Did Christ Teach in Greek?

( Christ's Words" website)

Christ taught in Greek. The Greek of Christ's words in the Gospels is no different than the Greek of
the rest of the New Testament: the original words of the people involved. In other words, we
believe that the Greek in which we read Christ's words is not a translation from the Aramaic, as
most scholars claim. The Greek is the original spoken words of Christ. We believe that these exact
words were either written down at the time or remembered extremely accurately by those who
heard Christ speak. Just as the Greek of Paul's letters are not a translation, but what he actually
wrote and meant to say to the Greek speaking churches to which he wrote, Christ's words are not a
translation but what he really said in the language the people of his time commonly spoke in
public.
The Bias for Aramaic
Most academics believe that the Jews and other people in the area spoke Aramaic in Christ's era.
They claim that it was the common language of the Eastern Mediterranean before and after the
Assyrian, Babylonian, and the Greek eras. This idea seems highly unlikely, for reasons we will
discuss in detail later.
This idea of a common Aramaic heritage would naturally result from the Arab conquest of the
region in the eight century. If any language biases arose from that conquest, it would be that
Aramaic, a sister language to Arabic, was the historical, global language stretching from Africa to
China. That claim is still made today.
However, some of this prejudice toward Aramaic also arises from academics who study of the Dead
Sea scrolls. However, how likely are the scrolls to be representative of the common population? It is
the work of a community that prided itself on its separation from mainstream culture.
More evidence is claim to come from the writing of Josephus, the Jewish historian of the period.
who wrote the following in his Antiquities of the Jews (XX XI):
I have also taken a great deal of pains to obtain the learning of the Greeks, and understand the
elements of the Greek language, although I have so long accustomed myself to speak our own
tongue, that I cannot pronounce Greek with sufficient exactness; for our nation does not encourage
those that learn the languages of many nations, and so adorn their discourses with the smoothness of
their periods; because they look upon this sort of accomplishment as common, not only to all sorts
of free-men, but to as many of the servants as please to learn them. But they give him the testimony
of being a wise man who is fully acquainted with our laws, and is able to interpret their meaning; on
which account, as there have been many who have done their endeavors with great patience to
obtain this learning, there have yet hardly been so many as two or three that have succeeded therein,
who were immediately well rewarded for their pains.

However, what is Josephus really saying here? First, that he struggled to learn "proper" Greek, not
the common tongue, koine. When he said his people spoke "our own tongue" and were encourage
by the "nation" to do so, what is he saying? The "nation"wasn't the Roman rulers, but the Jewish
aristocracy who rebelled against Rome, of which Josephus was a member until the rebellion was
crushed in 67 AD.
What was this group's reason for speaking their own tongue? Josephus tells us that speaking the
"language of many nations" was considered "common." So speaking "our own language" made the
rebels special. Speaking the common tongue was something that free-man and servants, that is, the
common peope, did.
If Josephus is correct. Christ and the apostles, common people all , spoke Greek koine, not their
"own language."
The Argument For Greek
This article explains our reasoning for believing that Christ taught in Greek. This reasoning has
been built up over time as this the evidence in the text mounts in working with the Greek. Entire
sites are dedicated to the topic of Christ speaking Greek, but the perspective here is based primarily
on the words of Christ themselves.
While, much of the research on Christ speaking Aramaic is interesting (see some here), much of it
is also difficult to accept. For example, the examples cited in this research are taken from the
Epistles, written to various Christian communities. Those communities were almost in Asia Minor
and all spoke Greek, not Aramaic, which wasn't widespread in the area until the Islamic era over six
hundred years later. It is hard to believe that the those who clearly spoke Greek, such as Paul, would
have written to communities that spoke Greek, communities of both Jews and Gentiles, in Aramaic.
