Did Jesus Speak Greek?

Fitzmyer, Joseph A. Biblical Archaeology Review, Sep/Oct 1992, 58-63, 76-77.

The answer is almost certainly yes. The more difficult question, however, is whether he taught in Greek. Are any of the sayings of Jesus that are preserved for us only in Greek nevertheless in the original language in which he uttered them?

That Aramaic was the language Jesus normally used for both conversation and teaching seems clear. Most New Testament scholars would agree with this.27 But did he also speak Greek? The evidence already recounted for the use of Greek in first-century Palestine provides the background for an answer to this question. But there are more specific indications in the Gospels themselves.

All four Gospels depict Jesus conversing with Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect of Judea, at the time of his trial (Mark 15:2–5; Matthew 27:11–14; Luke 23:3; John 18:33–38). Even if we allow for obvious literary embellishment of these accounts, there can be little doubt that Jesus and Pilate did engage in some kind of conversation (compare the independent testimony in 1 Timothy 6:13, which speaks of Jesus’ “testimony” before Pilate). In what language did Jesus and Pilate converse? There is no mention of an interpreter. Since there is little likelihood that Pilate, a Roman, would have been able to speak either Aramaic or Hebrew, the obvious answer is that Jesus spoke Greek at his trial before Pilate.

The same might be suggested by Jesus’ encounter with the centurion (Matthew 8:5–13; Luke 7:2–10; John 4:46–53). Luke gives him the title hekatontarchos, which might well indicate that he was a Roman centurion, or at least in charge of a troop of Roman mercenaries in the service of Herod Antipas (perhaps that is why he is called basiliskos, “royal official,” in John 4:46). In any event, Luke 7:9 implies he is a gentile. In what language did Jesus speak to this first gentile convert? Most probably in Greek.

In Mark 7:25–30 Jesus, having journeyed to the pagan area of Tyre and Sidon, converses with a Syro-Phoenician woman. Though the indigenous population of that area undoubtedly spoke some Semitic language, either Phoenician or Aramaic (sister languages), the Marcan account goes out of its way to identify the woman as Helleµnis, “a Greek” (Mark 7:26). This too suggests that Jesus spoke to her in Greek.

Moreover, if there is any historicity to the incident in John 12:20–22 where “Greeks” (Helleµnes) come and want to see Jesus, and if he conversed with them, it must have been in Greek. The same might be suggested by John 7:35, where Jesus says that he plans to “go off” to him who sent him, and the Jews wonder whether he intends to go to “the Diaspora among the Greeks and teach the Greeks.” 

The evangelist presumably thought that Jesus would teach the Greeks in Greek.

Such hints in these stories about Jesus’ ministry suggest that he did on occasion speak Greek.

Moreover, these specific instances in which Jesus apparently spoke Greek are consistent with his Galilean background. In Matthew 4:15, this area is referred to as “Galilee of the gentiles.”28 Growing up and living in this area, Jesus would have had to speak some Greek. Nazareth was a mere hour’s walk to Sepphorisb and in the vicinity of other cities of the Decapolis. Tiberias, on the Sea of Galilee, was built by Herod Antipas; the population there, too, was far more bilingual than in Jerusalem.29

Coming from such an area, Jesus would no doubt have shared this double linguistic heritage. Reared in an area where many inhabitants were Greek-speaking gentiles, Jesus, the “carpenter” (tektoµn, Mark 6:3), like Joseph, his foster-father (Matthew 13:55), would have had to deal with them in Greek. Jesus was not an illiterate peasant and did not come from the lowest stratum of Palestinian society; he was a skilled craftsman. He is said to have had a house in Capernaum (Mark 2:15). He would naturally have conducted business in Greek with gentiles in Nazareth and neighboring Sepphoris. His parables reveal that he was familiar with Palestinian trade and government. His followers, especially the fishermen Simon, Andrew, James and John, would also have had to conduct their fishmongering in Greek with gentile customers.30 So Jesus almost certainly spoke some Greek.

The more difficult question is whether Jesus at times taught the people in Greek.

This question is especially important because, if the answer is yes, this opens the possibility that, in the words of A. W. Argyle, “We may have direct access to the original utterances of our Lord and not only to a translation of them.”31

Although Jesus probably did speak at least some Greek, it is unlikely that any of his preserved teaching has come down to us directly in that language.

