Presenting Acts chapter 22 here two weeks ago, where Paul was said to have addressed the crowd in Jerusalem in Hebrew, we spoke a little about Aramaic and Hebrew. Last week, just prior to our open lines program, I received a kindly message from a dear sister in England, and she had also asked a short question about the speech of Christ. Not being able to listen to the live program she hoped I could read it, but the flow of the program didn't really offer an opportunity, so I will answer her question here.
She asks:
“Yashuah's last word was 'TETELESTAI' meaning It is finished. But did he speak that utterance in Greek or Aramaic? Do we know? Elsewhere it is written that just prior to that, he cried out in Aramaic, 'Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani'? [Mark 15:34]”
I would feel safe to imagine, that because the apostles all took care to point out that certain words and phrases were uttered in Hebrew, all of the other words of Christ that they recorded must have been uttered in Greek. Otherwise why would they at all mention any occasions when He spoke in Hebrew? Greek was the lingua franca of the time, and archaeologists have recently and correctly been pointing out that there must have even been a Palestinian sub-dialect of Koine Greek where indeed Hebraisms commonly appear.
Such Hebraisms are found in the Gospels also, in Mark and Matthew, and even in Luke who was a Greek, but who had compiled his Gospel from collected records. Hebraisms are features common to the Hebrew language which appear in Greek. Such Hebraisms may be Hebrew idioms that were a novelty in Greek, or the Hebrew habit of parallelism, which is very common in the New Testament, where something is described twice using different words. Many assert that these Hebraisms somehow prove that there was an original Hebrew or Aramaic text that the Greek was derived from. That assertion is ridiculous. Rather, the Hebraisms prove that the New Testament was written in Greek by people who had their first language as Hebrew, and therefore brought their Hebrew habits into their Greek writing.
