Leipzig, 1896. 166 pp.
_Hans Lietzmann._ Der Menschensohn. Ein Beitrag zur
neutestamentlichen Theologie. (The Son of Man. A Contribution to
New Testament Theology.) Freiburg, 1896. 95 pp.
_J. Wellhausen._ Israelitische und jüdische Geschichte. (History
of Israel and the Jews.) 3rd ed., 1897; 4th ed., 1901. 394 pp.
_Gustaf Dalman._ Grammatik des jüdisch‐palästinensischen
Aramäisch. (Grammar of Jewish‐Palestinian Aramaic.) Leipzig, 1894.
Die Worte Jesu. Mit Berücksichtigung des nachkanonischen jüdischen
Schrifttums und der aramäischen Sprache. (The Sayings of Jesus
considered in connexion with the post‐canonical Jewish writings
and the Aramaic Language.) I. Introduction and certain leading
conceptions: with an appendix on Messianic texts. Leipzig, 1898.
309 pp.
_A. Wünsche._ Neue Beiträge zur Erläuterung der Evangelien aus
Talmud und Midrasch. (New Contributions to the Explanation of the
Gospels, from Talmud and Midrash.) Göttingen, 1878. 566 pp.
_Ferdinand Weber._ System der altsynagogalen palästinensischen
Theologie. (System of Theology of the Ancient Palestinian
Synagogue.) Leipzig, 1880. 399 pp. 2nd ed., 1897.
_Rudolf Seydel._ Das Evangelium Jesu in seinen Verhältnissen zur
Buddha‐Sage und Buddha‐Lehre. (The Gospel of Jesus in its
relations to the Buddha‐Legend and the Teaching of Buddha.)
Leipzig, 1882. 337 pp. Die Buddha‐Legende und das Leben Jesu nach
den Evangelien. Erneute Prüfung ihres gegenseitigen Verhältnisses.
(The Buddha‐Legend and the Life of Jesus in the Gospels. A New
Examination of their Mutual Relations.) 2nd ed., 1897. 129 pp.
Only since the appearance of Dalman’s Grammar of Jewish Palestinian
Aramaic in 1894 have we really known what was the dialect in which the
Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount were spoken. This work closes a
discussion which had been proceeding for centuries on a line parallel to
that of theology proper, and which, according to the clear description of
Arnold Meyer, ran its course somewhat as follows.(188)
The question regarding the language spoken by Jesus had been vigorously
discussed in the sixteenth century. Up till that time no one had known
what to make of the tradition recorded by Eusebius that the speech of the
apostles had been “Syrian” since the distinction between Syrian, Hebrew,
and “Chaldee” was not understood and all three designations were used
indiscriminately. Light was first thrown upon the question by Joseph
Justus Scaliger († 1609). In the year 1555, Joh. Alb. Widmanstadt,
Chancellor of Ferdinand I., had published the Syriac translation of the
Bible in fulfilment of the wishes of an old scholar of Bologna, Theseus
Ambrosius, who had left him the manuscript as a sacred legacy. He himself
and his contemporaries believed that in this they had the Gospel in the
mother‐tongue of Jesus, until Scaliger, in one of his letters, gave a
clear sketch of the Syrian dialects, distinguished Syriac from Chaldee,
and further drew a distinction between the Babylonian Chaldee and Jewish
Chaldee of the Targums, and in the language of the Targums itself
distinguished an earlier from a later stratum. The apostles spoke,
according to Scaliger, a Galilaean dialect of Chaldaic, or according to
the more correct nomenclature introduced later, following a suggestion of
Scaliger’s, a dialect of Aramaic, and, in addition to that, the Syriac of
Antioch. Next, Hugo Grotius put in a strong plea for a distinction between
Jewish and Antiochian Syriac. Into the confusion caused at that time by
the use of the term “Hebrew” some order was introduced by the Leyden
Calvinistic professor Claude Saumaise, who, writing in French, emphasised
the point that the New Testament, and the Early Fathers, when they speak
of Hebrew, mean Syriac, since Hebrew had become completely unknown to the
Jews of that period. Brian Walton, the editor of the London polyglot,
which was completed in 1657, supposed that the dialect of Onkelos and
Jonathan was the language of Jesus, being under the impression that both
these Targums were written in the time of Jesus.