Those who argue otherwise often begin by pointing out that no Christian documents are extant in Aramaic. Papias, a second-century bishop of Hierapolis in Asia Minor, maintained that Matthew had put together the logia, “sayings,” of Jesus “in the Hebrew dialect” (= Aramaic),32 but no one has ever seen them. More important, all four Gospels were composed in eastern Mediterranean areas outside of Palestine. That is why they are in Greek; they are the immediate products of a non-Palestinian Christian tradition, which has, however, many marks of its Palestinian, Semitic (especially Aramaic) roots.

Another point sometimes made by those who contend that Jesus taught in Greek is that a number of Jesus’ disciples had Greek names: Andrew, Philip and even Simon (a Grecized form of Hebrew Sðim‘ôn). Levi/Matthew, a toil-collector would have had to deal with people in Greek (Luke 5:27). Similarly, technical Greek names have crept into the Hebrew or Aramaic used by the upper classes—for example, sanhedrin, from Greek synedrion, for the Jewish judicial and legislative council. In addition, it is claimed that Greek terms used in the Gospels were supposedly retained because they were uttered in Greek. One example is epiousios, the bread for which Christians pray in the “Our Father,” which is usually rendered “daily” for want of a better analysis, but which even Origen recognized was a neologism.33 A second example is ho huios tou anthropou, usually rendered “Son of Man,” but which is a Greek barbarism. All of these features reveal only the influence of Greek language and culture on Palestinian Jewish life. They do not prove that Andrew, Philip or Levi normally spoke to Jesus only in Greek. As for the word epiousios, it creates such a problem that no one knows how to analyze it or translate it.

No little part of the problem in maintaining that Jesus’ utterances, preserved for us in the Greek Gospels, are in the language in which he uttered them is that they are not in word-for-word agreement in the Gospels themselves. How then are we to determine which form is original? Did Jesus recite the Our Father prayer with five petitions, as It is preserved in Luke 11:2–4, or with seven petitions, as it is preserved in Matthew 6:9–13? One could naively maintain that he uttered it both ways. But is such a solution, which is always possible, really convincing? The same would have to be said about the different forms of the words of eucharistic institution (Mark 14:22–24; Matthew 26:26–28; Luke 22:17–20). In all three Gospels, Jesus says of the bread that this is his body, but the words are not the same. In Matthew, he says, “Take, eat; this is my body”; in Mark, “Take; this is my body”; in Luke, simply, “This is my body.” In Matthew and Mark, Jesus tells those at the Last Supper to drink of the wine, which is his blood, but the precise words are different. If these utterances of Jesus were preserved in the original language, the first problem would be to decide which of the Greek forms of the sayings were original.

Some scholars have attempted to analyze some of the Greek words in which the sayings of Jesus have been preserved to show that this was indeed their original language. For example, the word hypokriteµs, “hypocrite,” is a compound Greek word (= Greek preposition Hypo, “under,” + the root krin-, “judge”), a form which is wholly lacking in Semitic languages. Hypokriteµs basically means “one who answers,” but it came to mean in classical and Hellenistic Greek not only “interpreter, expounder,” but also “orator,” and even an “actor” on a stage,34 one who spoke from behind a dramatic mask. From this use for a play-actor it came to mean “dissembler, pretender.” But Greek hypokriteµs has no counterpart in either Hebrew or Aramaic.35 However, this does not mean that Jesus’ original utterance was in Greek. Actually, the word hypokriteµs appears in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures known as the Septuagint (Job 34:30, 36:13), translating a Hebrew word h\aµneµph, which means a “godless or impious” person; so it already had some currency among Jewish speakers. Among Greek-speaking Jews of the Diaspora, hypokrisis, “hypocrisy,” has also been listed with terms for lying and deceit.36

Moreover, the word hypokriteµs never appears in John’s Gospel. In Luke it is used for “disciples” and other people, “the crowds” (Luke 6:17, 12:56). It appears frequently in the other two Gospels for the Pharisees (Matthew 7:5 = Luke 6:42; Mark 7:6 = Matthew 15:7; Luke 13:15; Matthew 6:2, 5, 16, 22:18, 23:13, 14, 15). Mark and Matthew have undoubtedly put on the lips of Jesus an opprobrious Greek term that they and their contemporaries had already begun to use of their Jewish opponents. We cannot conclude from such evidence that Jesus himself actually used the Greek term “hypocrite(s)” for the Pharisees or for anyone else.

