Aramaic, Greek and daily life in Jesus's time

This article describes thinking that Aramaic was the sole language of Palestine as an American conceit. I think I'd expand on that to say that it is a native English speaker's conceit, since Brits tend to do it too: we forget how routinely multilingual many cultures have been and are. So it is good to be reminded of the situation in Palestine of the Roman Occupation (emphasis mine).

Aramaic would have been one of the daily spoken languages in first-century Palestine. It would have been commonly used in Jewish households and in the synagogues, for example. But Palestine in the first century was much like the same area of the world today—truly multi-cultural and multi-lingual. Someone walking down the street or in the marketplace in a city such as Jerusalem or Nazareth would have certainly heard Aramaic. But he would also have heard Greek, which was the lingua franca of the Mediterranean world in the first century. He may have heard Persian or Egyptian. He would probably have heard Latin, especially if he passed near some Roman soldiers. He may even have heard some Western European languages, depending on where the Roman soldiers were from. Daily conversations were a smorgasbord of languages.

In fact, given that Jesus hailed from Galilee 'of the gentiles' (so called because of a lot of gentile settlement) he would prabably have a good working knowledge of Koine Greek and, given his likely audience, may well have preached and taught from time to time in Greek -and or had simultaneous interpretation from his Greek-named Disciples.

There is a further issue here too: all this fixation on the Aramaic Jesus, as well as playing into a particular Ecclesiastical polity's interests, and into a particular brand of spirituality's attempts to reframe Christian faith in ways that would not have been recognised by Jesus's earliest followers, is actually potentially a kind of gnosticism, and I don't mean that favourably:

in the past century there has appeared on the religious scene a mindset that understanding Aramaic, because it was the language that Jesus spoke, will give someone special insight into the meaning of the New Testament. This is essentially a gnostic conceit. That is, the gnostics (an elastic term if there ever was one) were of the opinion that there was a secret knowledge that admitted one to truths inaccessible to the unwashed masses. This is wrong.

We forget that gnosticism was elitist, misogynist, body-hating and suspicious of sexuality and that 'orthodox' Christianity eschewed it because it was all of those things and in being so traduced the God who created and 'saw that it was good'.

Aramaic Thoughts with Benjamin Shaw on StudyLight.org: Filed in: Aramaic, Greek, Palestine, language, Jesus