Our main argument for Christ speaking Greek is the meaning hidden in the Greek itself. Much of
that meaning doesn't translate easily to English. Much of it was lost specifically in the creation of
the KJV, which is the historical source for many problems. More recent translation are getting
better, but they cling to bad ideas set forth in the KJV because that is how Christianity has always
been taught in English. We address this topic of hidden meaning in almost every post about the
verses analyzed on this site. We give examples below, but there are too many extremely good
examples to list here. This article is designed only to get you interested in exploring the posts here
further.
A strong secondary argument is based on Christ's references to what we call the Old Testament. If
Christ was quoting the Hebrew or an Aramaic version (was there one?), his references would have
been translated differently. In most cases, they are the close quotes of someone who had memorized
the Greek version.
For a general example, the word "Beelzebub" was not used in the Hebrew Bible but it was used in
the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Bible. Christ, of course, uses the word in the Gospels.
Exact quotes from the Septuagint are repeated in the Gospels in generally the same Greek. For
example, in Matthew 13:14, Christ quotes the Septuagint's Isaiah 6:9 about people nearing but not
understanding and seeing and not perceiving. The Greek in the Gospel is basically the same as the
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Greek of the Septuagint. In examining the Hebrew, this seems very unlikely if the original quote
was in Hebrew or Aramaic because there are are many different common Greek words that mean
"hear," "understand," "see," and "perceive." Translators of the Gospels would not by chance use the
same terms by accident, at least not consistently. But we say the same Greek whenever Christ
quotes the Old Testament.
Some may suggest that the Greek translators referred to the Septuagint to create the Gospel's
language for Old Testament quotes. However, if this were true, it seems the wording would be
exactly the same instead of basically the same. For example, in Matthew 15:4, Christ quotes two
different sections of Exodus: Exo 20:12 and Exo 21:17. Both use the same Greek vocabulary, but
in both the phrasing is different, dropping some pronouns and using different verb forms. Just as a
person quoting something from memory would do. To believe we are reading a translation of
Aramaic into Greek, we must believe that the Gospel translators went back to the Septuagint when
quoting Christ Aramaic to get the Greek for it and then changed that Greek for some reason. Why
wouldn't they just translate the Aramaic into Greek using the vocabulary they usually used or
simply insert the appropriate quote from the Septuagint?
Another instructive set of verses are Mat 15:8 and Mat 15:9, (click to see the articles on these verses)
which quote Isaiah 29:13. In Mat 15:8, we see that the translators of the Vulgate (the Latin version
of the Bible) went back to the Septuagint to get the complete quote from Isaiah and use it. Since the
KJV translators worked from a Greek translation of the Latin, the complete quote appears in their
version (as it does in several other translations). However, today's more historically accurate
sources do not include the complete quote and so more modern translations do not include it. So
historically, translators referred to the Septuagint and used it. However, in Mat 15:9, we see the
historical translators ignore the precise wording of the Septuagint in order to preserve a play on
words, an alliteration, created by Christ from the quote. To those translators, and anyone who
studies Christ in the Greek, such wordplay is so typical of Christ, even when dealing with sacred
Scripture, that they believed that it captured Christ's original words. Of course, none of this
attention to detail makes sense and the wordplay is a just byproduct of translation is Christ really
taught in Aramaic because then all the Greek is just an approximation of the original.
A third argument is the use of Aramaic in the Gospels. When Christ speaks in Aramaic in the
Gospels, he is quoted in Aramaic, for example, in Mar 5:41 Talitha cumi; Damsel. If everything in
the Gospels was originally Aramaic, why choose not to translate quotes like this? The only logical
reason would be that these were instances where Christ spoke Aramaic, in this case, speaking to a
small, local girl who probably spoke Aramaic at home and was more comfortable with it.
However, before looking at the evidence in the Greek of Christ's words more closely or even at how
the events Christ's life lead us to think he spoke Greek, let us first look a why speaking Greek made
sense for the time and place in which Christ lived.
Some Historical Background
The area in which Christ lived had been under Greek domination for over three hundred years when
Christ was born. Whatever language was dominant there before the rise of the Greeks (and it could
well have been Babylonian Akkadian), Greek was certainly the official language of the era and had
been for many lifetimes. The question is: what was the common, everyday language?
