From time to time, people ask me quite interesting questions about one of our readings, or about some other Biblical or theological question. I’ve realized that some of the questions and answers may be of more general interest! I thought I’d try writing up and sharing answers to some of these questions from “the Rector’s AMA inbox.” (For anyone who’s blessed not to spend too much time on the Internet, that’s “ask me anything.”) I love answering these kinds of questions, either by email or off the cuff, so feel free to grab me at Coffee Hour or any time and ask!
On Sunday, we read the story of Paul and his companions traveling to Macedonia to spread the Gospel, following a dream in which Paul saw a “man of Macedonia pleading with him and saying, ‘Come over to Macedonia and help us.’” (Acts 16:9) Symbolically, this is a huge deal: the Acts of the Apostles tells the story of the spread of Christianity from east to west, beginning in Jerusalem and ending in Rome, and this brief journey across the sea from Troas to Philippi marks the dividing line between Asia and Europe in both ancient and modern geography. Paul’s missionary journeys spanned much of the ancient Eastern Mediterranean, and so one of you asked me a very good question: How did Paul communicate with people on his travels? i.e., When Paul goes to a quiet place of prayer down by the river to speak with Lydia and her friends, what language did they speak?
It’s a great question. Paul’s journeys landed him, at various points, in areas that are now part of Israel and the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Cyprus, Greece, and Italy; he was just a stone’s throw from parts of modern Macedonia and Bulgaria. These days, if you went on that journey you’d encounter people speaking Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, Greek, and Italian, and not all of the people involved get along particularly well. If you only spoke one of those languages and went on that same journey, you might have an awkward time.
Although, more likely, you’d more or less get by traveling through the region speaking English. And indeed, in the 21st century it’s fairly common to hear two people, from two different countries, neither of whose first language is English, speaking English together; it’s what we call a lingua franca in much of the world.
In the ancient Eastern Mediterranean, the lingua franca was Greek.
The Greek language had always been the native tongue of the coastlands and islands around the Aegean Sea, as well as various cities that originated as Greek colonies in southern Italy and around the coastline of the Black Sea. After the conquests of Alexander the Great, the Greek language spread throughout the former Persian Empire, and became the language of government, administration, and culture, especially in the areas of modern Turkey, Syria, and Egypt.
Greek coexisted, in these areas, with other local languages, to varying extents. So for example, in Egypt, Greek was the official language of the ruling dynasty and the upper class, and coexisted alongside a Greek-influenced form of ancient Egyptian that developed into Coptic. In greater Syria (modern Syria/Lebanon/Israel/Palestine), the same kind of urban/upper-class Greek coexisted along with Aramaic, the dominant language of ordinary people and the countryside. (Because of the way these things work, Aramaic itself had spread as the language of administration used by the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian Empires, and had mostly supplanted earlier local languages, including Hebrew, a few centuries before!) And in areas that were ruled by Greek-speaking governments for longer, local languages like Phyrgian died out entirely.
And Greek was also the language of philosophical and literary discourse in much of the Western Mediterrean, even in areas where people would otherwise speak Latin. This was certainly true for Christians in the West, communicating with other Christians in the East: not only Clement of Rome (writing to Corinth) but Irenaeus of Lyons (in what’s now southern France) wrote in Greek. But this was even true for non-Christians. So, for example, when the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote his philosophical Meditations, he didn’t write them in his native Latin; he wrote in Greek.
Jesus grew up in Galilee, where he certainly spoke Galilean Aramaic and very likely grew up fluent in Hebrew, as well. (Whether Hebrew was still a spoken native language in parts of Judea or Galilee at the time is somewhat debated, although I’m inclined to accept the view that evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Mishnah suggests that it was. Hebrew was definitely in continuous use as a religious language and Jesus would have been steeped in it weekly from birth, in any case.) A local businessman like Joseph would likely have spoken a bit of business Greek, but it’s unlikely that Jesus went around teaching in Greek; while the original versions of the Gospels are written in Greek, this is almost certainly a very early translation of Jesus’ teachings. (We don’t have any Aramaic originals.)
But Paul was a Roman citizen, born and raised in Tarsus in Cilicia. (One of those majority-Greek sections of what’s now the southern coast of Turkey in the map above.) He almost certainly grew up speaking Greek as a native language, and his letters show it. While he doesn’t have the elevated style of a classical Athenian orator, he clearly thinks in Greek. But as an observant and educated Jew, Paul was also intimately familiar with written and spoken Hebrew, and almost certainly fluent in Aramaic.
So: How did Paul communicate with people on his travels? Greek and Aramaic gave him everything he needed! Most of his ministry and most of his letters were written to congregations who shared his native tongue of Greek. Others, like his letter to the Romans, could easily have been translated from Greek to Latin by any educated Roman. And when his travels took him to Jerusalem, or rural parts of Syria, he could get along just fine in Aramaic.
I don’t think this kind of bilingualism was uncommon, but it did sometimes take people by surprised, especially if they didn’t know who Paul was. When he visited Jerusalem, for example, the Roman tribune, thinking that Paul was a rural Egyptian rebel, was surprised to hear Paul address him in Greek (Acts 21:37); but in the same scene, the locals are surprised to hear him address them in Hebraisti, likely in this case meaning “in the Jewish dialect of Aramaic” but possibly (and more literally) “in Hebrew.” (Acts 22:2)
Paul’s ability to communicate in these two idioms both reflects and enables Paul’s remarkable position in the church: as the apostle to the Gentiles par excellence, the one person responsible, more than any other, for the spread of Christianity from its Jewish origins into the Gentile world. In a sense, the question “How did Paul communicate on his travels?” opens up into the whole story of Christianity—not only in the first century, but in the twenty centuries since, in which the stories of Jesus have been translated into and adapted for nearly every language and culture in the world.