Did Jesus Speak Hebrew or Aramaic? 1) yes 2) Aramaic 3) our linguistic holy relics aren't his language 1 “Israel’s Prime Minister was arguing with the Pope over what language Jesus spoke” sounds like the setup to a weird joke. Actually, it is. The dust-up probably lasted only 10 seconds, but it reflects centuries of attempts to claim Jesus through speech, making his native language and original words into sacred linguistic relics. Netanyahu asserted Jesus’ language was Hebrew, but backpedaled quickly when the Pope corrected him that it was Aramaic (“He spoke Aramaic but he knew Hebrew”). What is surprising isn’t so much that Netanyahu used language politically, to gain territory for his side—what defines his goals better?—as the fact that any attempt to pin this first-century Judean holy man down to one language ends up concealing him and his world from us. Few sacred texts confuse monolingual thinkers as badly as the Gospels, where Hebrew and Aramaic seem to be repeatedly confused. In John 20, Mary Magdalene is described as calling the resurrected Jesus “rabbuni,” which, every standard translation tells us, is Hebrew and means “teacher.” This is fascinatingly wrong: it is actually the only time in the New Testament that an Aramaic form of the word is used; every other time Jesus is addressed with a similar term it is the Hebrew “Rabbi.” Indeed, all the comprehensible words labeled “hebraisti”(translated “Hebrew”) in John, like Golgotha, are Aramaic (the –tha ending, as in Mark’s famous talitha cumi, “rise (from the dead) o girl!” is a giveaway). 1 A better-illustrated unfootnoted version was published June 9 on Religion Dispatches, which is currently down. I thank Ed Cook, Steven Fassberg, Noam Mizrahi and Matthew Morgenstern for advice, which I may not necessarily have followed.