But PCG's leader, Gerald Flurry, seems to be unaware of this fact. In one article in 2014 he stated that Jesus and the people of those Jewish communities of that time spoke Hebrew, not Aramaic, in the normal course of their lives.
How did this man [Pope Francis] who carefully designed and stage-managed all of his symbolic moves in the Holy Land treat the prime minister of Israel? The Economist on May 28 characterized the pope’s demeanor as “standoffish.”
“In one of his blander pronouncements during the papal visit, Netanyahu mentioned on Monday that Jesus spoke Hebrew,” [Caroline] Glick wrote. “There was nothing incorrect about Netanyahu’s statement. Jesus was, after all, an Israeli Jew. But Francis couldn’t take the truth, so he indelicately interrupted his host, interjecting, ‘Aramaic!’ Netanyahu was probably flustered. True at the time, educated Jews spoke and wrote in Aramaic, and Jesus was educated, but the language of the people was Hebrew, and Jesus preached to the people in Hebrew. Netanyahu responded, ‘He spoke Aramaic, but He knew Hebrew’” (op. cit.).
Netanyahu ought to have reacted more strongly. But this is the pope—you just don’t do that to a dictator of his stature! (Gerald Flurry, The Dark Side of the Pope’s Visit to Jerusalem, August 2014.)It is perfectly reasonable to suppose that those many Jews in those days had some familiarity with Hebrew since it would have used in religious services but in their everyday life they talked in Aramaic, not Hebrew. While Hebrew was still used in religious and scholarly settings nevertheless by Jesus' time the Hebrew language had long ago fallen out of use as a language used in everyday life. This is common knowledge among anyone who inquires about the society in which Jesus Christ lived.
And yet Gerald Flurry seems to be unaware of this fact. He throws verifiable knowledge out the window in a badly thought out attempt to make Pope Francis look bad. Instead Gerald Flurry shows himself remarkably ill informed about the history of the society in which Jesus lived in.
If Gerald Flurry could let himself be wrong about the language used in everyday life in Jesus' time it is little wonder that he should happen to be wrong about other matters.
By the first century CE, Hebrew was about like Latin in the past century: for church and the educated. The Gospels transliterate Aramaic words spoken by Jesus, but he read the Torah at a synagogue. Interesting that the OT references in the NT generally appear to be references to the Septuagint, and the original Gospel of Matthew was likely written in Hebrew.
ReplyDeleteSome years ago Bob Thiel offered a rebuttal to a book (Ruach Qadim, by A.G. Roth) that showed some NT discrepancies could be resolved if it was originally written in Aramaic. Bob said the book was "full of errors" and the NT must have been authored in Greek. When I read the book, I found the "errors" were most likely points the author made that didn't support Armstrongism.