The growing knowledge of the distinction between Hebrew and Aramaic did
not prevent the Vienna Jesuit Inchofer († 1648) from maintaining that
Jesus spoke—Latin! The Lord cannot have used any other language upon
earth, since this is the language of the saints in heaven. On the
Protestant side, Vossius, opposing Richard Simon, endeavoured to establish
the thesis that Greek was the language of Jesus, being partly inspired by
the apologetic purpose of preventing the authenticity of the discourses
and sayings of Jesus from being weakened by supposing them to have been
translated from Aramaic into Greek, but also rightly recognising the
importance which the Greek language must have assumed at that time in
northern Palestine, through which there passed such important trade
routes.
This view was brought up again by the Neapolitan legal scholar, Dominicus
Diodati, in his book _De Christo Graece loquente_, 1767, who added some
interesting material concerning the importance of the Greek language at
the period and in the native district of Jesus. But five years later, in
1772, this view was thoroughly refuted by Giambernardo de Rossi,(189) who
argued convincingly that among a people so separate and so conservative as
the Jews the native language cannot possibly have been wholly driven out.
The apostles wrote Greek for the sake of foreign readers. In the year
1792, Johann Adrian Bolten, “first collegiate pastor at the principal
church in Altona” († 1807), made the first attempt to re‐translate the
sayings of Jesus into the original tongue.(190)
The certainly original Greek of the Epistles and the Johannine literature
was a strong argument against the attempt to recognise no language save
Aramaic as known to Jesus and His disciples. Paulus the rationalist,
therefore, sought a middle path, and explained that while the Aramaic
dialect was indeed the native language of Jesus, Greek had become so
generally current among the population of Galilee, and still more of
Jerusalem, that the founders of Christianity could use this language when
they found it needful to do so. His Catholic contemporary, Hug, came to a
similar conclusion.
In the course of the nineteenth century Aramaic—known down to the time of
Michaelis as “Chaldee”(191)—was more thoroughly studied. The various
branches of this language and the history of its progress became more or
less clearly recognisable. Kautzsch’s grammar of Biblical Aramaic(192)
(1884) and Dalman’s(193) work embody the result of these studies. “The
Aramaic language,” explains Meyer, “is a branch of the North Semitic, the
linguistic stock to which also belong the Assyrio‐Babylonian language in
the East, and the Canaanitish languages, including Hebrew, in the West,
while the South Semitic languages—the Arabic and Aethiopic—form a group by
themselves.” The users of these languages, the Aramaeans, were seated in
historic times between the Babylonians and Canaanites, the area of their
distribution extending from the foot of Lebanon and Hermon in a north‐
easterly direction as far as Mesopotamia, where “Aram of the two rivers”
forms their easternmost province. Their immigration into these regions
forms the third epoch of the Semitic migrations, which probably lasted
from 1600 B.C. down to 600.
The Aramaic states had no great stability. The most important of them was
the kingdom of Damascus, which at a certain period was so dangerous an
enemy to northern Israel. In the end, however, the Aramaean dynasties were
crushed, like the two Israelitish kingdoms, between the upper and nether
millstones of Babylon and Egypt. In the time of the successors of
Alexander, there arose in these regions the Syrian kingdom; which in turn
gave place to the Roman power.
But linguistically the Aramaeans conquered the whole of Western Asia. In
the course of the first millennium B.C. Aramaic became the language of
commerce and diplomacy, as Babylonian had been during the second. It was
only the rise of Greek as a universal language which put a term to these
conquests of the Aramaic.
In the year 701 B.C. Aramaic had not yet penetrated to Judaea. When the
_rabshakeh_ (officer) sent by Sennacherib addressed the envoys of Hezekiah
in Hebrew, they begged him to speak Aramaic in order that the men upon the
wall might not understand.(194) For the post‐exilic period the Aramaic
edicts in the Book of Ezra and inscriptions on Persian coins show that
throughout wide districts of the new empire Aramaic had made good its
position as the language of common intercourse. Its domain extended from
the Euxine southwards as far as Egypt, and even into Egypt itself. Samaria
and the Hauran adopted it. Only the Greek towns and Phoenicia resisted.
