Jesus and Aramaic
B.A. in Applied Theology, Moorlands Bible College
Why did Jesus speak Aramaic instead of Hebrew?
That doesn't mean that this was the only language he spoke or understood, but it would have been very strange to spend most of his time walking around speaking a language (Hebrew) that the majority of people did not use in their daily interactions.If I’m a Catholic priest, who knows Latin fluently, I’m a real jerk if I walk around church speaking only Latin and insist on making you speak to me in Latin, especially since you and I both know I also know English. That is the equivalent of what speaking Hebrew in Judea and Galilee at the time of Jesus would have been.
At the time of Jesus, Hebrew, as a language, had largely been relegated to a ceremonial and religious language, not a language used by the people. It would likely be used in the temple, and for formal discourse, official proclamations, and some academic discussion among educated people, but in the street, it had been replaced by Aramaic a long time prior, with even some distinctive dialects among that language. Like Hebrew, Aramaic is a Semitic language with some similarities to others, but like Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, which likewise have shared origins, knowing one doesn’t automatically mean you’ll understand the other completely.
There is very good reason to believe koine Greek was spoken quite fluently too — Jerusalem and the surrounding area was under Roman rule at the time, and plenty of Greek speakers would have been in the area on official business, and there is good reason to believe that Jesus was at least conversational in this language too. Prior to beginning his ministry, Jesus almost certainly would have followed his Joseph into the family business as a carpenter. The word carpenter often has a pretty low-class connotation in our world, but in that time, a carpenter was likely to be a skilled and artisanal craftsperson. They would likely often be working with relatively well-off people who could afford such artisans, and would need to communicate with the at least middle-class, which would often be in Greek, and a large number of Roman public works took place in and around the area Jesus would have been working during his career, which would have required a lot of skilled craftspeople from all over the empire working together, with Greek probably being the unifying language in these environments.
We also know Jesus must have been fluent enough in Greek to be able to defend himself before Pilate without the need of a translator and spoke to several other officials who would have spoken Greek, and we never see this causing an issue for him, or them. We also see him make points based on idiosyncratic words or phrases which are from the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures [today commonly called the Septuagint] indicating that this translation [not the Hebrew original, or Aramaic translation] was the version he was using and familiar with at the time.
There is also some reason to believe Jesus was educated enough, possibly sitting under a local Rabbi, to know at least some ceremonial Hebrew. Compared to the surrounding area, Galilee was a well-educated enclave, with plenty of scholars and educators calling it home, and it seems reasonable even while he trained in his father’s craft, he would have also been drawn to religious education and discourse. When Jesus was left at the temple, he seems confused as to why this surprises his family, “Did you not know that I must be about "My Father’s business?” certainly seems to imply him studying and debating Scripture wasn’t an uncommon occurrence for him.
We see him read from the scroll in the temple which, while possible reading or quoting from the Greek translation, would likely have also at least included the Hebrew [or possibly Aramaic], and we see him having discourse and debate with the Rabbis and scholars in the temple who would have spoken Hebrew there too. Additionally, there are a number of places where Jesus uses words or phrases which seem in Hebrew to be jokes or wordplay, which don’t really translate well to Greek or Aramaic, and often in places where Jesus is rebuking the kind of religious people who would have understood Hebrew (e.g., Matthew 3:9)
It doesn’t seem unreasonable to suppose that Jesus didn’t exclusively speak, read and understand Aramaic, but the reason he mostly appeared to do so, was simply because that was the language most of the people he was interacting with used in their daily lives, and were most comfortable with.