporated his findings into their accounts of the evolution of the NT Canon.

Bishop John ('Honest to God') Robinson, who had been a very 'liberal' academic all his life, wrote first On redating the New Testament and then The Priority of John, demolishing the theories, accepted as certainties among the 'experts', which dated the NT douments late. Something so subversive of the entire Modern Scholarly Consensus could never have been accepted for publication if Robinson had not for decades been very famous. It probably also helped that, when he wrote Priority, he was dying of cancer.

Professor Graham Stanton, having seen the little notebooks produced by planing wood which were used by the legionaries along Hadrian's Wall, expressed to me the opinion that the Lord's hearers might have jotted down verbatim what they heard him say in just such handy little notebooks ... ergo no need for any solution to the Synoptic Problem, because there isn't one.

Continued below.
Fr Hunwicke's Mutual Enrichment: Yet more Crass (2)

 

[philadelphos]

Dunno if you read, a couple of months ago, of some two-millennia-old Biblical fragments recently discovered in caves in the Judean deaert. One of them (Zechariah 8:16-17) was ... except for the Tetragrammaton ... written in Greek.

Amazing...

Times of Israel, Bible scroll fragments among dazzling artifacts found in Dead Sea Cave of Horror

The team has so far reconstructed 11 lines of Greek text that was translated from Zechariah 8:16–17, as well as verses from Nahum 1:5–6. They join nine, much more extant fragments that were discovered by Yochanan Aharoni, who first surveyed the Cave of Horrors in 1953. On the new fragments, as well as in the Greek translation scroll discovered by Aharoni, only the name of God appears in Hebrew. It is written in the Paleo-Hebrew script used during the First Temple period...

 

[Bob Crowley]

I'll stick with the surmise that Christ spoke Aramaic.

Christ probably knew enough Greek to use when he needed to, and when Pilate was speaking to him at his trial, probably conversed in Greek, since he would most likely not have known Aramaic himself, and would have used Greek as the lingua fraca of the time, rather than the imperial Latin.

But Christ spent most of His time speaking to ordinary Jews. Secondly I fail to see why we should think Christ spoke Greek just so Fr. Hunwicke can pose a neat and tidy solution to the "synoptic problem".

English is the modern lingua fraca. Our archbishop spent some time in Rome and by his own account is a fluent Italian speaker, but he said he writes in schoolboy Italian. By the same token I wouldn't be surprised if English speaking Italians wrote in schoolboy English. If when he was in Rome our good archbishop decided to have a go at writing a fifth Gospel for Italians, I still think he'd have written it in schoolboy Italian, despite being having a much better grasp of written English to academic standard. He'd be speaking and writing for locals.

Later, to make it understandable to a wider audience, some Italian would translate it to into a schoolboy English version. And since the archbishop's first name is Mark, it would become the Gospel according to Mark II...

I get the impression that Mark and Mathew, if not Luke, were written in what might be called schoolboy Greek. But then I don't know a thing about the Greek language. I'm depending on what I would call the scuttlebutt of general church homilies and lectures.

The pro-Roman Jewish historian Josephus was a highly educated Jew, but he spoke Aramaic as his first language, and admitted he struggled with Greek.

What Language Did Jesus Speak? | Zondervan Academic

Evidence from Josephus
There is also a significant piece of evidence that shows Greek, although well-known as a secondary language, was not the primary or most-understood language of Jesus’s time. This evidence comes from Josephus, a well-educated Jew and a priest.

In his writings, Josephus frequently indicates that Greek wasn’t his original language. For example, although he translated his works into Greek and required help to do so. In The Wars of the Jews, he writes:

"I have proposed to myself, for the sake of such as live under the government of the Romans, to translate those books into the Greek tongue, which I formerly composed in the language of our country, and sent to the Upper Barbarians; I Joseph, the son of Matthias, by birth an Hebrew, a priest also, and one who at first fought against the Romans myself, and was forced to be present at what was done afterwards, [am the author of this work]... "

And in Antiquities, he also writes:

"For those of my own nation freely acknowledge that I far exceed them in the learning belonging to the Jews. I have also taken a great deal of pains to obtain the learning of the Greeks, and understand the elements of the Greek language, although I have so long accustomed myself to speak our own tongue, that I cannot pronounce Greek with sufficient exactness . .."

Harold Hoehner notes that even “Josephus, who had the educational opportunities, wrote his Bellum Judaicum in Aramaic and later translated it into Greek for the benefit of those under Roman rule; this he did with the help of assistants because his knowledge of Greek was inadequate.”6

From this, we can conclude that Greek wasn’t the first language of most first-century Jews. It would have been spoken only among the diaspora in Jerusalem; among those involved in international trade and commerce; and among the upper class and educated—such as Josephus. And of those who did understand Greek—again, like Josephus—it was often only as a second language.