Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>]

On 24/02/2004 11:54, Harold R. Holmyard III wrote:

> Dear Yigal,
>
> that first article said:
>
> (Mr. Gibson's use of Latin, by the way, is deemed a blunder by experts.
> He'd have done better with Greek, which was widely spoken in Jesus' day.
> "No one in the Mideast spoke Latin," Rabbi Geller said.
>
> HH: I'm not so sure about that. The Romans would have. ...

Are you sure? As I understood it, in the first century CE even in ROME 
the lingua franca was Greek, not Latin, and that Latin was dying out 
until it was revived under the Flavians. (That explains why Paul wrote 
his letter to the Romans in Greek.) I suppose that Latin was used by the 
Romans for official administrative purposes, but that Romans in 
Palestine would have spoken mostly Greek among one another, The language 
spoken in the army may have varied from regiment to regiment, and some 
of the regiment names are recorded, e.g. in Acts 10:1, Cornelius was 
from the Italian regiment, and so is more likely to have been a Latin 
speaker - although he probably conversed with Peter in Greek. Note 
however another Roman officer's surprise that Paul could speak Greek, 
Acts 21:37, which suggests that most of the Jerusalem crowds could not.


--
Peter Kirk
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peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
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