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Aug 9, 2024 · Latin is in the Italic group of the Indo-European language family, first spoken by small tribes of people called the Latini who lived along the lower Tiber River. Called Latium, it was in this area that a small pastoral town in the hills would grow to become the capital of the vast Roman Empire.
Jan 11, 2022 · The Latin learning materials used were “Colloquia” (mostly useful dialogues and basic grammar). Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek and Latin were used during Jesus’ time ( cf. John 19:19, 20; Lk 23:38 ESV). So, Jesus was probably familiar with Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek. But, did he speak Latin at all? Let’s find out! Was Latin used as Soft Power?
May 27, 2014 · This is the language that Mel Gibson used for The Passion of the Christ, although not all the words could be found from 1st Century Aramaic, and some of the script used words from later centuries....
because Latin had become, in the course of the first centuries of our era, a Christian language: Latin had been modified and reinspired and loosed in the bosom of the Christian communities. It was inspired by the spirit of Christian faith and it was modified by the exigencies of Christian life
- Overview
- Jesus Was Likely Multilingual
- Alexander the Great Brought Greek to Mesopotamia
- HISTORY Vault: Jesus: His Life
While historians and scholars debate many aspects of Jesus' life, most agree on what language he mainly spoke.
While scholars generally agree that Jesus was a real historical figure, debate has long raged around the events and circumstances of his life as depicted in the Bible.
In particular, there’s been some confusion in the past about what language Jesus spoke, as a man living during the first century A.D. in the kingdom of Judea, located in what is now the southern part of Palestine.
The issue of Jesus’ preferred language memorably came up in 2014, during a public meeting in Jerusalem between Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, and Pope Francis, during the pontiff’s tour of the Holy Land. Speaking to the pope through an interpreter, Netanyahu declared: “Jesus was here, in this land. He spoke Hebrew.”
Francis broke in, correcting him. “Aramaic,” he said, referring to the ancient Semitic language, now mostly extinct, that originated among a people known as the Aramaeans around the late 11th century B.C. As reported in the Washington Post, a version of it is still spoken today by communities of Chaldean Christians in Iraq and Syria.
“He spoke Aramaic, but he knew Hebrew,” Netanyahu replied quickly.
Most religious scholars and historians agree with Pope Francis that the historical Jesus principally spoke a Galilean dialect of Aramaic. Through trade, invasions and conquest, the Aramaic language had spread far afield by the 7th century B.C. and would become the lingua franca in much of the Middle East.
In the first century A.D., it would have been the most commonly used language among ordinary Jewish people, as opposed to the religious elite, and the most likely to have been used among Jesus and his disciples in their daily lives.
But Netanyahu was technically correct as well. Hebrew, which is from the same linguistic family as Aramaic, was also in common use in Jesus’ day. Similar to Latin today, Hebrew was the chosen language for religious scholars and the holy scriptures, including the Bible (although some of the Old Testament was written in Aramaic).
Jesus likely understood Hebrew, though his everyday life would have been conducted in Aramaic. Of the first four books of the New Testament, the Gospels of Matthew and Mark records Jesus using Aramaic terms and phrases, while in Luke 4:16, he was shown reading Hebrew from the Bible at a synagogue.
Alexander the Great.
In addition to Aramaic and Hebrew, Greek and Latin were also common in Jesus’ time. After Alexander the Great’s conquest of Mesopotamia and the rest of the Persian Empire in the fourth century B.C., Greek supplanted other tongues as the official language in much of the region. In the first century A.D., Judea was part of the eastern Roman Empire, which embraced Greek as its lingua franca and reserved Latin for legal and military matters.
As Jonathan Katz, a Classics lecturer at Oxford University, told BBC News, Jesus probably didn’t know more than a few words in Latin. He probably knew more Greek, but it was not a common language among the people he spoke to regularly, and he was likely not too proficient. He definitely did not speak Arabic, another Semitic language that did not arrive in Palestine until after the first century A.D.
So while Jesus’ most common spoken language was Aramaic, he was familiar with—if not fluent, or even proficient in—three or four different tongues. As with many multilingual people, which one he spoke probably depended on the context of his words, as well as the audience he was speaking to at the time.
The story of Jesus Christ through a unique lens—the people in his life who were closest to him.
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- Sarah Pruitt
Mar 22, 2023 · The majority of translations probably originated in North Africa around the end of the second century: the surviving evidence for each book appears to derive from a single initial version which underwent multiple subsequent revisions. Both the Old Testament and New Testament were based on Greek sources and preserve important ancient readings.
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There is solid evidence that the Jews still retained their use of Hebrew, but Aramaic and Koine were also spoken. Latin, too, appeared on official inscriptions of the Roman rulers of the land (Joh 19:20) and was doubtless heard from Roman soldiers stationed there. As to the language generally spoken by Jesus, see ARAMAIC; also HEBREW, II.
