It is one of the confusing features of the debate about language use in first-century Judaism that many of the fundamental assumptions of the past are again and again repeated today while their frame of reference has changed dramatically.
Modern interest in the Aramaic language arose with the “discovery” of the Aramaic-speaking churches of the east in the sixteenth century. Here, finally, it was believed, Jesus’ “mother-tongue” had been found, and the earliest treatises about the Jewish vernacular in the time of Jesus were written by de Rossi (1772)[1] and Pfannkuche (1798)[2] on the basis of this assumption. These treatises remained the only ones in the field until the studies of Dalman in 1894 and following.[3] Throughout these approximately one hundred years, scholars firmly believed in the exclusive use of Aramaic, and this belief permeated works of New Testament scholarship. By the end of the nineteenth century this belief had almost reached the status of infallibility.
For this reason, even the word “Hebrew” in the New Testament, as well as in Josephus and Philo, was believed to refer to the Aramaic language. Wordlists of Semitic terms in the New Testament were compiled and carefully checked against the Aramaic lexicon known at that time; however, these lists were never equally crosschecked against the Hebrew lexicon. In this way, even some
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