Logical

"... Greek, a language that neither Jesus nor any of his disciples spoke or were able to write."
-- CNN Article

I find that claim to be surprising, given that Greek was a common second language in the region at the time, and given that some of the gospels were poorly written, indicating the Jewish authors' poor knowledge of the Greek language, which proves that they knew how to write in Greek, i.e. it was written by them, not a Greek person who knew the language well.

What do the scholars say about this claim?

ApostateAbe

Bart Ehrman tends to represent the consensus of opinions of critical scholars. He wrote an undergraduate textbook titled The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. On page 59 (of 3rd edition), he writes:

Moreover, we know something about the backgrounds of the people who accompanied Jesus during most of his ministry. The disciples appear to have been uneducated peasants from Galilee. Both Simon Peter and John the son of Zebedee, for example, are said to have been peasant fishermen (Mark 1:16-20) who were "uneducated," that is, literally, unable to read and write (Acts 4:13). Now it is true that the Gospels do not represent the most elegant literature from antiquity, but their authors were at least relatively well educated; they write, for the most part, correct Greek. Could two of them have been disciples?

Again, it is possible. Jesus and his apostles, however, appear to have spoken Aramaic, the common language of the Jews in Palestine. Whether they could also have spoken Greek as a second language is something scholars have long debated, but at the very least it is clear that Greek was not their native tongue. The authors of the Gospels, on the other hand, are absolutely fluent in Greek.

Maklelan

I don't have strong feelings either way, but here are some things to consider:

- Aramaic was the lingua franca for the common people of Judea and Galilee. Greek would have been more common among people who dealt with people from outside of Judea or otherwise engaged in business or government. This doesn't mean the commoner wouldn't have known Greek, but it would have been far less critical to their day to day subsistence.

- Jesus traveled between Galilee, the coast, and Judea, and seems to have been able to communicate with people with which he needed to communicate.

- The gospels were written decades after the fact, when Christianity was spreading throughout Asia minor and Italy. It's only natural to expect them to be written in Greek, and it's quite unlikely that any of them were written by the actual original disciples of Jesus.

- The gospels were not "poorly written," they just attest to a more provincial dialect that was quite distinct from the literary Greek of historians and philosophers. It's more basic and has some distinct rules of its own. It's not that they had "poor knowledge," they just didn't use literary Greek. This distinction between academic language and common language was and remains quite ubiquitous.

With that said, the conclusion that Jesus definitely didn't know Greek oversteps the evidence by quite a bit. I would say it's probably 60/40 that he knew some conversational Greek.

Doug Shaver

Spong is overstating the case. The evidence does not warrant such a categorical conclusion.

Assuming that Jesus really existed, it is likely that he knew no language but his native Aramaic, but there is no way we can be certain about that. The same goes for his disciples, though in their case the uncertainty is even greater. Most of them we know absolutely nothing about except their names, but if one of them actually was a tax collector, then the notion that he might have been at least conversant in Greek is hardly incredible.

stephan huller

A funny story about mistaking people's ability to speak another language. I went to a gifted school and my wife had to endure a party where everyone was bragging about their academic achievements so when the question came to her - 'how many languages do you speak?' - my wife felt compelled to exaggerate her abilities in Spanish. The person asking her the question was some blond haired blue eyed gringo. The next minute he's bombarding her with Spanish because he lived in South America for a few years. The point is you never know.

Steven Carr

I think the consensus among mainstream Biblical scholars is that a lot of Jews in the cosmopolitan city of Jerusalem spoke Greek, and that James the brother of Jesus would have had good reasons to learn Greek and would have been familiar with Septuagintal Greek.

I am getting this from Richard Bauckham.

So the disciples would have known Greek, but if something might be Aramaic that is a sign of authenticity.

Vorkosigan

How can anyone draw any conclusions about what languages the character of Jesus knew?

Next up: did Frodo know German?

No Robots

^Another barbed witticism from our man in the counter-revolutionary exclave.

Toto

It seems obvious that first of all, you reconstruct a historical Jesus. If you historical Jesus was a peasant revolutionary, as Crossan thinks, then he probably didn't speak Greek. If you historical Jesus was a more upscale type, maybe he did.

seyorni

You'd be surprised at the linguistic capabilities of "illiterate peasants." They often have a working knowledge of the languages of neighboring tribal groups, traders and the regional lingua franca, if any