Originally posted by RJHindsquote:
This is news to me. I think I must agree with what is written in the big
square at the beginning of the article, especially on the language. There
is a lot of unverifiable speculation in the article. I think I will stick with
the more scholarly notion that Jesus spoke primarily Greek and Hebrew,
with a little Aramaic that he might have picked up.
"The Language of Jesus: Introducing Aramaic" is a brief introduction to general facts about the Aramaic language. Bible scholars have determined that Aramaic was the language spoken by Jesus Christ. This book lists the evidence from the Bible, archeology and other ancient records that have led them to this conclusion. Examining the words of Jesus in his native language gives us a deeper understanding of the Messiah and his message. "The Language of Jesus: Introducing Aramaic" serves an important introduction to Aramaic biblical studies and to the last surviving native speakers of the Aramaic language, the Assyrian Christians of Mesopotamia.
http://books.google.com/[WORD TOO LONG]
Originally posted by JS357Don't believe this propaganda.
quote:
"The Language of Jesus: Introducing Aramaic" is a brief introduction to general facts about the Aramaic language. Bible scholars have determined that Aramaic was the language spoken by Jesus Christ. This book lists the evidence from the Bible, archeology and other ancient records that have led them to this conclusion. Examining the words of Jesus in ...[text shortened]... us%22&hl=en&ei=TfIYTs-TDK_SiALeq7DRBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAQ
Originally posted by Conrau KI say he also spoke Greek. Is that authority enough for you?
The scholarly opinion is that Jesus spoke Aramaic. I have never heard any serious scholar suggest he spoke Greek. Perhaps he spoke Hebrew, clearly he was able to read biblical Hebrew if the gospels are reliable.
With regard to the Hebrew—
The original text (and Torah scrolls today) had no punctuation, no word/sentence breaks and essentially no vowels.*
—Despite Robbie’s comments on the Masoretes, theirs was an attempt to create a standard text, e.g., by devising a set of vowel-points. There is no reason to accept their standardization as anything other than a beginning from which all the (continuing) wide-ranging rabbinical permutations remain valid. And it seems that a majority of Jews do not. It's useful for learning a standard pronunciation.
It is the attempt to honor the original text that rabbinical exegesis (including in the Talmud and the Kabbalah) insists on a “hermeneutic of openness”. The notion of a closed, singular, definitive (and doctrinally required) reading of the Torah is rejected as a form of idolatry (an “idolatry of the one right meaning”, as one scholar put it—Marc Alain Ouaknin, if I recall rightly). There is a kind of “apophatic limit”, in that, for example, a polytheistic reading would be rejected (non-dualist readings are, however, as opposed to dualist-theistic readings, are not rejected).
People who quote the Talmud as some kind of singular, defining reading of Torah do not, simply, understand Talmud either. When Jews study Torah/Talmud, they—argue; that is the traditional form of study, not rote learning. And agreement at the end is not required.
Needless to say, this is an ancient paradigm that is so different from that of (most) Christianity that (most) Christians “get it” even less than a narrowly dogmatic logician (who thinks that all discourse should be logical) might “get” poetry. To someone who wants their religion to entail rigorous, known, and set-for-all-time propositions—well, that is not Judaism (with perhaps some fringe exceptions), and never was. This is not to argue anything contra Christianity, per se; it is just to say that whatever early Christians understood about the Judaism of the “dual Torah” that as already the majority Judaism at the time of Jesus,** seems to have been mostly forgotten over time . . .
I wrote tons about this on here in the past; and this is just a recap. For those who want to understand more, the rabbinical dictum (from Hillel) is: “Go and study”.
__________________________________________________
* There were consonants that could be used as vowels: yod (y), he (h), vav (v); as vowels, yod becomes “ee”, he becomes “ah”, and vav becomes “oh” or “oo”. Interestingly, the divine “name”—YHVH—could be all vowels, and pronounced something like “ee-ah-oh-ah”—Eeyaoah. One can see how this could become something like “Yahowah” (a number of Hebrew scholars reject the “Yahveh” pronunciation on the grounds that “veh” is not a known syllable in classical Hebrew).
** The oral part was still strictly oral. Reducing the Oral Torah to writing in the Talmuds was done for the purpose of preservation—it in no way put an end-point on the continuing dynamic of the Oral Torah, which continues to this day.