The Freeman

What Language Did Christ Use?

Prof. Roberts, of St. Andrew's University, Edinburgh, has lately published a little volume under the title "A Short Proof That Greek Was the Language of Christ," in which he reiterates his conviction, expressed in a larger work a number of years since, that the language spoken by Christ was not a dialect of the Hebrew, but a Hebraistic form of Greek, and maintains that in the Greek Testament we possess the teachings of Christ in the original form in which they were uttered. In this little book the learned author dispenses with the subsidiary arguments which appeal rather to Biblical scholars, and confines himself to a single line of reasoning, based upon the evidences that ancient Hebrew was in the time of Christ a dead language, and that a version of the Scriptures was then in wide circulation and familiar to the people in Palestine, which was neither the Hebrew original nor an Aramaic version, but in Greek. Dr. Roberts seems to have overlooked the fact recorded in the 22d chapter of the Acts, that when St. Paul would gain the attention of the Jews at the time of his arrest he addressed them "in the Hebrew language." Nothing could demonstrate more forcibly that the Hebrew was the vernacular of the country at the time, and was the language in which Christ spoke to the people.