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First, let us start with what we know personally, not academic knowledge. What is our experience
today concerning the language of indigenous people after a long period of occupation?
Simply ask yourself what language people speak in Latin America? Even though the vast majority
of people in Latin America are of Indian descent, do they speak their original Indian languages or
Spanish? What language did they speak 300 years after Spanish occupation, before modern
schooling and communication? In even shorter periods of time, what language do people of
Hispanic descent born in America speak? Spanish or English?
We could try to claim that the official language becoming the common language is a modern
by-product of education, but the reality is that it is an historical by-product of economics and
government. People speak the language of commerce and trade, where ever they are. Isolated tribes
still trade and learn the common trade tongue.
In the case of the Jews in Galilee and Judea, the Jewish people did not even have the advantage of
continuous occupation of their homeland. Israel fell to Assyria in 722 BC and was dominated as a
kingdom first by Assyria and then Babylon. In 589 BC, Israel as a state was completely destroyed
by Babylon. Its people were sent into exile in Persia. They were slaves of a people that spoke
another language. Did the masters learn Hebrew and Aramaic or did the slave learn Akkadian, the
language of Babylon? This seems almost certain.
Of course, some Jewish and Arabic scholars claim Akkadian was a Semitic language. Since it was
written in cuneiform and no Akkadian speakers survived today, it is hard to know what their
evidence might be. It seems unlikely since the Persian (Farsi) spoken today, its likely descendant,
is not a Semitic language. This idea is likely another example of the Aramaic bias mentioned earlier
that claim Aramaic as Christ's lanuage.
It wasn't until 539 BC, a generation and a half later, that Jews were allowed to return to Judea from
Babylon. Most Jews were still captive in Babylon for four more generations. The Torah wasn't
brought back to Jerusalem from Babylon until 428 BC. This is considered the starting point of the
modern Jewish religion.
What language did these returning exiles speak after such a long period of exile? Though Hebrew
was clearly kept alive in Jewish families as it is today among serious Jews all over the word, as a
practical matter the Jewish people themselves certainly all spoke Akkadian, in their everyday live.
Babylon still governed their country and the entire region until 332 BC. Certainly all trading was
done in Akkadian. Israel, located on the sea and on the trade route between Egypt and Babylon was
a trading nation. Perhaps Hebrew became the official language of the state at some point, as it is in
modern Israel, but that is speculation.
Babylon was then conquered by the Greeks in 332 BC, only four generations after the return of the
majority of Jews. The Greeks did not stop at winning Babylon, but also conquered every other
major kingdom in the region, most importantly, Egypt. After 332 BC, Greek became the official
language of the region. This remained true after Roman conquest in 53 BC, since Greek was the
official language of the Eastern Roman Empire.

What evidence do we have of Jews speaking Greek during this period? The Greek language version
of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, is the strongest evidence. This work was begun in the third
century BC, perhaps only a generation after Greek conquest. Was there an earlier Akkadian Bible
lost to time? We will never know. We do know that the Greek Old Testament was needed. Why was
it necessary? Especially if all Jews learned Hebrew?
Supposedly, Ptolemy II, the Greek ruler of Egypt, paid for the Septuagint translation because the
Jews in Alexandria, Egypt, could no longer read Hebrew but could read Greek Koine. The story
sounds questionable. Why would Ptolemy, as a Greek ruler of an Egyptian people, care about
preserving the holy book of the Jewish people? However, we do know that the translation work was
performed in Alexandria. This means that a nnn-indigenous people in Egypt were not speaking
Egyptian. This means that the local people, at least in Alexandria, were not speaking Egyptian. The
Jews didn't choose Greek over the local language. They were speaking the local language because
Alexandria was a city built by the Greek. The people Egypt in the country may have still spoken
Egyptian, but the people of the cities were speaking Greek. What does that say about the likely
popularity of Greek in Egypt and all of the Middle East several hundred year later?
We do know that the Septuagint was popular. It is the book quoted by the authors of the New
Testament. The Gospel writers quoted the Greek Bible as did Paul in is letters. It seems to have
been a well-known book both among Jews and Gentiles.
