Jesus Taught in Greek - 1) His Aramaic Words

This series of articles will be an abomination to most Biblical scholars, but it must be said: Jesus taught in Greek, not Aramaic. His words were not and could not have been translated from Aramaic to Greek. All my evidence is from the Greek words themselves, evidence that no one can deny. I have read the arguments for Aramaic. IThey are not persuasive and a bit dumb. Strangely enough, this first article will focus on Jesus’s use of Aramaic words.

Did Jesus speak Aramaic? Absolutely. He was bilingual, just as everyone living in similar circumstances is bilingual, even in America today, speaking one language at home and another in public. Were all the Galileans of his time bilingual? This is highly unlikely for reasons we will get into in a future article.

First, I will argue against the words we have today being a translation. There is a logic to how translations are made, all translations from one language into another.

A Firm Rule in Translation

Translations often include words that are from a different language other than the language being translated. For example, Dostoyevsky often quotes French in his books. How do I know? Because all respectable translations show those passages in French, not English. We all do this ourselves both in talking and writing. If someone calls us amigo or says gracias to us, we relay amigo and gracias when recounting the conversation to someone else. Words in a different language that most people understand have a feeling that is lost in translation, and we want to preserve it.

This is why the writers of Jesus’s Gospel recorded Aramaic words. The result is that Jesus’s Greek is liberally sprinkled with Aramaic, such as amen, as we would expect in a bi-lingual culture. Everyone may not have spoken Aramaic, but they knew common words like most of us know amigo and gracias in America today.

Let us perform a simple thought experiment. If Jesus’s words were originally Aramaic, how did these words survive in the Greek we read today? Can we imagine a translator, translating one Aramaic word after another and coming to the Aramaic amen and deciding not to translate it? Why leave this one word in Aramaic? Why would translators leave amen untranslated in ninety-one verses of Jesus’s words and more in the words of others? It is not that there isn’t a Greek word that means the same thing. The joke of amen is that its Greek counterpart, men, also means “truly.” Putting the “a” before any Greek word means “not.” So, amen implies “not true” in Greek. (See this article.)

The Rule Violated

(Note: The rest of this article providing more evidence and personal information is reserved for paid subscribers. This is a change from the past when I made most articles public after a month. Enough people are paying subscriptions now, that I want to reward them for caring enough about Jesus’s words to support my work.)