Posted on 06/01/2014 6:27:38 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
He spoke with the Samaritan woman at the well. Who knows what language she spoke.
Interesting that the Mishnah, compiled a century or two after Jesus, is in Hebrew, not Aramaic.
The Gemara, commentary on the Mishnah compiled a century or two after the Mishnah, is indeed in Aramaic.
Jesus only spoke Latin in Passion of the Christ?
How can it be a myth invented to erase Jewishness when it is the claim that it was the language of the Jews at the time?
The wide-spread use of Aramaic by the Jews is attested by the Aramaic Targums. That the Jews at the time did spoke Aramaic rather than Hebrew should be no more disturbing than the fact that later eastern European Jews spoke Yiddish or that Jews today in America speak English. They are still Jews and Jesus is still a Jew regardless of what was the Jewish vernacular that he spoke.
Jesus only spoke Latin in Passion of the Christ?
No, I remember discussions of Aramaic when the movie came out.
The script was written in English by Gibson and Benedict Fitzgerald, then translated by William Fulco, S.J., a professor at Loyola Marymount University, into Latin, reconstructed Aramaic and Hebrew.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Passion_of_the_Christ
The Gemara, commentary on the Mishnah compiled a century or two after the Mishnah, is indeed in Aramaic.
Yes, but the Targumim were in Aramaic. It should not surprise that Hebrew was still being used as a religious and scholarly language alongside Aramaic as the vernacular. We see the same thing with the former use of Latin and Old Slavonic by Christians.
Here is the description at IMDB
What languages do the characters speak in the film?
Jesus and his disciples speak Old Aramaic, a Semitic language which was the daily speech of most Jews between 539 BC and AD 70. The Jewish authorities speak Hebrew, which at the time was only used for religious purposes. The Romans speak Latin (however, in the eastern Roman Empire, Koine Greek was also used.) The Gospels were written in Koine Greek, however, many Aramaic words and phrases appear, most notably “Abba”, “Mammon” and “Eli Eli lema sabachthani”.
So, you believe that there were Targums considered authoritative before the Mishnah was accepted?
The whole point of the Mishnah was to make it easier to learn and teach. Why not make it in Aramaic if it was the most common language? Why wasn’t it in Greek if the Septuagint was the accepted Bible?
We know the Gemara used the most common language of its day. Why the difference?
I don’t care what language Jesus spoke. For me I was disappointed that the Pontiff thought the security wall was there for the same reason the Berlin wall was put up by the Soviets.
Nothing could be further from the truth. For years Palestinian Arabs would enter Israel to blow themselves up or plant bombs to blow up buses and crowded places where Jews would be killed. Also many times if it was not a bombing they attacked with small arms and handguns.
The security wall is mostly fences, but in some particularly vulnerable places where attack before happened the Israelis have built concrete walls. These walls as Netanyahu pointed out to the Pontiff have saved thousands of lives both Jewish Israelis and Arab Israelis as well as Christians.
I would have thought a brilliant and worldly man that the Pontiff is would have not have realized that Israel lives in a dangerous neighborhood since 1948.
Scholars now acknowledge that Aramaic was the language of the upper crust.Can you provide a link? I have always read just the opposite: that Aramaic was the language in the rural, poorer areas.
I didn’t know he said that, so Israel didn’t build the wall to keep the Jews from fleeing to freedom, just like the border fence is not built to keep me and you from escaping to Mexico.
My understanding from New Testiment class is that Christ was at least tri lingual, Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. For example when He was examined by Pilate, there doesn't seem to be any indication of a translator. It's not impossible that Pilate knew Hebrew or Aramaic, but it's easier to believe that they both knew Greek.
Whether the Targums were considered authoritative or not is irrelevant. The fact is that there was a need from the first century B.C. for Aramaic paraphrases and explanations.
The whole point of the Mishnah was to make it easier to learn and teach. Why not make it in Aramaic if it was the most common language? Why wasn’t it in Greek if the Septuagint was the accepted Bible?
There is no contradiction in the use of a Hebrew Mishnah in a scholarly setting and an Aramaic Targum in a more common setting.
We know the Gemara used the most common language of its day. Why the difference?
The Gemara was used by rabbis. Thus it being in Hebrew is no more indicative of Hebrew being the common language of the Jews than Latin theological texts being indicative that Latin was the common language of Catholics. On my bookshelf I have a set of Latin seminary texts that were printed in 1936. I also have a set of Latin philosophy textbooks printed in 1919 "in usum adolescentium" (for the use of adolescents). Neither indicate that Latin was the common language of Catholics.
Gemara is in Aramaic.
Also, Jesus would have spoken hebrew to the lower classes.
Here is a very recent analogy: I lived in Czechoslovakia immediately after the fall of the Iron Curtain and then for another 6 or 7 years. Czech and Slovak are related languages in a very similar way to how Hebrew and Aramaic are related. They are mutually intelligible to anyone who follows them. As a concrete example, when that part of the world was still Czechslovakia, television programs in both languages were regularly broadcast. Czechs understood the Slovak programs and Slovaks understood the Czech programming, even though each who watched spoke his or her own mother tongue in everyday life.
I would suggest that the same was true of Hebrew and Aramaic. If millions of Czechs and Slovaks could regularly deal with both languages, even though one would be their default language, why would the people of 1st century Palestine be different?
Additionally, most Czechs and Slovaks learned Russian, a linguistically cognate language, in the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s. and understood it quite well. When the 2000’s dawned after to so-called Iron Curtain had fallen, many Czechs and Slovaks revealed that, because they had been listening to German TV and radio, they also understood German fairly well ... and their understanding would only get better.
What is the difference between Czech/Slovak versus Hebrew/Aramaic and then with the addition of Russian or German in the first instance and Greek (the language of the Hellenistic ancient world) in the second. All of this is rather simple to understand by way of modern analogy unless one insists on believing that those who lived a couple of thousand years before us were less intelligent than we ... something I find ludicrous.
That Jesus spoke Aramaic and, probably, Hebrew is a no-brainer. That he also understood and spoke Greek is probably a given. Such was the world in his time. Such is the world in our time if one happens to live in a “Palestine.” For the average citizen of Rome or Athens this may have been hard to understand, but for one who lived in Palestine - as with one who today lives in a Czechoslovakia, or a Belgium or a Liechtenstein - this is not hard to understand at all. It is in fact hard for them to understand how anyone would have trouble understanding.
Let's see how this nonsense works. The Palestinians swept down from Arabia in the 7th century and met... Palestinians.
Golly gee. Maybe Jesus was the first Nikolai Lenin type, too /sarc
But the fact that the Gemara is Aramaic makes it or its authors no less Jewish than the Mishnah. If the vernacular of Jesus and the Jews of his day was Aramaic they too would be no less Jewish. I do not understand this insistence that it must have been Hebrew.
I thought the Romans called it Syria.
In the movie, the Jews spoke Aramaic and the Romans spoke Latin, iirc.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.