What language did Jesus and Pilate use?

[prodromos]

Pilate is named after ther region from whence he came, namely Pontos, which was a Greek speaking region on the coast of the Black Sea if my memory of geography serves me well. Pilate certainly would have been fluent in Greek.

 

[prodromos]

Are you sure about that? AIUI, Latin was the local tongue in the area of Rome (known as Latium, or Lazio in modern times) and this made it the Imperial tongue. While the educated classes would know Greek, in Rome proper wouldn’t Latin be used?

Bilugualism isn’t merely the domain of the educated. All one has to do is grow up in an environment where more than one language is spoken and you will naturally acquire both. I have a friend who grew up in Alexandria in Egypt. In academic terms she never finished high school, but as the daughter of a Greek mother and Italian father, with a grandmother who mostly spoke to her in French, growing up in a country which mostly spoke Arabic, she is now fluent in five languages (she learnt English after coming to Australia). I have met another man who was fluent in seven languages, also not highly educated.

 

[NoelFitz]

Petergee

Jerome was about 400 years after Jesus Christ. Language had changed by then.

I still suggest Pilate and Jesus spoke in Greek.

 

[patrick457]

No, it’s the reverse of that. Educated Romans learned Greek, although they normally spoke in Latin to each other. The common Romans knew only Latin. That’s why St Jerome’s standard Latin edition of the Bible is called the Vulgate, literally “belonging to the common ('vulgar”) people".

Actually the Vulgate came to be known as such because it was the versio vulgata, the ‘common translation’. Not to mention that the name was only was only applied to it in the 13th century by Roger Bacon.

Throughout Late Antiquity and most of the Middle Ages, the name vulgata was applied to what is known as the Greek Vulgate (i.e. the standard Greek text of the Bible used by the Greek Church, consisting of the Septuagint for most of the OT with the version of Theodotion used for the book of Daniel and the NT according to the Byzantine text-type), but as the acceptance of Jerome’s version overtook that of the Vetus Latina in the Western church, it too began to be considered as an editio vulgata, a Latin analogue to the older Greek editio vulgata.

 

[Ridgerunner]

It’s interesting to speculate on this, and one is inclined to think it was the form of “sorta Greek” called “Koine”.

But Jesus, being God, could, if he chose, have spoken in Japanese or Finnish or Basque or Urdu or by telepathy, and caused Pilate to understand it.

So, we don’t know, do we? But that’s not to say it isn’t interesting to speculate on it.

 

[Patrick_Joshua]

But Jesus, being God, could, if he chose, have spoken in Japanese or Finnish or Basque or Urdu or by telepathy, and caused Pilate to understand it.

So, we don’t know, do we? But that’s not to say it isn’t interesting to speculate on it.

I have the idea aswell.

Jesus raised the dead, fed the 5000, He conquered death.

Surely languages not going to stump the Son of God.

 

[NotWorthy]

Guys,

Ya’ll are making this WAAAAYYYY too hard.

What were every one of the New Testament Scriptures written in (except for the first edition of Matthew)?

Greek. There is a reason that they wrote in Greek throughout the Roman Empire, even in St. Paul’s (who himself was a Roman Citizen) Epistle to the Romans. Because Greek was the Langua Franca (or something like that).

 

[Joe_Kelley]

I would maintain that they spoke Latin.

Pilate: **Quid est veritas? **[What is truth}
**
**Jesus: ******Est vir qui adest. **It is the man who is here.]

Note that one is an anagram of the other.

Also Adam and Eve spoke English.

**Madam I’m Adam

Eve

**Note that both are palindromes.

 

[Petergee]

Petergee

Jerome was about 400 years after Jesus Christ. Language had changed by then.

I still suggest Pilate and Jesus spoke in Greek.

I offered no opinion on that. I think it was either or both Latin or Greek.
My point is that NEVER at ANY ime in the long history of Rome and its dominions, was there ever a time when, as you claimed, “The ordinary people used Greek and the more educated used Latin” or as NotWorthy claimed, “Latin was only used in Rome by the most learned people. Greek was the common tongue even in Rome.”

 

[PAboy57]

I have the idea aswell.

Jesus raised the dead, fed the 5000, He conquered death.

Surely languages not going to stump the Son of God.

I agree. Surely the Son of God, who spent 30 years preparing for His ministry, would have no problem speaking in the people’s language. Maybe a little of all.

