Most religious scholars and historians agree with Pope Francis that the historical Jesus principally spoke a Galilean dialect of Aramaic.
Aramaic is best known as the language Jesus spoke. It is a Semitic language originating in the middle Euphrates. In 800-600 BC it spread from there to Syria and Mesopotamia.
These questions lead me to reconsider Aramaic's dominance in the first century CE. Contrary to contemporary scholarship, I find that Greek was more widely used in both written and oral form by Jesus, his disciples, and the Jews who inhabited first-century Palestine.
Gleaves presents some instances in the New Testament where Jesus spoke with people who would have likely spoken Greek rather than Aramaic (Pilate, a centurion, a Syrophoenician woman, the Greeks who sought him in John 12). He points out that Jesus and his disciples often alluded to or quoted Greek from the LXX (18).
The consensus of modern scholars is that the New Testament was written in Greek and that an Aramaic source text was used for portions of the New Testament, especially the gospels.
The books of the Christian New Testament are widely agreed to have originally been written in Greek, specifically Koine Greek, even though some authors often included translations from Hebrew and Aramaic texts.
The Hebrew Bible was written in Hebrew. Its Greek translation, the Septuagint, made it accessible in the Hellenistic period (c. 300 BCE–c. 300 CE) and provided a language for the New Testament and for the Christian liturgy and theology of the first three centuries CE.
The essential uses of the name of God the Father in the New Testament are Theos (θεός the Greek term for God), Kyrios (i.e. Lord in Greek) and Patēr (πατήρ i.e. Father in Greek). The Aramaic word "Abba" (אבא), meaning "Father" is used by Jesus in Mark 14:36 and also appears in Romans 8:15 and Galatians 4:6.
The Aramaic word for God is אלהא Elāhā ( Biblical Aramaic) and ܐܠܗܐ Alāhā ( Syriac), which comes from the same Proto- Semitic word (* ʾil-) as the Arabic and Hebrew terms; Jesus is described in Mark 15:34 as having used the word on the cross, with the ending meaning "my", when saying, "My God, my God, why hast Thou ...
Although it is known (from his biography and from Acts) that Paul could and did speak Aramaic, modern scholarship suggests that Koine Greek was his first language.
The Adamic language, according to Jewish tradition (as recorded in the midrashim) and some Christians, is the language spoken by Adam (and possibly Eve) in the Garden of Eden.
Even if Peter did pursue education later in life, there is little indication that Peter would have learnt or spoke fluent Greek in his livelihood before Jesus's call, as multilingualism was generally only seen in towns closely involved in trade.
The Gospel According to Matthew was composed in Greek, probably sometime after 70 ce, with evident dependence on the earlier Gospel According to Mark. There has, however, been extended discussion about the possibility of an earlier version in Aramaic.
In addition to Aramaic and Hebrew, Greek and Latin were also common in Jesus' time.
There's scholarly consensus that the historical Jesus principally spoke Aramaic, the ancient Semitic language which was the everyday tongue in the lands of the Levant and Mesopotamia. Hebrew was more the preserve of clerics and religious scholars, a written language for holy scriptures.
It is written as ܐܠܗܐ (ʼĔlāhā) in Biblical Aramaic and ܐܲܠܵܗܵܐ (ʼAlāhā) in Syriac as used by the Assyrian Church, both meaning simply "God".
Though Muslims and Christians can describe Allah and Yahweh in similar ways at times, they are not the same god.
Allah and the god of the Bible
Arabic-speaking Christians call God Allah, and Gideon bibles, quoting John 3:16 in different languages, assert that Allah sent his son into the world.
Yeshua in Hebrew is a verbal derivative from "to rescue", "to deliver". Among the Jews of the Second Temple period, the Biblical Aramaic/Hebrew name יֵשׁוּעַ, Yēšūaʿ was common: the Hebrew Bible mentions several individuals with this name – while also using their full name Joshua.
Jesus' name in Hebrew was “Yeshua” which translates to English as Joshua. So how did we get the name “Jesus”?
The Aramaic term abba (אבא, Hebrew: אב (av), "father") appears in traditional Jewish liturgy and Jewish prayers to God, e.g. in the Kaddish (קדיש, Qaddish Aramaic, Hebrew: קדש (Qādash), "holy").
The meaning of the name Yeshua is "Yahweh is salvation", or "Yahweh saves", and is alluded to in Matthew 1:21 and Luke 2:21.
According to tradition, Ptolemy II Philadelphus (the Greek Pharaoh of Egypt) sent seventy-two Jewish translators—six from each of the Twelve Tribes of Israel—from Jerusalem to Alexandria to translate the Tanakh from Biblical Hebrew into Koine Greek, for inclusion in his library.
As a Jew living in the Diaspora (that is, outside Palestine), Paul wrote his letters in Greek, the lingua franca of the ancient Mediterranean. Though he appears not to have known Aramaic, the dominant language of ancient Palestine, debate persists over whether Paul could read the Bible in its original Hebrew.
Divine language, the language of the gods, or, in monotheism, the language of God (or angels), is the concept of a mystical or divine proto-language, which predates and supersedes human speech.