The influence of Aramaic upon Jewish literature begins to be noticeable
about the year 600. Jeremiah and Ezekiel, writing in a foreign land in an
Aramaic environment, are the first witnesses to its supremacy. In the
northern part of the country, owing to the immigration of foreign
colonists after the destruction of the northern kingdom, it had already
gained a hold upon the common people. In the Book of Daniel, written in
the year 167 B.C., the Hebrew and Aramaic languages alternate. Perhaps,
indeed, we ought to assume an Aramaic ground‐document as the basis of this
work.
At what time Aramaic became the common popular speech in the post‐exilic
community we cannot exactly discover. Under Nehemiah “Judaean,” that is to
say, Hebrew, was still spoken in Jerusalem; in the time of the Maccabees
Aramaic seems to have wholly driven out the ancient national language.
Evidence for this is to be found in the occurrence of Aramaic passages in
the Talmud, from which it is evident that the Rabbis used this language in
the religious instruction of the people. The provision that the text,
after being read in Hebrew, should be interpreted to the people, may quite
well reach back into the time of Jesus. The first evidence for the
practice is in the Mishna, about A.D. 150.
In the time of Jesus three languages met in Galilee—Hebrew, Aramaic, and
Greek. In what relation they stood to each other we do not know, since
Josephus, the only writer who could have told us, fails us in this point,
as he so often does elsewhere. He informs us that when acting as an envoy
of Titus he spoke to the people of Jerusalem in the ancestral language,
and the word he uses is ἑβραΐζων. But the very thing we should like to
know—whether, namely, this language was Aramaic or Hebrew, he does not
tell us. We are left in the same uncertainty by the passage in Acts (xxii.
2) which says that Paul spoke to the people Ἑβραΐδι διαλέκτῳ, thereby
gaining their attention, for there is no indication whether the language
was Aramaic or Hebrew. For the writers of that period “Hebrew” simply
means Jewish.
We cannot, therefore, be sure in what relation the ancient Hebrew sacred
language and the Aramaic of ordinary intercourse stood to one another as
regards religious writings and religious instruction. Did the ordinary man
merely learn by heart a few verses, prayers, and psalms? Or was Hebrew, as
the language of the cultus, also current in wider circles?
Dalman gives a number of examples of works written in Hebrew in the
century which witnessed the birth of Christ: “A Hebrew original,” he says,
“must be assumed in the case of the main part of the Aethiopic book of
Enoch, the Assumption of Moses, the Apocalypse of Baruch, Fourth Ezra, the
Book of Jubilees, and for the Jewish ground‐document of the Testament of
the Twelve Patriarchs, of which M. Gaster has discovered a Hebrew
manuscript.” The first Book of Maccabees, too, seems to him to go back to
a Hebrew original. Nevertheless, he holds it to be impossible that
synagogue discourses intended for the people can have been delivered in
Hebrew, or that Jesus taught otherwise than in Aramaic.
Franz Delitzsch’s view, on the other hand, is that Jesus and the disciples
taught in Hebrew; and that is the opinion of Resch also. Adolf
Neubauer,(195) Reader in Rabbinical Hebrew at Oxford, attempted a
compromise. It was certainly the case, he thought, that in the time of
Jesus Aramaic was spoken throughout Palestine; but whereas in Galilee this
language had an exclusive dominance, and the knowledge of Hebrew was
confined to texts learned by heart, in Jerusalem Hebrew had renewed itself
by the adoption of Aramaic elements, and a kind of Neo‐Hebraic language
had arisen. This solution at least testifies to the difficulty of the
question. The fact is that from the language of the New Testament it is
often difficult to make out whether the underlying words are Hebrew or
Aramaic. Thus, for instance, Dalman remarks—with reference to the question
whether the statement of Papias refers to a Hebrew or an Aramaic
“primitive Matthew”—that it is difficult “to produce proof of an Aramaic
as distinct from a Hebrew source, because it is often the case in Biblical
Hebrew, and still more often in the idiom of the Mishna, that the same
expressions and forms of phrase are possible as in Aramaic.”
