I had a number of very interesting conversations with friends and colleagues at the annual Society of Biblical Literature meeting this last week.  There were about 8000 or so biblical scholars, most of them professors in one kind of institution or another, from around the world.  It’s an amazing range of people, some of them quite stunning in their knowledge and insight about Jewish and Christian antiquity in areas I know little or very little about, as well as areas I’ve worked on for many years.

On the other hand, there were lots of other people I ran into who explained to me research they were doing that I thought was, well, really problematic.

I won’t name names.   One friend of mine — a European scholar I’ve known for years — told me he was writing a book meant to show that Jesus taught in Greek.  Now that’s a topic I have thought about and researched for a very long time.  And I think he is completely wrong:  Scholars are virtually unified that Jesus spoke Aramaic, and almost no one in rural Galilee could speak fluent Greek; if anyone knew Greek at all, it was very basic — like when you go to France and learn a couple of phrases to help you order a steak frites or find the bathroom.  Still, I think every hypothesis (this is not a new one!) deserves to be considered based on the evidence, and so I was interested in knowing what he found persuasive.

One thing that strikes me about very smart people is that some find a piece of evidence to be powerful and compelling that others find almost entirely irrelevant and beside the point.  And it is very hard for either one to make sense to the other.

In this case, it seemed very much to me that this person had an agenda (theological) and was scrounging around for anything that would support his view.  (For what it’s worth, I mentioned the conversation to several other colleagues who are equally experts in ancient linguistics, and they all also shook their heads and said … WHAT??

So, his first piece of evidence: in the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount (“Blessed are the poor in spirit, etc.” Matthew 5), there is a series of verses that are nicely alliterated in Greek (words beginning with the same letter): each of the “blessed” groups in Matt 5:3-6 begin with the letter “pi” (English “P”).  Blessed are the poor, the mourning, the meek, the hungry — all four of those start with pi.  That can’t happen if you say the same words in Aramaic, only in Greek.  And so, he argued, for the nice literary effect to work, Jesus had to be speaking Greek.

That’s the kind of argument that a regular ole person might think of as WOW!  Who knew!  I guess Jesus taught in Greek!

But my initial response was (interestingly) the same one all my colleagues had when I related the conversation to them:  Uh, Really?  What makes you think that Jesus actually said these things in precisely these words?

That’s obviously the first question for anyone engaged in a study of the teachings of the historical Jesus.  How do we know what Jesus really taught?   And if he is recorded as teaching something specific using very specific words, how do we know that these are the very words he used?  Matthew — the only Gospel with the Sermon on the Mount — was written some 50 years after Jesus’ death by someone who wasn’t there and certainly did not have access to the stenographic notes.  So how can you assume that these alliterated words go back to Jesus instead of to a later Greek translator.  (I asked him if he’s studied similar phenomena in modern English translations of poetry originally produced, say, in Ancient Greek, where a translator will make it “poetic” in English ways by using rhymes not found in the original Greek.  No, that hadn’t occurred to him, to look into how common the phenomenon is.)

It’s worth pointing out that even though Luke does not have the Sermon on the Mount, he does have the Beatitudes — some of the same ones! — an they are always worded differently from Matthew’s version (usually without the alliterations).

But for this scholar that wasn’t an issue.  Apparently if it’s in the New Testament, Jesus said it.  (Let me repeat, this is a very fine linguist I’m talking about.  But he is also a conservative evangelical Christian who believes in the inerrancy of the Bible).

When he did not see any of these objections as relevant, he moved to the next argument:  Our earliest records of Jesus preaching have him preaching in GREEK.  Isn’t that interesting?  (Surely it shows he spoke in Greek!)

I was again a bit taken aback.  What he was saying is that we should take note of the fact that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are written in Greek.  Uh….   I pointed out that this is not a new discovery.  No one (well virtually no one these days) questions that the Gospels were written in Greek.  What does that have to do with whether Jesus preached in Greek?  (Since all the Gospel writers were Greek speakers and trained in Greek literary composition writing for Greek-speaking audiences —  what OTHER language would you expect them to write in?).

But he was insistent: Jesus’ words are reported in Greek!  Isn’t that interesting?  Well, yes.  But does the fact that I’ve read Anna Karenina three times in English suggest that Tolstoy probably did not compose it in Russian?

So, I suggested that he (my friend with these ideas) do a couple of things to shore up his research. In particular, I suggested he look into the demographics of rural Galilee and the educational systems there (which basically didn’t exist) and the literacy rates rate (extremely low) and the requirements of proficiency in Greek generally in Roman antiquity (many years of education in a Greek school — which did not exist in rural areas, let alone rural areas of Galilee), and the question of whether we have any records of any rural Galilean at the time attaining proficiency in Greek (answer: no).

Another fundamental issue is Jesus’s audience: in the Gospels Jesus preaches in rural Galilee to local inhabitants. We have solid evidence that just about everyone then and there led a hand-to-mouth existence:  poverty was rampant and public education was nowhere, let alone public education in a second language.  I don’t know of any counter-evidence (If you’re interested in such things, read the comprehensive evaluation of Catherine Hezser: Literacy in Roman Palestine).  That being the case: to whom was Jesus preaching in Greek??  Not the impoverished crowds mentioned in the NT!

It is always difficult (OK, impossible) to know the actual concerns motivating a particular historical investigation.  But when a case is argued for a position that fits extremely well with one’s personal religious, philosophical, or otherwise ideological views (for example, that Jesus was a proto-Marxist or a counter-cultural forerunner of the 60s or whatever…) then at least others need to question the case is seriously being advanced on the basis of evidene or if “evidence” is being adduced in support of the case one already believes in.  In this case, it seems to me that the case involves the concern to show that Jesus the inspired teacher delivered teachings that we still have in his original Greek form (making our knowledge of what he says more likely highly accurate) rather than an interest in seeing what is historically plausible.