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  • From: Peter Kirk <peterkirk AT qaya.org>
  • To: "Harold R. Holmyard III" <hholmyard AT ont.com>
  • Cc: b-hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Linguists hope for Aramaic revival
  • Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2004 14:20:17 -0800

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
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/





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