[MarkBsnr]

It would have been Greek that was limited to elites, normal folk used Aramaic or Hebrew. Probably the Romans ended the use of Hebrew publicly as a reaction to the Bar Kochba rebellion.

I would use the agument that the NT was composed entirely in Greek (thus making it available for the literate Jews) as well as the Septuagint (also in Greek) which showed that the lingua franca of the region was not Hebrew.

[jjotto]

Yes, that seems a good argument, but Yiddish and Ladino were used by exiled Jewish communities long after this point in time, and they include much Hebrew, little Aramaic and almost no Greek (’Sanhedrin’ is a great example).

And the fact remains that literate Jews on the whole were unimpressed with the Greek books. Perhaps the prominence of the Greek-speaking Jews of Alexandria have skewed the history of the Land of Israel.