Re Speaking in Other Tongues, April
There cannot be any doubt that the native tongue of a Galilean Jew of Jesus' time was Aramaic, the lingua franca of the Near East. The Gospels, however, have not come down to us in Aramaic. Gentiles wrote them or Hellenized Jews like Paul whose first or second language was Greek — the English of the Mediterranean world. Jesus could scarcely have conducted his ministry had he not mastered Greek as a second language. Indeed Greek was every non-Greek's second language.
Aramaic could be described as “Hebrew” because it had the same look and feel — same alphabet and similar vocabulary, orthography and grammar. By Jesus' time, Hebrew was a priestly and scriptural language, not a vernacular. Jesus, like every other rabbi, would have known and could have prayed the Psalms in Hebrew. The Gospels, for their part, are replete with Aramaic words and Aramaisms, so much so that their common source may have been a now lost Aramaic document.
As for “Pilate's famous INRI superscription upon the Cross,” its Latin text would have been transliterated into the two other alphabets — Greek and Hebrew — not translated into two other languages. As for the language of Peter, when in Rome Peter would have done what other non-Romans did — speak in the same Greek as the Gospels were written, and be understood by just about everyone.
