Did Jesus Speak Greek?

This is an excursus to the first article in this series, Greek in Church History. It does not belong to the article, but it answers an objection the first article may raise for some readers. That chapter opens with three words: “Jesus spoke Greek.” For a lot of Christians, that sentence contradicts their expectation that Jesus spoke Hebrew or Aramaic. So before we turn to the benefits of knowing Greek, I wanted to provide a response to this and similar objections.

Jesus spoke Aramaic

Unlike many Western Christians who only speak one language, Jesus was probably multilingual, using Greek, Aramaic, and likely Hebrew on a near-daily basis. Therefore, any objections to the effect of “I believe Jesus spoke Aramaic” or “Jesus spoke Hebrew” are also correct. We see that the Gospels preserve Aramaic words on Jesus’ lips, most famously the cry from the cross, Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani (Mark 15:34, actually an Aramaic rendering of a Hebrew text). Nobody who reads the Gospels carefully should doubt that Aramaic was a language Jesus spoke and used regularly.

But the question raised by the history of the Greek language is not whether Jesus spoke Aramaic. It is whether he also spoke Greek. We have already traced what first-century Palestine looked like in linguistic terms. Herod the Great had made Greek the official language of government more than thirty years before Jesus began his ministry. The trade routes through Galilee brought Greek-speaking merchants and travelers from across the empire into regular contact with the locals. Most Jews in the diaspora, and many in Israel itself, worshipped in synagogues that read the scriptures in Greek. The disciples quoted the Septuagint. Paul engaged Greek philosophers in Athens in their own language and drew on Greek poets to make his argument. The New Testament itself was written entirely in Greek. The Greek language was not a secondary language in the first century but a primary one, probably used even more widely and regularly in Palestine than Hebrew.

Aramaic was the home language. Hebrew was the language of the Jewish scripture and the synagogue (at least in many synagogues throughout Israel). Greek was the language of commerce, government, and the wider world. It is true that Jesus spoke Aramaic. To say he therefore did not speak Greek is a non sequitur. Multilingualism in first-century Palestine was not the exception but the norm.

What about an Aramaic Gospel?

A related argument deserves brief attention here, because it follows naturally from the “Jesus spoke Aramaic” position. Some argue that certain Gospels, particularly the Gospel of Matthew, were originally written in Aramaic or Hebrew. Following this, some argue that our Greek New Testament is merely a translation, and somewhere there may exist (or may once have existed) a more original and more authoritative text in a Semitic language.

The only ancient evidence for this position comes from Papias, a church father of the early second century, as quoted by Eusebius. Papias wrote that Matthew composed his account “in the Hebrew dialect.” That single second-hand reference constitutes the total extant body of evidence that a Semitic Gospel of Matthew once existed. There are no manuscripts of such a text. No church father quotes from one. No ancient writer claims to have read one or translated from one. The church, from its earliest period, received, copied, and preserved the Greek Gospel of Matthew as the canonical text, along with the other Gospels.

Even if, for argument’s sake, Matthew wrote an early Aramaic account of the Gospel for a Jewish audience, the version the church has always recognized as inspired and authoritative is the Greek one. The Greek Matthew is what God preserved. It is what the early church copied, circulated, read, debated, and staked its life on. The absence of any Semitic manuscript, combined with the universal witness of the patristic church to the Greek text, means there is no responsible basis for treating the Greek Matthew as a translation in need of correction from a lost original.

Personally, I think it is plausible that Matthew wrote an Aramaic version. But even so, it remains difficult to argue that a later Greek edition is a “translation” and therefore inferior. A multilingual person doesn’t need to “translate” from one language to another. Matthew was quite likely able to express himself naturally in Greek and expand on what he wrote in the earlier Aramaic version as he saw fit. So, even if an earlier Aramaic version was written, it is likely not as complete as the later Greek edition and was certainly not preserved by the early church as authoritative and inspired.

Therefore, the Greek manuscripts we have of the Gospel of Matthew should be regarded as the authoritative representation of Matthew’s work. The Greek version of Matthew (and other Gospels) has been preserved by the church because the church considered them inspired or having their source in the Spirit of God through the hand of Matthew (2 Peter 1:20-21). To argue that an Aramaic version of any gospel is worth seeking or prioritizing contradicts the church’s established canon throughout church history and lacks any basis of evidence.

What the first chapter actually claims

To put it plainly: the first chapter’s opening sentence, “Jesus spoke Greek,” is not a claim that Greek was the only language Jesus spoke, or even His primary language, or the language of his private prayer and family conversation. It is a claim that Greek was sufficiently established in the world he inhabited that he almost certainly spoke it. It is, in any case, a subordinate point. The chapter’s argument does not turn on the language of Jesus’ inner life. The argument is that the language of the first century and the New Testament is Greek, and that Greek shaped the language, culture, and life of the first centuries of church history. Recovering this heritage is a powerful antidote to many of the challenges that arise from reading and studying scripture through an exclusively twenty-first-century lens, and it provides many benefits to Christians and the church. Those benefits are the subject of the next chapter in this series.