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Did Jesus teach in Greek?
Most of the responses I have received to the suggestion that
Jesus taught in Greek ASSUME that his audience spoke almost
exclusively in Aramaic. The whole point here is not just that
Jesus knew and could have used Greek, but that his audience
knew and regularly used Greek. For example, one writer
said that the government could have used local translators
so that the people would not need to speak in Greek to them.
Again, this begs the question whether or not the common people
knew and used Greek. Porter makes a strong argument, I think,
that we should reevaluate that position. For example, he
notes that cemetary inscriptions are done in Greek in a very
large number of cases (enough so that it is not in the least
exceptional). If the common people did not use Greek
regularly, but instead clung almost exclusively to Aramaic,
why would they use Greek on funerary inscriptions? Why
would documents from the Bar Kochba rebellion be written
in Greek if it was only limited to government trasnactions?
I do apologize for lapsing and placing Aquila's Greek
OT prior to Jesus, when I know better than that. Still
the LXX did exist before Jesus and Jesus Palestinian
contemporaries seem to know it. Why, if Greek is only
used on a very limited basis. So I am not just saying
Jesus probably spoke Greek when his audience did not.
I'm challenging the unproven assumption that his
audiences almost exclusively used Aramaic.
Ken Litwak