Delitzsch’s(196) “retranslation” of the New Testament into Hebrew is
therefore historically justified.
But the question about the language of Jesus must not be confused with the
problem of the original language of the primitive form of Matthew’s
Gospel. In reference to the latter, Dalman thinks that the tradition of
the Early Church regarding an earlier Aramaic form of the Gospel must be
considered as lacking confirmation. “It is only in the case of Jesus’ own
words that an Aramaic original form is undeniable, and it is only for
these that Early Church tradition asserted the existence of a Semitic
documentary source. It is, therefore, the right and duty of Biblical
scholarship to investigate the form which the sayings of Jesus must have
taken in the original and the sense which in this form they must have
conveyed to Jewish hearers.”
That Jesus spoke Aramaic, Meyer has shown by collecting all the Aramaic
expressions which occur in His preaching.(197) He considers the “Abba” in
Gethsemane decisive, for this means that Jesus prayed in Aramaic in His
hour of bitterest need. Again the cry from the cross was, according to
Mark xv. 34, also Aramaic: Ἑλωΐ, ἑλωΐ, λαμὰ σαβαχθανεὶ. The Old Testament
was therefore most familiar to Him in an Aramaic translation, otherwise
this form of the Psalm passage would not have come to His lips at the
moment of death.
It is a quite independent question whether Jesus could speak, or at least
understand, Greek. According to Josephus the knowledge of Greek in
Palestine at that time, even among educated Jews, can only have been of a
quite elementary character. He himself had to learn it laboriously in
order to be able to write in it. His “Jewish War” was first written in
Aramaic for his fellow‐countrymen; the Greek edition was, by his own
avowal, not intended for them. In another passage, it is true, he seems to
imply a knowledge of, and interest in, foreign languages even among people
in humble life.(198)
An analogy, which is in many respects very close, to the linguistic
conditions in Palestine was offered by Alsace under French rule in the
’sixties of the nineteenth century. Here, too, three languages met in the
same district. The High‐German of Luther’s translation of the Bible was
the language of the Church, the Alemannic dialect was the usual speech of
the people, while French was the language of culture and of government
administration. This remarkable analogy would be rather in favour—if
analogy can be admitted to have any weight in the question—of Delitzsch
and Resch, since the Biblical High‐German, although never spoken in social
intercourse, strongly influenced the Alemannic dialect—although this was,
on the other hand, quite uninfluenced by Modern High‐German—but did not
allow it to penetrate into Church or school, there maintaining for itself
an undivided sway. French made some progress, but only in certain circles,
and remained entirely excluded from the religious sphere. The Alsatians of
the poorer classes who could at that time have repeated the Lord’s Prayer
or the Beatitudes in French would not have been difficult to count. The
Lutheran translation still holds its own to some extent against the French
translation with the older generation of the Alsatian community in Paris,
which has in other respects become completely French—so strong is the
influence of a former ecclesiastical language even among those who have
left their native home. There is one factor, however, which is not
represented in the analogy; the influence of the Greek‐speaking Jews of
the Diaspora, who gathered to the Feasts at Jerusalem, upon the extension
of the Greek language in the mother‐country.
Jesus, then, spoke Galilaean Aramaic, which is known to us as a separate
dialect from writings of the fourth to the seventh century. For the
Judaean dialect we have more and earlier evidence. We have literary
monuments in it from the first to the third century. “It is very
probable,” Dalman thinks, “that the popular dialect of Northern Palestine,
after the final fall of the Judaean centre of the Aramaic‐Jewish culture,
which followed on the Bar‐Cochba rising, spread over almost the whole of
Palestine.”
The retranslations into Aramaic are therefore justified. After J. A.
Bolten’s attempt had remained for nearly a hundred years the only one of
its kind, the experiment has been renewed in our own time by J. T.
Marshall, E. Nestle, J. Wellhausen, Arnold Meyer, and Gustaf Dalman; in
the case of Marshall and Nestle with the subsidiary purpose of
endeavouring to prove the existence of an Aramaic documentary source.
