wholly driven out the ancient national language. Evidence for this is to be found in the occurrence of Aramaic passages in the Talmud, from which it is evident that the Rabbis used this language in the religious instruction of the people. The provision that the text, after being read in Hebrew, should be interpreted to the people, may quite well reach back into the time of Jesus. The first evidence for the practice is in the Mishna, about A.D. 150.
In the time of Jesus three languages met in Galilee-Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. In what relation they stood to each other we do not know, since Josephus, the only writer who could have told us, fails us in this point, as he so often does elsewhere. He informs us that when acting as an envoy of Titus he spoke to the people of Jerusalem in the ancestral language, and the word he uses is ebraizwn. But the very thing we should like to know-whether, namely, this language was Aramaic or Hebrew, he does not tell us. We are left in the same uncertainty by the passage in Acts (xxii. 2) which says that Paul spoke to the people 'Ebraidi dialektw, thereby gaining their attention, for there is no indication whether the language was Aramaic or Hebrew. For the writers of that period "Hebrew" simply means Jewish.
We cannot, therefore, be sure in what relation the ancient Hebrew sacred language and the Aramaic of ordinary intercourse stood to one another as regards religious writings and religious instruction. Did the ordinary man merely learn by heart a few verses, prayers, and psalms? Or was Hebrew, as the language of the cultus, also current in wider circles?
Dalman gives a number of examples of works written in Hebrew in the century which witnessed the birth of Christ: "A Hebrew original, he says, "must be assumed in the case of the main part of the Aethiopic book of Enoch, the Assumption of Moses, the Apocalypse of Baruch, Fourth Ezra, the Book of Jubilees, and for the Jewish ground-document of the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, of which M. Gaster has discovered a Hebrew manuscript." The first Rook of Maccabees, too, seems to him to go back to a Hebrew original. Nevertheless, he holds it to impossible that synagogue discourses intended for the people can have been delivered in Hebrew, or that Jesus taught otherwise than in Aramaic.
Franz Delitzsch's view, on the other hand, is that Jesus and the disciples taught in Hebrew; and that is the opinion of Resch also. Adolf Neubauer,[1] Reader in Rabbinical Hebrew at Oxford, attempted a compromise. It was certainly the case, he thought,
- ↑ Franz Delitzsch, Die Bucher des Neuen Testaments aus dem Griechischen ins Hebraische ubersetzt. 1877. (The Books of the N.T. translated from Greek into Hebrew.) This work has been circulated by thousands among Jews throughout the whole world. Delitzsch was born in 1813 at Leipzig and became Privat-Docent there in 1842, went to Rostock as Professor in 1846, to Erlangen in 1850, and returned in 1867 to Leipzig. By conviction he was a strict Lutheran in theology. He was one of the leading experts in Late-Jewish and Talmudic literature. He died in 1890.
