Re: Aramaic speakers also being Greek speakers
You have to remember that, first of all, Greek was the common tongue of most of the Roman Empire, all the way out to Asia and around the Mediterranean. If you wanted to do business with anybody not a Jew from a certain tiny area in Israel, Syria, and surrounding areas, you had to know Greek. (Latin was the language of Roman lawyers, court cases, schoolkids learning classic Roman poetry and speeches, and people of Roman descent at home.)
Pretty much anywhere you went in the Roman Empire, you had local languages and common tongues coexisting, because it was useful. Syro-Phoenicians and North Africans might speak Carthaginian at home or in the neighborhood, but they did business in Greek. Galatians and Gauls spoke Gaulish Celtic at home, but at the marketplace they spoke Greek. There were even places in the ancient world where a city’s women had a different private tongue than the men; but they also spoke and understood Greek.
Before the Roman Empire, there was Alexander the Great and his generals and his generals’ descendants, spreading out all across the known world (and causing two books of Maccabees to be written, because of Greek and Asian invaders of Israel). Before that, there were the trade empires of the Greeks. The Greeks went all over the place colonizing and founding cities, as well.
So if you didn’t speak Greek at all, it was a sign that you were not just a country bumpkin, but a barbarian from so far back in the valleys of the hills that you never saw daylight and kept owls as yard dogs, and had no idea what an anchor was. Jesus was from Galilee, but from fairly close to populated areas. He was not from the waybacks. He spoke Greek as well as Aramaic and Hebrew. Greek was part of normal life in Israel for good or ill, as the Books of Maccabees also make clear.
You will also notice that most of the Apostles seem to have both Hebrew and Greek names (along with Aramaic and Greek nicknames), even as many Jewish people today have their Hebrew names and then also have legal names for interaction with Gentile society.
Only being able to speak one language, like many US natives, is unusual in the history of the world for people who don’t live in total isolation. For most people, it has always been critical to survival and happiness to know how to talk to that other tribe on the other side of the valley, because there has been so much dialectal variation even within small areas, and because migration and trade has always brought people of different languages into contact.
