Aramaic

• spoken by common people in Palestine in Jesus’ time

121:6.2In the days of Je­sus three lan­guages pre­vailed in Pales­tine: The com­mon peo­ple spoke some di­alect of Ara­maic; the priests and rab­bis spoke He­brew; the ed­u­cated classes and the bet­ter strata of Jews in gen­eral spoke Greek. The early trans­la­tion of the He­brew scrip­tures into Greek at Alexan­dria was re­spon­si­ble in no small mea­sure for the sub­se­quent pre­dom­i­nance of the Greek wing of Jew­ish cul­ture and the­ol­ogy. And the writ­ings of the Chris­tian teach­ers were soon to ap­pear in the same lan­guage. The re­nais­sance of Ju­daism dates from the Greek trans­la­tion of the He­brew scrip­tures. This was a vi­tal in­flu­ence which later de­ter­mined the drift of Paul’s Chris­tian cult to­ward the West in­stead of to­ward the East.

• Jesus spoke

123:2.14Though Joseph was now as­sum­ing the di­rect re­spon­si­bil­ity for Je­sus’ in­tel­lec­tual and re­li­gious ed­u­ca­tion, his mother still in­ter­ested her­self in his home train­ing. She taught him to know and care for the vines and flow­ers grow­ing about the gar­den walls which com­pletely sur­rounded the home plot. She also pro­vided on the roof of the house (the sum­mer bed­room) shal­low boxes of sand in which Je­sus worked out maps and did much of his early prac­tice at writ­ing Ara­maic, Greek, and later on, He­brew, for in time he learned to read, write, and speak, flu­ently, all three lan­guages.

• Jesus spoke

123:5.1Je­sus was now seven years old, the age when Jew­ish chil­dren were sup­posed to be­gin their for­mal ed­u­ca­tion in the syn­a­gogue schools. Ac­cord­ingly, in Au­gust of this year he en­tered upon his event­ful school life at Naz­a­reth. Al­ready this lad was a flu­ent reader, writer, and speaker of two lan­guages, Ara­maic and Greek. He was now to ac­quaint him­self with the task of learn­ing to read, write, and speak the He­brew lan­guage. And he was truly ea­ger for the new school life which was ahead of him.