A trenchant analysis by G. H. R. Horsley has convincingly shown that the Greek of the Gospels is not “Jewish Greek”;37 and yet it is Semitized enough to reflect a Palestinian matrix of the tradition that it enshrines.38 But there is no real evidence that it enshrines any didactic utterances of Jesus that he addressed to the crowds or to his followers in Greek. As Barnabas Lindars has remarked, “Careful analysis of the sayings shows again and again that the hypothesis of an Aramaic original leads to the most convincing and illuminating results.”39

Just as some scholars have attempted to show that some of Jesus’ teachings were uttered in Greek, others have tried to show—equally unconvincingly—that beneath his utterances is a Hebrew Vorlage (source).40 That Jesus at times used Hebrew is suggested by the Lucan version of his visit to the synagogue in Nazareth (Luke 4:16–19), where he is portrayed opening a scroll of Isaiah and finding a certain passage (Isaiah 61:1–2) and reading it. If that detail is considered historical, and not merely part of Luke’s programmatic scene, then Jesus would have read Isaiah in Hebrew.41 There is no mention of an Aramaic targum in this passage. So Jesus may be an example of a trilingual Palestinian Jew, capable of reading at least some Hebrew and of speaking some Greek, who normally used Aramaic as his dominant language.

It is important to keep in mind the three stages of the Gospel tradition. Stage I consists of what Jesus of Nazareth said and did during the approximate period between 1 and 33 A.D.; stage II consists of what the disciples and apostles taught and preached about him and his words and his deeds during the approximate period between 33 and 66 A.D. Stage III consists of what the evangelists sifted from that preaching and teaching and then redacted, each in his own way and each with his own evangelical purpose and literary and rhetorical style. This last stage occurred sometime between about 66 and 95 A.D. The canonical Gospels reflect stage III of the gospel tradition much more than stage I.

If we fail to keep this in mind, we fall into the danger of fundamentalism, of equating the Greek of stage III of the gospel tradition with its Aramaic stage I.

In short, what has come down to us about Jesus’ words and deeds comes in a Christian tradition that is in Greek. But Greek was not the form in which that tradition was originally conceived or formulated. None of the Gospels even purports to be a stenographic report or cinematographic reproduction of the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. The only thing that we are told that Jesus himself wrote, he wrote on the ground John 8:6–8)—and the evangelist took no pains to record it.

So the answer to the question, “Did Jesus speak Greek?” is yes, on some occasions, but we have no real record of it. Did Jesus teach and preach in Greek? That is unlikely; but if he did, there is no way to sort out what he might have taught in Greek from what we have inherited in the Greek tradition of the Gospels.

Footnotes:

a. See Pieter W. van der Horst, “Jewish Funerary Inscriptions,” in this issue.

b. See Richard A. Batey, “Sepphoris—An Urban Portrait of Jesus,” BAR 18:03.

Endnotes:

 27. See W. Sanday, “The Language Spoken in Palestine at the Time of Our Lord,” Expositor 1/7 (1878), pp. 81–99; “Did Christ Speak Greek?—A Rejoinder,” Expositor 1/7 (1878), pp. 368–388; A. Meyer, Jesu Muttersprache: Das galiläische Aramäish in seiner Bedeutung für die Erklärung der Reden Jesu (Leipzig: Mohr [Siebeck], 1896); Gustaf Dalman, The Words of Jesus Considered in the Light of Post-biblical Jewish Writings and the Aramaic Language (Edinburgh: T & T. Clark, 1902); Jesus-Jeshua: Studies in the Gospels (London: SPCK, 1929; repr. New York: Ktav, 1971), p. 1037; Friedrich Schulthess, Das Problem der Sprache Jesu (Zurich: Schulthess, 1917); Charles C. Torrey, Our Translated Gospels (New York: Harper & Row, 1936); André Dupont-Sommer, Les Araméens (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1949) 99, Matthew Black, “The Recovery of the Language of Jesus,” NTS 3 (1956–57) 305–13; Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967); A. Diez Macho, La lengua hablada por Jesucristo, 2nd ed., Maldonado 1 (Madrid: Fe católica, 1976); Paul Kahle, “Das zur Zeit Jesu gesprochene Aramaïsch: Erwiderung,” Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft (ZNW) 51 (1960), p. 55; E.Y. Kutscher, “Das zur Zeit Jesu gesprochene Aramaisch,” ZNW 51 (1960), pp. 46–54; H. Ott, “Um die Muttersprache Jesu: Forschungen seit Gustaf Dalman,” Novum Testamentum (NovT) 9 (1967), pp. 1–25; J. Barr, “Which Language did Jesus Speak?—Some Remarks of a Semitist,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 53 (1970–71), pp. 9–29; Barnabas Lindars, “The Language in Which Jesus Taught,” Theology 86 (1983), pp. 363–365.

