What language did Jesus speak?

The words the Gospels kept

The four Gospels were written in Greek, the shared language of the eastern Roman Empire. But now and then they pause and leave a word in Jesus’s own tongue, usually with a translation for readers who did not know it. Mark does it most often.

Looking up to heaven, he sighed, and said to him, “Ephphatha!” that is, “Be opened!”

• Talitha cumi, “Girl, I tell you, get up!” to Jairus’s daughter (Mark 5:41).
• Ephphatha, “Be opened!” to a deaf man near the Sea of Galilee (Mark 7:34).
• Abba, “Father,” in his prayer in Gethsemane (Mark 14:36).
• Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” from the cross, quoting Psalm 22 (Mark 15:34).
• Cephas, “rock,” the name he gives Simon (John 1:42), and Boanerges, “Sons of Thunder,” for James and John (Mark 3:17).
• Corban, an offering vowed to God (Mark 7:11), and Mammon, wealth (Matthew 6:24).

People who spoke to him called him Rabbi, or Rabboni, “Teacher” (John 20:16). Golgotha, the place of a skull, is Aramaic too, as What does Golgotha mean? explains.

Why Aramaic?

Aramaic began among the Arameans of Syria and became the common tongue of the Assyrian and Persian empires, used in government from Egypt to the edge of India. Jews came home from the Babylonian exile speaking it, and parts of the Bible are written in it: Daniel 2:4–7:28 and stretches of Ezra. By Jesus’s day it was the language of home in Galilee and Judea. His own name in it, Yeshua, is the subject of What was Jesus’s real name? Galileans even had an accent. In the high priest’s courtyard, bystanders catch Peter out by it.

Surely you are also one of them, for your speech makes you known.

Hebrew for Scripture

Hebrew had not died. It was the language of the Torah and the prophets, of prayer, and of most of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Luke shows Jesus standing up in the Nazareth synagogue to read from the scroll of Isaiah (Luke 4:16–20), and he argues Scripture with scribes who knew it in Hebrew. Later Jewish sources describe synagogue readings followed by an oral Aramaic translation, a targum (Mishnah, Megillah 4:4). A Galilean villager could live in both languages at once. Confusingly, the New Testament sometimes says “Hebrew” when it means Aramaic, as when John calls Golgotha a Hebrew name.

Greek, and a little Latin

Galilee was ringed by Greek-speaking cities, and Sepphoris, which Herod Antipas was rebuilding, lay an hour’s walk from Nazareth. Jesus talks with a woman Mark calls “a Greek, a Syrophoenician by race” (Mark 7:26), and with Pilate, with no interpreter mentioned. Many scholars think he had working Greek; how much is debated. Latin was the language of Roman law and the army, and over the cross Pilate posted the charge in all three tongues of the city.

it was written in Hebrew, in Latin, and in Greek.

Aramaic today

Aramaic never died either. A later form of it, Syriac, is still a language of worship in several Eastern churches, and modern Aramaic dialects are spoken by Assyrian and Chaldean Christians and in Maaloula, a village in the mountains north of Damascus. When Mel Gibson filmed The Passion of the Christ in 2004, he had the actors speak Aramaic, Latin and Hebrew, with subtitles.