It is normally thought, certainly was by Mel Gibson, that Christ spoke Aramaic, the Semitic tongue believed to have displaced Hebrew as the Jewish vernacular. Latin is usually ruled out. It was used in the East mainly for administrative purposes; the Romans never forced it on their subjects — hence the bad grammar joke in Monty Python's Life of Brian.
The King James Authorised Version misleads when (in Acts) it refers to Jupiter, Mercury, and Diana: the Greek naturally has Zeus, Hermes, and Artemis. Yet, Jesus and Pilate converse easily in John 18. Had Pilate acquired Aramaic? Or Christ some Latin? Or was Greek the East's common tongue (Koine)?
Those who deny Greek to Jesus usually adduce the historian Josephus' (Jewish Antiquities) difficulties with that language. Augustine (Confessions) had similar problems. Still, their troubles prove nothing about Jesus. I don't say he preached regularly in Greek. But he might have varied according to audience. One certainly wonders what tongue he used with the Hellenic woman whom he (Mark 7) healed.
Hebrew presents big, unacknowledged problems. When Jesus appeals to Old Testament texts, he might mean the Targums, i.e. Aramaic paraphrases or translations. John (5, 19) thrice gives definitions of place names “in the Hebrew tongue.” Moderns (e.g. the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church; G. Moulton's Manual Greek Lexicon of the New Testament) assert that Hebrew here means Aramaic.
Does their dictum also apply to Acts 22 where God speaks to Saul on the Road to Damascus and Paul preaches at Jerusalem, both occasions “in Hebrew?” When God tells Saul (Acts 26), “It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks,” he is borrowing a verse from Euripides (Bacchae 795).
These same moderns say the only foreign words put on Jesus' lips in the Greek New Testament are Aramaic, instancing Mark 5, 7, 14, 15). We should note these all come at dramatic moments: the raising of Jairus' daughter; healing a deaf mute; Christ's appeal to God as 'Abba' beseeching “Take away this cup from me;” his dying “Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachththani.” However, John Allegro, a distinguished multi-linguist observes that Abba is not uniquely Aramaic.
Not forgetting, of course, that Christ's cry is a quotation from the opening of Psalm 22. Many will think a dying man's last words are likely to be in his native tongue or (not always the same thing) the language he most used. Furthermore, Matthew 27 and Mark 16 (Luke and John give different last words) say some of the crowd misunderstood his cry, thinking he was “calling upon Eli.” Were these ordinary Jews who did not understand Hebrew? Or foreigners ignorant of Aramaic? Or the Roman soldiers on duty who may only have known Latin?
Which brings us to Pilate's famous INRI superscription upon the Cross (Luke 24:28; John 19:19; no such detail in Matthew or Mark), said to have been written “in Greek, Latin and Hebrew” (Luke) and “in Hebrew and Greek and Latin”(John). Their different orderings deserve notice, especially given modern praise of Luke for his particular sensitivity to language differences.
This topic (Biblically writ large from Babel to the Gift of Tongues) recurs throughout Acts: Peter and John ridiculed as “unlearned” (4:13); Barnabas, a Cypriot Jew, was surely bi-lingual (4:36); polyglot disputes with Stephen (6:9); Philip the Deacon translates Isaiah for an Ethiopian official (8:27-32); some apostles preach only to Jews, others only to Greeks (11:19-21); Jews and Greeks simultaneously addressed at Iconium (14:6). Furthermore, what language did Peter communicate in at Rome? Beyond its Jewish community, no resident would know Aramaic or Hebrew; educated Romans knew Greek, ordinary ones only Latin.