These retranslations first attracted their due meed of attention from
theologians in connexion with the Son‐of‐Man question. Rarely, if ever,
have theologians experienced such a surprise as was sprung upon them by
Hans Lietzmann’s essay in 1896.(199) Jesus had never, so ran the thesis of
the Bonn candidate in theology, applied to Himself the title Son of Man,
because in the Aramaic the title did not exist, and on linguistic grounds
could not have existed. In the language which He used, בן אנש was merely a
periphrasis for “a man.” That Jesus meant Himself when He spoke of the Son
of Man, none of His hearers could have suspected.
Lietzmann had not been without predecessors.(200) Gilbert Génébrard, who
died Archbishop of Aix as long ago as 1597, had emphasised the point that
the term Son of Man should not be interpreted with reference solely to
Christ, but to the race of mankind. Hugo Grotius maintained the same
position even more emphatically. With a quite modern one‐sidedness, Paulus
the rationalist maintained in his commentaries and in his Life of Jesus
that according to Ezek. ii. 1 “Barnash” meant man in general. Jesus, he
thought, whenever He used the expression the Son of Man, pointed to
Himself and thus gave it the sense of “this man.” In taking this line he
gives up the general reference to mankind as a whole for which Mark ii. 28
is generally cited as the classical passage. The suggestion that the term
Son of Man in its apocalyptic signification was first attributed to Jesus
at a later time and that the passages where it occurs in this sense are
therefore suspicious, was first put forward by Fr. Aug. Fritzsche. He
hoped in this way to get rid of Matt. x. 23. De Lagarde, like Paulus,
emphatically asserted that Son of Man only meant man. But instead of the
clumsy explanation of the rationalist he gave another and a more pleasing
one, namely, that Jesus by choosing this title designed to ennoble
mankind. Wellhausen, in his “History of Israel and of the Jews” (1894),
remarked on it as strange that Jesus should have called Himself “the Man.”
B. D. Eerdmans, taking the apocalyptic significance of the term as his
starting‐point, attempted to carry out consistently the theory of the
later interpolation of this title into the sayings of Jesus.(201)
Thus Lietzmann had predecessors; but they were not so in any real sense.
They had either started out from the Marcan passage where the Son of Man
is described as the Lord of the Sabbath, and endeavoured arbitrarily to
interpret all the Son‐of‐Man passages in the same sense; or they assumed
without sufficient grounds that the title Son of Man was a later
interpolation. The new idea consisted in combining the two attempts, and
declaring the passages about the Son of Man to be linguistically and
historically impossible, seeing that, on linguistic grounds, “son of man”
means “man.”
Arnold Meyer and Wellhausen expressed themselves in the same sense as
Lietzmann. The passages where Jesus uses the expression in an unmistakably
Messianic sense are, according to them, to be put down to the account of
Early Christian theology. The only passages which in their opinion are
historically tenable are the two or three in which the expression denotes
man in general, or is equivalent to the simple “I.” These latter were felt
to be a difficulty by the Church when it came to think in Greek, since
this way of speaking of oneself was strange to them; consequently the
expression appeared to them deliberately enigmatic and only capable of
being interpreted in the sense which it bears in Daniel. The Son‐of‐Man
conception, argued Lietzmann, when he again approached the question two
years later, had arisen in a Hellenistic environment,(202) on the basis of
Dan. vii. 13; N. Schmidt,(203) too, saw in the apocalyptic Bar‐Nasha
passages which follow the revelation of the Messiahship at Caesarea
Philippi an interpolation from the later apocalyptic theology. On the
other hand, P. Schmiedel still wished to make it a Messianic designation,
and to take it as being historical in this sense even in passages in which
the term man “gave a possible sense.”(204) H. Gunkel thought that it was
possible to translate Bar‐Nasha simply by “man,” and nevertheless hold to
the historicity of the expression as a self‐designation of Jesus. Jesus,
he suggests, had borrowed this enigmatic term, which goes back to Dan.
vii. 13, from the mystical apocalyptic literature, meaning thereby to
indicate that He was the Man of God in contrast to the Man of Sin.(205)