Double Meanings and Wordplay
However, as we have said, the most persuasive argument for Christ speaking Greek comes from the
Greek source itself. Spending time with the Greek of Christ's words will gradually convinces any
serious student that the work couldn't be a translation. There is so much in it, especially double
meanings and other wordplay, the makes sense only in the Greek. There are many to many
examples to cite, but you can go through all the posts discussing them here. These posts are
currently shows with the most recent first, even though that work doesn't follow the order of the
Gospels themselves.
Scholars claim wordplay in Aramaic translation. They claim this proves that the Aramaic is the
source. For example, in the parable of the mustard seed (Matt 13 31-32) has some wordplay in
Aramaic, It is smaller ( zearoya, in Aramaic) than all the seeds (zeraona). But when it grows
(rabbath) it is greater (rabba) than all the herbs.
While the similarity between rabbath (grows) and rabba (greater) sounds like a choice of words
from the same root. This is a choice of the translator working from Greek into Aramaic. There are
always many word choices in any language for general ideas such as "greater" and
"growth." Think of all the synonyms in English. The similarity between zearoya (smaller) and
zeraona (seeds) could easily be a coincidence or, again, the choice of the translator. We cannot
know what words were actually in the "original" Aramaic if there every was such a thing. Al
Aramaic Bibles today are translations from the Greek. I suspect that the best are not the older
translations, but the most recent since our Greek sources have gotten better over the years.
As far as any double meanings in any Aramaic Bible, it can only be an artifact of translation. Again,
we have no original Aramaic Biblical sources from the era. All such Bibles are created by
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translators as the English versions are created by translators. As you can see from studying the posts
on this site, much is lost in translation from Greek to English. This must also be true in translation
to Aramaic. Certainly, nothing authentic can be gained because the source of the Aramaic is the
Greek.
We see such constructed wordplay in English, for example, the poetic phrase, "Your kingdom come;
you will be done." This rhyme doesn't exist in the original Greek and, for sake of the rhyme, the
translation actually changes the meaning of Christ's words in a small but meaningful way.
However, in both the Aramaic and English wordplay cited above, the focus in the similarity or
rhyming of words This type of wordplay ads no new meaning. It cannot since translation cannot add
more meaning.
Wordplay that seems to add new dimensions of meaning is common in Greek. So common that just
today, before rewriting this article, the days post examined the phrase, "the Teacher and Master"
in Jhn 13:13 that Christ reverses in Jhn 13:14 to "Master and Teacher." There seems to be no reason
for this in English, but in Greek, the "and" is from kai which also means "as". So the first verse
Christ his followers call him the "Teacher as Master." In English, we might call a great teacher a
"master" as well. However, in the following verse, Christ describes himself as a "Master as
Teacher," a Superior who is also teaching them. This makes perfect sense if you read the contents
of Jhn 13:14 If I then, your Lord and Master. The topic is what he is teaching. His reversal of these
words is clever, funny, and says something important about Christ's role. And it only works in
Greek where an "and" is also an "as."
However, if there were such cleverness in Aramaic, we would know that the wordplay above was
the creation of the translator since no original Aramaic Bible exist. However, this raises the
question, is the wordplay in the source Greek Gospels the creation of a translator or many
translators?
The problem there is that many and perhaps most of Christs verses in the Gospel have
double-meanings in Greek that are lost in English translation. While this could have arisen from the
cleverness of the Gospel writers, it seems unlikely because we dont find these plays on words
commonly in the narrative. In Christs words, which are written in the most straight-forward style
possible, it abounds. In the narrative, it is largely absent. If the writers were such clever people, its
seems we might find plays on words throughout the work.
There are so many double meanings in the Greek that are lost in English that the work here in
general might be described as uncovering them, but we should a couple that stand out. This list
here is created from most recent posts because we added a special "field" in which we note
wordplay. Wordplay is seems much more common in Matthew and Mark that it is in John.
