SUNDAY REVELATIONS: What Did Jesus Say?
Why is this an issue? Aside from the weird misuse of Hebrew and Latin in Mel Gibson’s Jesus flick and the fundie Christian fantasy that the bible was written in King James’ English, most folks never think about the languages used in Jesus’s time. The language issue became part of the Israeli/Palestinian problem because of Palestinian claims that they are the indigenous people of Palestine .. presumably a people who, like Jesus, spoke Aramaic, an ancestor language of Arabic. While no sane person can deny that there is today a very real Palestinian people,the creation of the Palestinian people is very successful propaganda. The fiction is that a Palestinian people were replaced by the Jews coming from Europe. The truth is that there have been Jews in Palestine for at least 3000 years. The Jews of Palestine referred to themselves as “Palestinians” for all that time, even serving in the WWII British army as “His Majesty’s Palestinian Brigade.” The story of the Palestinians as a people is an example of success of the big lie. Goebbels took credit for identifying the big lie as a propaganda device. The Nazi propagandist demonized the Jews and created a myth on a noble Aryan past for the Germans. Madison Ave and the Tea Party have perfected the method and Mr. Putin uses it to justify his aggression in the Ukraine.The other residents of Palestine never considered themselves an indigenous people. The Palestinians as a people were invented by Gamel Abdul Nasser and his agent Yassir Arafat. Until their alliance, no one had identified any people as “Palestinian” since the defeat of the Philistines by the early Hebrews some 3000 years ago. (The term Philistine is an English pronunciation of the Hebrew word “פלישתי ” ,, Palisti.) The name Palestine for the strip of land remained even though the Philistines were long gone. Herodotus used that term in the fifth century B.C.E., when the Jews had returned from the Babylonian exodus to re establish their kingdom in Jerusalem. After the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, the Roman effort to expunge memory of the Jewish kingdom, included calling Jerusalem Aelia Capitolina. That name referred to Hadrian’s family, the gens Aelia.The only country ever called “Palestine” was the Crusader state created after the Europeans bloody conquests. Under the Turks (1517-1917), the area was called Palestine but the only enthnic group to use that term for themselves were the Zionist immigrants in the 19th century. This was especially true during the British Mandate.Back to Jesus’ language, the only Latin he would have spoken outside of a Gibson movie was the language he needed to read state proclamations, street posters written in the official language of the Empire. As for speech, the common languages of occupied Judea in Jesus’ time were Aramaic for the Jews and Greek for the occupying Roman army. Aramaic is an old language, with deep roots in the past, related to Canaani, Hebrew, Ethiopic, and Akkadian (the language of the Babylonians and Assyrians). Of course “Palestinian” Aramaic likely contained a lot of Hebrew. While Jesus might have been literate enough to read the Hebrew of the Torah, his everyday language would have been Aramaic, He likely used Greek to speak to the overlords as well as with fashionably Hellenized Jews. For example, in John 12:20: “Now among those who worshiped at the festival were some Greeks. They came from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to (the apostle Phillip), ‘Sir, we wish to see Jesus.’ Of course the true father of Christianity, Paul was a Hellenized Jew and wrote the gospels in his native language … Greek.
Read more in this essay by Jay Parini, a poet and novelist.
Or this essay from Randal Buth at Haaretz.
Tags: Jesus identity, Misc., Netanyahu
Posted 22 Jan 2017 by theaveeditor
in Misc.