28. However, in Isaiah 9:1 the phrase (gelîl haggôyim) is used as a description of “the land west of the Jordan,” northern Galilee, inhabited by pagans even in the time of the eighth-century prophet. Whether that is a stringent argument for that area in first-century Palestine is not apparent. J.M. Ross, who maintains that Greek was widely used in lower Galilee, doubts that it was true of northern Galilee (Irish Biblical Studies 12 [1990], p. 42).

29. See Sean Freyne, Galilee from Alexander the Great to Hadrian 323 B.C.E. to 135 C.E..: A Study of Second Temple Judaism (Notre Dame, IN: Univ. Of Notre Dame; Wilmington, DE: Glazier, 1980), pp. 101–154.

30. See J.A.L. Lee, “Some Features of the Speech of Jesus in Mark’s Gospel,” NovT 27 (1985), pp. 1–36. The abundance of parataxis in this early Gospel is often invoked as evidence of the influence of Aramaic.

31. Argyle, “Did Jesus Speak Greek?” ExpTim 67 (1955–1956), p. 93.

32. Papias, quoted in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.39.16.

33. See my commentary, The Gospel According to Luke, Anchor Bible 28, 28a (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981, 1985), pp. 904–906.

34. Pindar, Fragments, 140b; Aristophanes, Wasps 1279; Plato, Republic 2.373b.

35. Argyle, “‘Hypocrites’ and the Aramaic Theory,” ExpTim 75 (1963–1964), pp. 113–114.

36. Testament of Benjamin 6:4–5; Psalms of Solomon 4:6; 2 Maccabees 6:25.

37. G.H.R. Horsley, “The Fiction of ‘Jewish Greek,’” New Documents Illustrating Early Christianity, 5 vols. (North Ryde, N.S.W., Australia: Macquarie Univ., 1981–1989), 5.5–40. But that fiction is often repeated; e.g. Ben Zion Wacholder, Eupolemus: A Study of Judaeo-Greek Literature (Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College, 1974), p. 256: “In the Gospels Jesus speaks Judaeo-Greek.”

38. See Klaus Beyer, Semitische Syntax im Neuen Testament: Band I, Satzlehre Teil 1, 2nd ed., Studien zur Umwelt des Neuen Testaments (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1968); A. Ceresa-Gastaldao, “Lingua greca e categoric semitiche del testo evangelico,” Storia e preistoria dei Vangeli (Genoa: Universita di Genova, Facolta di lettere, 1988), pp. 121–141; Elliott C. Maloney, Semitic Interference in Marcan Syntax, Society of Biblical Literature Dissertation Series 51 (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1981).

39. Lindars, “The Language in Which Jesus Taught,” Theology 86 (1983), p. 364.

40. See Harris Birkeland, The Language of Jesus, Avhandlinger utgitt av Det Norske Videnskaps-Akademi i Oslo II. Hist-Filos. Klasse 1954/1 (Oslo: Jacob Dybwad, 1954). Cf. Jean Carmignac, The Birth of the Synoptic Gospels (Chicago: Franciscan Herald, 1987); Claude Tresmontant, The Hebrew Christ: Language in the Age of the Gospels (Chicago: Franciscan Herald, 1989). These claims have been adequately refuted by Pierre Grelot, L’Origine des evangiles: Controverse avec J. Carmignac (Paris: Cerf, 1986).

41. The text is composite, being a quotation of Isaiah 61:1a, b, d; 58:6d; 61:2a. It omits “to heal the broken-hearted” (61:1c) and “the day of vengeance of our God” (61:2b). As such, it is scarcely derived directly from the Hebrew or the Septuagint.