Dominicus Diodati, in his book De Christo Craece loquente, 1767, who added some interesting material concerning the importance of the Greek language at the period and in the native district of Jesus. But five years later, in 1772, this view was thoroughly refuted by Giambernardo de Rossi, [1] who argued convincingly that among a people so separate and so conservative as the Jews the native language cannot possibly have been wholly driven out. The apostles wrote Greek for the sake of foreign readers. In the year 1792, Johann Adrian Bolten, "first collegiate pastor at the principal church in Altona" (l807), made the first attempt to re-translate the sayings of Jesus into the original tongue. [2]
The certainly original Greek of the Epistles and the Johannine literature was a strong argument against the attempt to recognise no language save Aramaic as known to Jesus and His disciples. Paulus the rationalist, therefore, sought a middle path, and explained that while the Aramaic dialect was indeed the native language of Jesus, Greek had become so generally current among the population of Galilee, and still more of Jerusalem, that the founders of Christianity could use this language when they found it needful to do so. His Catholic contemporary. Hug, came to a similar conclusion.
In the course of the nineteenth century Aramaic-known down to the time of Michaelis as "Chaldee" [3]-was more thoroughly studied. The various branches of this language and the history of its progress became more or less clearly recognisable. Kautzsch's grammar of Biblical Aramaic [4] (1884) and Dalman's [5] work embody the result of these studies. "The Aramaic language," explains Meyer, "is a branch of the North Semitic, the linguistic stock to which also belong the Assyrio-Babylonian language in the East, and the Canaanitish languages, including Hebrew, in the West, while the South Semitic languages-the Arabic and Aethiopic-form a group by themselves. The users of these languages, the
- ↑ Giambern. de Rossi, Dissertazione delta lingua propria di Christo e degli Ebrei nazionali della Palestina da' Tempi de' Massabei in disamina del sentimento di w recente scrittore Italiano. Parma, 1772.
- ↑ Der Bericht des Matthaus van Jesu dem Messias. (Matthew's account of Jesus the Messiah.) Altona, 1792. According to Meyer, p. 105 ff., this was a very striking performance.
- ↑ The name Chaldee was due to the mistaken belief that the language in which parts of Daniel and Ezra were written was really the vernacular of Babylonia. That vernacular, now known to us from cuneiform tablets and inscriptions, is a Semitic language, but quite different from Aramaic.-F. C. B.
- ↑ Emil Friedrich Kautzsch was born in 1841 at Plauen in Saxony, and studied in Leipzig, where he became Privat-Docent in 1869. In 1872 he was called as as Professor to Basle, in 1880 to Tubingen, in 1888 to Halle.
- ↑ Gustaf Dalman, Professor at Leipzig, was born in 1865 at Niesky. In addition to the works of his named above, see also Der leidende und der sterbende Messias (The Suffering and Dying Messiah), 1888; and Was sagt der Talmud uber Jesum? (What does the Talmud say about Jesus?), 1891.
