' I am so bold as to say, now that I have completed the task set before me, that no other person, either Jew or Greek, with whatever good intentions, would have been able to set forth this history to the Greeks as accurately as I have done ; for I am acknowledged by my countrjmen to excel them far in our national learning. I also did my best to obtain a knowledge of Greek by practising myself in the grammar, though native habit prevented me from attaining accuracy in its use.'
Josephus' difficulty Avith Greek is very signi- ficant. For if that difficulty obtained Avith him, Avhat of his countrymen generally? Stress has been laid, as, e.g., by Dr. Roberts, upon the attain- ments in Greek of such men as Peter and James and John, as shoAvn in the speeches or Avritings attributed to them, and it has been argued there- from that a knoAvledge of Greek must have been common among the rank and file. But even though Peter and James and John Avere the authors of the speeches and Avritings referred to, and did sjieak or Avrite such Greek as is found therein, Avhich is open to question, they cannot fairly be regarded as representative of the people generally in this respect. The very fact of their not only being of the number of the Twelve, but forming the inner group of that favoured circle, difi'erentiates them from the croAvd. ' Unlearned and ignorant men,' the Council at Jerusalem dubbed them (Ac 4^^) ; but the contemjrtuous epithets were but the expression of a tAvofold prejudice, the prejudice of antagonism and the prejudice of the Schools. In virtue of their discipleship, Peter and James and John have to be placed in a difi'erent category from the mass of the people of their social rank, Avho, as compared Avitli them, must have been ' unlearned and ignorant ' in the broader sense of the terms.
3. The case for Aramaic as the prevailing lan- guage of Palestine in the time of Christ, and the language, therefore, Avhich Christ must necessarily have employed generally in His teaching, is thus incontestably established by the direct evidence of the Acts and of Josephus. And though less direct and certain, there is other evidence to the same effect to Avhich reference may be made, and speci- ally that furnished by the Targums and Avhat is knoAA'n as The Aramaic Gospel.
{a) The Targums are Aramaic translations or paraphrases of the OT books, and cover the Avhole
LANGUAGE OF CHRIST
LAST SUPPER
of those books with the exception of Daniel, Ezra, and Nehemiah. The two principal Targunis are ( 1 ) that on the Pentateuch, known as the Targum of Onkelos, which is characterized by its almost slavish literalism ; and (2) that of Jonathan ben- Uzziel on the Prophets, i.e. the Historical books and the Projjhets properly so called, which is largely paraphrastic. The dates of these Targums are uncertain, and by scholars they have been made to range from the end of the 1st to that of the 4th cent. a.d. The important point, however, is that they undoubtedly embody material from a much earlier time, and Avere the outcome of the practice, originating in the gi'adual disuse of Hebrew as the vernacular, of translating the synagogue readings of the OT into Aramaic for the benelit of the people generally. Written Tar- gums were at first forbidden. The ti'anslation Avas required to be oral, the translator (i?^"!{i9) giving his translation after each verse of the Pentateuch and every three verses of the Prophets. Whether the rule which forbade written Targums had fallen into desuetude by the time of Christ cannot be de- finitely determined. Probably it had. But even though it had not, and there were no written Targums till a later date, yet the existence of written Targums at that later date points con- clusively to the prevalence of the practice of the oral translation of the synagogue lessons into Aramaic, and therefore to the jjrevalence of that language as the vernacular.
As against this, the supporters of Greek hold that the Septuagint version was in such general use that it may be described as the 'People's Bible.' The special arguments in favour of this theory are :
( 1 ) that copies of the Septuagint could be had at a much smaller cost than Hebi'ew or Aramaic MSS, that indeed the price of the latter was prohibitive so far as the people generally were concerned ; and
(2) that the OT quotations in the NT point to a very general familiarity with the Septuagint, in- asmuch as the majority of them are verbatim or practically verbatim, or show unmistakable traces of the Septuagint, and particularly as in some cases the Septuagint is followed when it differs from the Hebrew. The price argument scarcely deserves notice, and very little weight is to be attached to the quotation argument. For while it muse be admitted that those who were -responsible for the quotations were familiar with the Septua- gint, it by no means follows that such familiarity obtained with the people generally. And while it was to be expected that the writers of the NT books would not only be familiiir with the Septua- gint, but in quoting from the OT would take ad- vantage of a translation ready to hand, it is yet a significant fact that that translation was not always taken advantage of, not a few of the quot;itions showing an entire independence of the Septuagint.