What language(s) did Jesus speak?

ARAMAIC WATCH: Pope, Netanyahu spar over Jesus' native language.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Pope Francis and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu traded words on Monday over the language spoken by Jesus two millennia ago.

"Jesus was here, in this land. He spoke Hebrew," Netanyahu told Francis, at a public meeting in Jerusalem in which the Israeli leader cited a strong connection between Judaism and Christianity.

"Aramaic," the pope interjected.

"He spoke Aramaic, but he knew Hebrew," Netanyahu shot back.

[...]

They are probably both right. Jesus is quoted speaking Aramaic in the New Testament (and possibly Hebrew too). It is clear from the epigraphic evidence that Aramaic was the normal spoken language in first-century CE Galilee and the Dead Sea Scrolls attest to a literary use of Hebrew in Palestine in the first century. Whether a Galilean tradesman like Jesus spoke Hebrew is a more difficult question. My guess is that he probably did know it well enough to read the Hebrew Scriptures, but I can't prove it. There is very little first-century epigraphic evidence for the colloquial use of Hebrew in Palestine. The Bar Kokhba texts show that Hebrew was a spoken language in the early second century, but it is unclear whether this represents a long-term ongoing tradition of speech or a revival of Hebrew during the Bar Kokhba revolt. Ghil'ad Zuckermann says that the lower classes spoke Hebrew in Jesus' time, but there isn't any compelling evidence that this is so.

A few earlier posts on the languages Jesus spoke are here, here, and here.

UPDATE: R. Stephen Notley: Your Holiness, Bibi was right – Jesus spoke Hebrew! (The Times of Israel; HT Gerald Rosenberg). This requires some unpacking.

The inscriptional and literary evidence reflects a reality not unlike what we find with the Dead Sea Scrolls. Of the 700 non-biblical texts from the Qumran library, 120 are in Aramaic and 28 in Greek, while 550 scrolls were written in Hebrew.

No, unlike the ratios within the Dead Sea Scrolls (which belonged to highly literate people), the inscriptional (epigraphic) evidence for first-century Palestine gives us quite a bit of Aramaic but scarcely any Hebrew.

Jesus lived in a trilingual land in which Hebrew and Aramaic were widely in use. A relative latecomer, Greek was introduced in the 4th century B.C.E. with the arrival of Alexander the Great and his Hellenistic successors.

By the first century C.E. Aramaic served as the lingua franca of the Near East, and there is little question that Jesus knew and spoke Aramaic. Hebrew, on the other hand, was in more limited use as the language of discourse among the Jewish people.

Correct.

The New Testament presents Jesus knowledgeable of both written and spoken Hebrew.

He is portrayed reading and teaching from the Bible, and there are clear indications in these accounts that he used the Hebrew Scriptures.

Jesus is shown to be knowledgeable about the Hebrew Bible, but it's hard to say for sure if he knew it directly or via Aramaic paraphrases. In the episode in Luke 4:16-30 he is portrayed as reading directly from a scroll of Isaiah, which would have been in Hebrew, but this story is told only by Luke and we don't know if it has anything to do with the historical Jesus. As I said, I suspect he could read the Hebrew Bible, but I can't prove it.

In this he was not alone. We have not a single example of a Jewish teacher of the first century in the land of Israel teaching from any other version of the scriptures than Hebrew.

We don't have anything remotely resembling a comprehensive knowledge of Palestinian Jewish teachers in the first century, so this doesn't prove much of anything. Both Paul and Josephus were Palestinian Jews and they knew and used the Greek Bible as a matter of course, albeit when living outside Palestine. And there is an Aramaic targum of the biblical book of Job among the Dead Sea Scrolls, so it's not hard to imagine people teaching from it.

In addition, Jesus is often described speaking in parables. These were delivered orally in popular, non-scholarly settings. They were also in Hebrew. Outside of the Gospels, story-parables of the type associated with Jesus are to be found only in rabbinic literature, and without exception they are all in Hebrew. We have not a single parable in Aramaic, so it seems that according to Jewish custom one did not tell parables in Aramaic. To suggest that Jesus told his parables in Aramaic is to ignore overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

The rabbinic parables were written down in the third century CE or later and one must make a careful stratigraphic argument to locate any Tannaitic rabbinic tradition in the first century. Some of them may well go back to the first century, but again, those are hardly a comprehensive collection. Given the paucity of our evidence, these arguments from silence that such and such is not attested in first-century Palestine do not have much force.

I think Jesus probably did know Hebrew, but let's not draw more confident conclusions than our evidence warrants.

UPDATE (4 June): More here.