Mystery:Did Jesus Teach in Greek?

Jesus is quoted in the Gospels as teaching in Greek, but occasionally saying speaking in an instinctive or emotional way in Aramaic. His statements in western Aramaic (associated with the region of Galilee) include:

• Talitha cum, which means, "Little girl, get up!" (Mark 5:41)
• Abba ("Father"; Mark 14:36; Gal.4:6; Rom.8:15)
• Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani ("My God, my God, why have you forsaken me"; Mark 15:34); Cephas ("Peter"; John 1:42)
• Mammon ("Wealth"; Matt.6:24, RSV); Raca ("Fool"; Matt. 5:22, RSV).

But Greek was a far more powerful language than Aramaic for conveying theological or philosophical concepts. Greek was commonly spoken by Jewish people in Palestine, due to the conquest by Alexander the Great; Greek was widely used in Jewish ossuaries to bury the dead. Commerce took place often in Greek, and Jesus had been in business as a carpenter. So Jesus almost certainly knew the language well.

Several of the key terms, such as Jesus' criticism of the Pharisees as "hypocrites", is derived directly from Greek without any comparable term in Aramaic or Hebrew. Several of the Apostles had Greek names (e.g., Andrew and Philip), although others, like John, Bartholomew, Matthew, and Thomas, had Aramaic or Hebrew names.

There has been no discovered book in the New Testament written in Aramaic or Hebrew that predates the Greek versions. The Gospel of John even seems to take advantage of the Greek "Socratic method" in repeating questions and then providing the important information as answers to the questions. One website provides an interesting presentation of the view that Jesus taught in Greek.

The oldest manuscripts of the New Testament are in "biblical Greek," or "Koine Greek." Biblical Greek was a product of the confluence or combination of the Jewish and Greek cultures in Palestine in the 1st century A.D. The New Testament has 550 Greek words that scholars could not find anywhere else, until the spectacular discovery in the 1800s of Greek papyri manuscripts that had been preserved in the sand in Egypt. These manuscripts included all kinds of literary and legal documents, in Greek. Nearly all of the unusual New Testament Greek words were found used in ordinary writings in these manuscripts. After examining these Egyptian manuscripts, the preeminent German scholar Adolf Deissmann concluded what Christians had known all along: the New Testament was written in the Greek language of the common man in the 1st century A.D.

The Epistle to the Hebrews, however, is written in a magnificent, flawless Greek. See Mystery:Did Jesus Write the Epistle to the Hebrews?