Unfortunately, these are the oldest posts on the site, many written before we included the Greek and
called out items of wordplay. This may be, as some believe, because Matthew and the other
synoptic Gospels were taken from written notes (the "Q" document) quoting Christ. John seems to
be much more likely to be written from memory. However, John still has plenty, as the example
above illustrates. If nothing else, such wordplay is memorable, at least in Greek.
However, here are a few examples.
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In Mat 18:8 (discussed here), for example, Christ says something that sounds pretty harsh: that you
should cut off your arm or leg if it offends you. While that is the literal meaning of the the statement,
it is considerably softened in the Greek, where the word for cutting off (ekkopt) also means to
bring to a stop. And the word used for crippled (kullos) with a slightly different accent also
means bitter or angry. So in Greek alone, we get a less grisly image, one with a double
meaning. Instead of just lopping off limbs and becoming a cripple, Christ was also saying that is
better to stop a part of your body and feel frustrated about it, than continue doing something that
will destroy you.
As somewhat simpler example is found in Mat 26:29 (discussed here), where, after he has
consecrated the wine as his blood, Christ says that he will not drink fruit of the vine until he is in
his Fathers kingdom. In this verse, the give away to a double meaning is use of gennma to mean
fruit. almost everywhere else in the Gospels, the Greek word used for fruit is karpos. Gennma
means offspring rather than fruit. So this brings in the double meaning children of the vine as
well as fruit of vine. These children of the vine are obviously his followers. The second
meaning in Greek, that he will be with his followers again only in his Fathers kingdom, is a lot
more significant than the only meaning in English, which seems trivial that Christ wont be having
any more spirits except in heaven.
This type of wordplay and double meanings can happen by chance because there is a certain
convergence in language. For example, using to the cutting off as stop example above, we see
something similar in English when we ask someone to cut it out meaning to stop it.
However, as I said, so many of verses of Christs words has a deeper and often a double meaning in
Greek, it less likely an artifact of chance.
Christ Own History
First, we must remember that Christ was not raised in Nazareth, Galilee, or Judea. He was raised in
Egypt. As we noted in the beginning of this essay, Alexandria in Egypt home of the Septuagint. It
was also the primary source of the greatest Greek influence on Jewish history and culture. If Christ
grew up in Egypt during this period, he not only almost certainly knew Greek, but his boyhood
study of Judaism would have been heavily influenced by the Greek language and ideas.
This is not to say that the use of Greek by Jews was limited to Egypt. During the Roman era, Greek,
not Aramaic and not Latin, was the cultural language of the Jewish people outside of Judea.
According to this article by Jona Lendering, the breakdown of language among Jews in Rome was
76% percent Greek, 23% Latin, and only 5% Hebrew (Aramaic). In other words, most Jews in
Rome spoke Greek, not Roman. This was likely true of all the Jewish communities of the Roman
empire, where Christianity first arose. This is one of the reasons it is unlikely that the letters sent to
the Christian communities would have been written in anything except Greek and why the New
Testament itself was likely originally written in Greek. From its beginning, Greek was the language
of Christianity because it was what the Jews outside of Judea all spoke.
So, Jesus almost certainly spoke Greek. Did he teach in it?

This has more to do with the makeup of Judea in the time of Christ and who his audiences were.
The Bible specifically mentions people coming to him from Decapolis (Mat 4:25) and Christ
teaching on the shores of Galilee in Decapolis (Mar 7:31). The Decapolis was the Greek area of
Judea. It was a federation of ten Greek cities and the center of Greek/Roman culture as opposed to
Semitic culture during this time.
The people of this area, like the Jews outside of Judea, spoke Greek. Nazareth is of particular
interest. The town called Nazareth today is a small, primarily Arab town, but in Christs time
Nazareth seems to have been the location of an important Roman bathhouse and garrison. As a
mason, Joseph and Jesus probably both worked in the nearby palace of Sephori, which had a Greek
theater. This may have been one of the reasons that Joseph and Mary, originally from Nazareth,
chose to flee Bethlehem to the Greek-speaking Jewish people of Egypt rather than to other Jewish
enclaves in the area. The Decapolis of Galilee and the Jews of Alexandria were culturally more
Greek than other Jewish communities in the region.
