THE LANGUAGE SPOKEN BY CHRIST

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Tuesday, November 18, 1884

FromAdvent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. 61, No. 46

THE LANGUAGE SPOKEN BY CHRIST.

It is a much discussed question as to what language was spoken by Christ; whether it was the Greek or the Hebrew or the Aramaic. The whole problem hangs together with the question as to what language was spoken in Palestine in the days of our Lord. The natural conservatism of the people, as well as the sacred character of the ancient Hebrew, would certainly influence the people to retain, as far as possible, that venerated idiom. Professor Delitzsch, in his little, but remarkably rich, pamphlet, entitled “The Hebrew New Testament of the British and Foreign Bible Society,” which he published (in English) as a sort of companion tract to the fifth and stereotyped edition of his New Testament, touches this point in the following words:—

“A friend of mine does not cease to entreat me to translate the New Testament into the Aramaic idiom which was spoken in Palestine in the days of Christ and his apostles; that is, into the language of the Palestinian Talmud and the Palestinian Targums. But his desire rests on an illusion. The Hebrew remained, even after the Exile, the language of Jewish literature. The Ecclesiasticus of Jesus Sirach was written in Hebrew, as its fragments in the Talmud show. The original of the first book of the Maccabees, and of the so-called Psalter of Solomon, was Hebrew. The inscriptions on coins, the epitaphs, the liturgic prayers, were Hebrew. The form of the laws was Hebrew, as appears from the codification of the Mishna. Also the book in which, as Papias says, Matthew had collected the sermons of the Lord, was written in the ‘Hebrew dialect.’ It is true that ‘Hebrew’ and ‘Chaldee’ were not accurately distinguished. Nevertheless it is quite unlikely that Matthew wrote in Aramaic; for the Aramaic was the language of daily life, the vulgar language, in which the people and also the learned were wont to converse and to hold controversies; but ἡ Ἑβραῖος διάλεκτος, in which St. Paul was accosted by the exalted Saviour (Acts 26:14), and in which he himself addressed the people of Jerusalem (Acts 21:40; 22:2), was the holy language, the language of the temple worship, of synagogical and

domestic prayer, of all formulas of benediction, of the traditional law; further, the parables, the animal fables, the lamentations for the dead, the Talmuds and Midrashim are mostly Hebrew; the holy languages continued to be the language of the higher form of speech; even the popular proverbs were only partly Aramaic. . . . The Shemitic woof of the New Testament Hellenism is Hebrew, not Aramaic. Our Lord and his apostles thought and spoke, for the most part, in Hebrew. Aramaic was understood only by a small part of the Diaspora.”

The little pamphlet of Delitzsch must be studied by all who are interested in Hebrew Syntax. It abounds in excellent points.—Independent.

Upon the same subject the Christian at Work, of Nov. 6, 1884, has the following:—

“The question is an interesting one, and has generally been answered one way; it is claimed that he spoke Aramaic. Our esteemed contemporary, the Advance, returns this answer to an inquiring correspondent, and assigns as its reason, ‘We know that He spoke Aramaic as we know that Bunsen spoke German and Talleyrand French, because it was the language of his countrymen.’ Herzog and the Encyclopædia Britannica are quoted in support of this view, likewise McClintock and Strong, though the latter can scarcely be considered as authorities. But our contemporary further quotes Herzog as follows—italics our own:—

“‘After the exile, Aramaic gradually became the language and the conversation of the people, and finally the written language of Judea. This language is called Hebrew in the New Testament. Acts 21:40; 22:2.’”

“And this from the Britannica:—

“‘The substitution of Aramaic for Hebrew, as the vernacular of Palestine, was completed before the time of Christ; and it is this dialect (not the language of the Old Testament Scriptures) which is designated in the New Testament as Hebrew.’”

The Christian at Work here quotes the opinion of Prof. Franz Delitzsch as given above from the Independent, and concludes as follows:—

“Who shall decide when the doctors disagree?—In the absence, though, of proof to the contrary, we may venture the opinion that Christ neither spoke all Aramaic nor all Hebrew. His words to the damsel, ‘Talitha cumi,’ are Aramaic, as they naturally would be; and one may believe that in addressing the common people Christ used the common language—Aramaic. On the other hand, whatever he said to the Sanhedrim, the Scribes, the Elders, the learned, would certainly be spoken in Hebrew. For one thing, we greatly doubt the correctness of the statement put forth in Herzog and the Britannica, and quoted by the Advance, that the ‘Hebrew tongue’ of the New Testament (Acts 21:40; 22:2) was not Hebrew but Aramaic. This seems entirely gratuitous. What proof is there that Aramaic was meant when the Jewish writers had proper and distinct word equivalents for each (Aramith and Hebraia)? Why, if Paul spoke in Aramaic, would it not have been so stated, and why, let us ask, would they have ‘kept the more silence’ at hearing their own common idiom? Is not this expression strongly indicative of the fact that Paul spoke in ‘the holy language of the temple worship’—a language sacred to them as used by God himself;—would they not naturally ‘keep the more silence,’ give him their respectful and stilled attention? As Christ used Hebrew on the cross, we believe he loved to use it—the hereditary language of his people—in speaking to his disciples and to the learned men of his day. We know that the great mass of commentators are united in the opinion that Paul spoke in Aramaic to that perturbed congregation of Jerusalemites. But we are mistaken if these opinions do not eventually have to give way. And we have no doubt that later investigation and the test of riper scholarship will considerably modify the view so generally held, that Christ ignored his own native tongue,—that sacred language in which he himself addressed the Apostle Paul from out of the cloud, as the apostle took that eventful and never-to-be-forgotten journey to Damascus.”