 In the New Testament, when Jesus enters a room and says peace be with you, we know he is really speaking Aramaic and saying in Shalom or the Aramaic equivalent, and then it is rendered in Greek as the Gospel writers recount the event. How much of the New Testament can we think of this way? Well, I would say to be honest, we really don't know if Jesus was speaking Aramaic. It depends on who is in the room. If Jesus walked into a room of Hellenistic Jews or a room with a mixed composition, Jews and Gentiles, he may have spoken Greek. We just don't know for sure what the scene was at any given point. Even if we have a scene in the Gospels, do we have a head count? Do we have an ethnicity count? Well, no. Sometimes we get more of an indication than others. Jesus is part of a multilingual culture. In a multilingual culture like 1st century Judea, we can't really assume what anyone is saying at any given point is in this or that language. We can go with the odds, so to speak, so if Jesus walked into a room full of Jews from his hometown or part of Judea dominated by Jewish presence, well, Aramaic is a pretty good bet. But if the parameters changed, it could have done something else. Incidentally, Jesus, getting off into the Aramaic thing for a little bit here, Jesus isn't recorded as using Aramaic except in only a few places. There's Mark chapter 5, there's 1 and Mark 7. Some of these are parallel in Matthew, there's 1 and Mark 15. There are people who have studied this, Jeremiah, I don't even know if it's Jeremiah or Jeremiah's, but I think it's Jeremiah's New Testament scholar back in the 60s, 70s, 80s. He had roughly a couple dozen Aramaic words in the Gospels in total. That isn't a whole lot. There are still scholars today who would suspect or argue that instead of Aramaic as being the native tongue of Jesus, it might have been Mishnahic Hebrew. That's possible. For those who are interested in this, I'm going to post a few articles on this. I've collected some and I'll pick out a few here from what I have. If you subscribe to the newsletter, again, you'll be given a link in each issue of the newsletter. At the bottom there's a link to a protected folder where I can put articles that aren't publicly accessible so that newsletter subscribers can at least read them. There's one by Stanley Porter. Did Jesus ever teach in Greek? It's from Tyndale Bulletin in 1993. Porter argues in this is, yeah, he could have taught in Greek. Porter acknowledges this is kind of a minority view that most other scholars would sort of give Jesus fluency in Aramaic or Mishnahic Hebrew, but Porter thinks he would have been trilingual. But he spends 30 pages laying out his case that Jesus could have taught in Greek, too. There's one by Grintz Hebrew as the spoken and written language in the last days of the Second Temple. Another by Emerton, the problem of vernacular Hebrew in the first century AD in the language of Jesus. So these are going to get into Jesus being an Aramaic speaker, Mishnahic Hebrew speaker. Again, it's not unreasonable to think that Jesus could have been trilingual, and so we can't really assume much about Jesus walks into a room and says, okay, you know, like which language he's using. We don't even know about the context. If the context is like really, really, really distinctly Jewish, well, again, Aramaic could be a good bet, but if we could time travel, we might have heard Jesus speak in Hebrew, Mishnahic Hebrew. We just, we don't know. So I wouldn't base any sort of exegetical or theological conclusions necessarily on some of these assumptions. I think we need to try to think about all the possibilities when it comes to this. So it's really hard to kind of reimagine what, not only what Jesus or anybody else would have been speaking or doing, but when it comes to literary output, that's a whole different issue. I think it makes very little sense to have much more than Matthew and Mark will say, two of the Gospels possibly written in Aramaic originally. You know, this whole discussion takes us into the Aramaic New Testament issue, so I might as well say something about that here. There is no evidence that the Aramaic, no manuscript evidence that the New Testament, any portion of it was written in Aramaic. There are some who argue for that. Again, Mark and Matthew usually become the target for that. Certainly Luke was not. Luke was a Gentile. He's writing to a Gentile. Why would he write in Aramaic? Paul's epistles are written to predominantly Gentile churches. Why would he write in Aramaic? Hey, I'm going to write you a letter, but I want half the congregation to not be able to read it. Doesn't make any sense. John is much later. He lacks Hebraisms in many cases like Matthew. He has little to no literary dependence on Matthew and Mark. Again, if you're familiar with the synoptic debate, Matthew, Mark and Luke, who wrote first and the other two are dependent on that one. John is not in the synoptics for a reason. Most of the content in John is not in the other three. So he doesn't have a literary dependence on the synoptics. So again, that would suggest anyway that even if Matthew or Mark were written in Aramaic originally, John doesn't really care. He comes later. He's not interested in tracking on that material. So Aramaic doesn't really make much sense for John and what he writes. Maybe the Targums, you know, maybe he might have used some Targums or been influenced by Targums like in the word theology. In the beginning was the word, you know, we've talked about this a little bit on the podcast before in relationship to the two powers in heaven idea. Where does John get that? Well, he gets it from his Old Testament. And he may have been familiar with the Memra material, Aramaic Targums of the Old Testament, where you have the second Yahweh figure, Memra, the word. Memra is the Aramaic word for word, where you have the word of God inserted into certain passages. He may have been familiar with that. So there may be an Aramaic influence there with John, but there's no reason to believe that the gospel or Revelation, you know, were written in Aramaic. Revelation, in fact, is oriented to Asia Minor. Churches in the first few chapters. This is predominantly Gentile territory, predominantly Gentile churches. Why would you write an Aramaic? Even the general epistles that are aimed at Jews in the dispersion. Well, where's the dispersion? It's out in the Gentile world. So you're going to have letters. Yeah, they're written to a Jewish audience, but chances are they're going to get passed around among groups of believers, many of whom are Gentiles. It just makes no sense to have an Aramaic New Testament is what I'm getting at. Again, maybe Matthew, maybe Mark, maybe an early gospel, something like that. But even if it makes sense for those, you know, two books, we don't actually have any manuscript evidence for it. So I'm not really sure why in my own mind why people, I've met some people, you know, in the course of being online that, you know, really, really care. And I think to an unusual degree about Jesus speaking Aramaic and the Aramaic, Aramaic being the language of the New Testament, I really don't see what the concern is. I think this is coming from curiosity, not some sort of ideology. But I've met people again who are in the latter camp and it just doesn't make any sense to have an Aramaic New Testament. So I don't think we need to get hung up on at least that part of the question.