So, if Christ was raised learning Greek, lived in a Greek speaking area, and the Bible says that
people from Greek cities came to hear him teach, what are the chances that he didnt teach, at least
some of the time, in Greek?
We might also factor in the fact that Christ was God. As God, he had foreknowledge that the
Gospels would be spread in Greek. Knowing this, why wouldnt he speak in Greek, at least some of
the time, to make certain that his words were capture in the New Testament accurately. Of course,
he could have put the job onto the Holy Spirit to make sure that the Gospel writers did a good job of
translation (more of that later), but as the word himself, he may well have taken a personal
interest the language used. Why else was he put where he was and given the childhood exposure to
Greek that he was?
This is not to say that he didnt also teach in Aramaic. We know for certain that he did because
many of the words in the Gospels such as satan and skandalizo come from Aramaic, not Greek,
sources. They do not appear in Greek until after Christ.
When a "foreign" language is quoted in the Gospels, that language is Aramaic. So Aramaic was
certainly spoken in the region and spoke by Christ. However, in reading the Gospel, this seems to
be the exception, not the rule. It was exceptional enough to be noted when it happens.
The Consistency of the Greek of Christs Words
There is final issue here. Christs Greek words in the Gospels are surprisingly consistent. Ancient
Greek has a large vocabulary and flexible structure. Even Koine, or the common Greek of the
Gospels has a rich vocabulary. It seems likely that, if the Gospel writers were individually
translating from the Aramaic, Christs words would come to us in a variety of flavors. However,
they dont.
Of course, there is a strong similarity in language in all the Synoptic Gospels, even outside of
quoting Christs words. However, Christs words, as expressed in Greek, are surprisingly consistent
throughout the Gospels, even in John, which is so different from the other three Gospels in most
respects. When a verse of Christs words appears in more than one Gospels, it almost always has
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the same words and same vocabulary. A verse of Christs words appears in John and one of the
other Gospels more rarely, but when it does, the Greek is essentially the same. There are differences,
but surprisingly little for texts that have a completely different histories.
Of course, the usually explanation for the similarities among the Synoptic Gospels is that there is a
single source for them, either Mark alone or Mark plus the Q document. Interestingly enough, one
of the reasons Mark is seen as the source is because he more often quotes Aramaic, which is
presumed to be the original language. There is also the idea that there was a separate lost sayings
gospel. Fragments of such a sayings gospel have been found going back to 200 B.C. and may or
may not have been the source for the non-biblical Gospel of Thomas.
Personally, I prefer the older view of the Augustinian Hypothesis, that is, that Matthew was the
original source, but with a twist.
When it comes to information, I generally believe those nearer in time and space have better
information than those further away. The modern preference for more recent theories comes both
from our desire for novelty and our desire to think we are smarter than our forbearers.
My twist is I think it is possible that Matthew wrote a sayings gospel before writing his Gospel.
I have no evidence for this except my study of Christs words. Matthew was a tax collector. As such,
he would have been trained to keep records, much more so than any of the other apostles. Unlike
the other apostles, and most people of the time, he would have had ready access to a supply of paper
for keeping records. As a tax collector, he would have had to know Greek because that was the
language of the local government. Likely all his writing was done in Greek. So even if Christ didnt
teach in Greek, he could have done the translation at the time. Though there could have been others
in a position to write down Christs words, Matthew is the only one we know who had both the
opportunity, the resources, and, we assume, the motivation.
We can add to this the fact that Christs words have a peculiar financial flavor in the original
Greek. The secondary meaning of many of the words is financial. For example, the most common
word used for fruit also means profit. However, as a trade language, Koine would have a
preference for financial meanings. And any Jews who worked with Greek-speakers would share that
vocabulary as well. This would less likely for fishermen like Peter and more likely for builder like
Jesus.