 

[Anrando]

I offered no opinion on that. I think it was either or both Latin or Greek.
My point is that NEVER at ANY ime in the long history of Rome and its dominions, was there ever a time when, as you claimed, “The ordinary people used Greek and the more educated used Latin” or as NotWorthy claimed, “Latin was only used in Rome by the most learned people. Greek was the common tongue even in Rome.”

As an old student of classical archaeology and Latin I’m afraid I must agree. The graffiti, public notices, grave inscriptions, military communications, sign posts, coinage, even menus found on the walls of well preserved shops in Pompeii were ALL in Latin, not Greek. The average Roman citizen spoke in Latin, and wrote in Latin. Greek was the language of the elite, it was NOT used by common citizens, conscript soldiers, or in official government records or correspondence.

That is not to say that Roman citizens did not use the language of the area they found themselves in at any given time, and certainly Greek was common in N. Africa and those areas controlled by Alexander’s generals’ descendants, but I’m afraid Latin was the “official” language of the empire.

Regards,
W.Unland

 

[NoelFitz]

PJ

good to hear from you. It is nice to realize that here in CA at the outermost part of cyberspace there is a fellow Dub.

It is also nice to have an argument about what we will never know (in this life) and is of no importance.

 

[Ron_Conte]

No, it’s the reverse of that. Educated Romans learned Greek, although they normally spoke in Latin to each other. The common Romans knew only Latin. That’s why St Jerome’s standard Latin edition of the Bible is called the Vulgate, literally “belonging to the common ('vulgar”) people".

I agree. I’ll add that the scholars of Rome used Latin as well as Greek. Many works of Roman scholars are in Latin, and many are in Greek. But the common people spoke Latin, a languge that developed in and around Rome.

 

[Ron_Conte]

Petergee

Jerome was about 400 years after Jesus Christ. Language had changed by then.

I still suggest Pilate and Jesus spoke in Greek.

Flavius Josephus was a Jewish priest and scholar, who became a Roman citizen and a Roman historian. He was an official historian for the Roman empire. He wrote in the first century A.D. in Latin.

Tacitus, Suetonius, Seneca, and Pliny also wrote in Latin. Other scholars did write in Greek, but the idea that Greek dominated over Latin, especially among the common people is unsupportable.

 

[NoelFitz]

Josephus wrote in Greek.

If a number of Roman scholars wrote in Latin it would support the idea that the upper classes used Latin.

 

[Shin]

**Christ’s human knowledge was free from positive ignorance and from error. (Sent. certa.)
**

. . . Since Christ is the Head and Lord of the whole Creation, and Judge of all mankind, St. Thomas concluded that Christ’s soul already on earth knew in the Divine Essence all real things of the past, the present and the future, including of course the thoughts of mankind.

• Ludwig Ott, Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma

 

[Petergee]

Greek was common in N. Africa

Only in Egypt, the only part of Africa ever ruled by Greeks. And even in Egypt the mass of common people spoke the native Egyptian semitic language Coptic, which is still the official liturgical language of Egyptian Christians.

The inhabitants of the ancient Roman province of “Africa”, roughly equivalent to modern day Tunisia, eastern Algeria and western Libya, spoke predominantly Latin and/or Punic (a Semitic language descended from Phoenician).

 

[Petergee]

Josephus wrote in Greek.

If a number of Roman scholars wrote in Latin it would support the idea that the upper classes used Latin.

It would NOT support your idea that the lower classes did NOT use Latin.

 

[awatkins69]

I was considering the meeting of Jesus with Pontius Pilate and wondered what language they used. The dialogue sounds too brisk to have been uttered through an interpreter, so we are left with Latin, which humanly Jesus probably did not know, or Aramaic, probably unintelligible to Pilate, or Greek.
Has anyone any ideas on this?

I think that Jesus may have spoken Greek. First of all, he was a carpenter from Galilee so he would have needed to know it. Secondly, see Saint John chapter 3. In the Greek version there is a pun which only makes sense in Greek. I think that Greek would have been spoken by Pilate, because we know that he put it on the sign above Our Lord’s cross, indicating that it was significant enough to be put up there. Since it was a significant language, Pilate, to be a good ruler, would probably have had to have known it.

 

[ProVobis]

It is difficult to comprehend that Christ, having lived in the middle of the Roman Empire for 33 years, didn’t know some Latin.

From John:

{14:6} Dicit ei Iesus: Ego sum via, et veritas, et vita. Nemo venit ad Patrem, nisi per me.
{14:6} Jesus said to him: “I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father, except through me.

The Latin has a nice ring to it.

The inscriptions above His head on the cross were in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. Let’s presume He was fluent in all three.