From: Steven Cox (scox@ns1.chinaonline.com.cn.net)
Date: Thu Dec 18 1997 - 10:15:48 EST
I'm very grateful to Brian, Edgar, Peter, Neil, for
comments. I suppose it was asking a bit much to expect
an atlas for a "dead" language of the same kind that
exists for, say, German (dtv Sprachatlas etc.)
Thanks
Steven
I'll post below a post I recieved off b-greek because
the comments relating to different cities might make
a start on a geographical distinction:
<quote>
At one time it was thought that the normative language of Palestine at
the time of Jesus was Aramaic, that Greek was used when dealing with
Romans and other foreigners, and that Hebrew was hardly used at all.
This picture seems to have changed because of archaeological evidence.
For example, there are large theatres in several ancient towns in the
area (eg. Beth Shen, Sepphoris, Caesarea). These are enormous with
several thousand seats each (5,000 in Sepphoris); for them to be
economic most of these seats would need to be filled on a regular basis.
As almost all plays in the time were written in Greek, this suggests
that a large number of locals were competent enough in Greek to
understand a play in the language. The Dead Sea Scrolls contain MS in
Greek.
<quote>
I read an article on this in either Biblical Archaeology Review or Bible
Review a couple of years ago. It summarized a lot of the research on this
issue and would be a useful start if anyone wanted to study this question
further. The conclusion, if I remember it correctly, was that Jesus spoke
Greek most of the time.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sat Apr 20 2002 - 15:38:38 EDT