108 John C. Poirier n dialect” often denotes a language held by the ethnic group n, has con- tributed to the widespread view that, when Acts refers to Paul addressing a crowd in “the Hebrew dialect”, it really means that he spoke Aramaic.3 This view has held the day within the majority of commentaries, as well as within footnotes to translations (e.g., NRSV), and has even caused at least one popular translation (the NIV) to translate τῇ Ἑβραΐδι διαλέκτῳ as “Aramaic”. The notion that Paul would have addressed the crowd in Aramaic goes back at least as far as John Calvin: in his Commentary on Acts (ad 22,2), he writes that “it is uncertain whether Paul spoke in the Hebrew or in the Syrian tongue”.4 In sources nearly contemporaneous with Acts, does “Hebrew” ever mean Aramaic? Ken Penner consulted the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae in connection with the Septuagint, Josephus, Philo, the New Testament, and Greek authors in general up to the third century, and Sokoloff’s Jewish Palestinian Aramaic dictionary, Jastrow’s dictionary of rabbinic Hebrew and Aramaic, and the Qumran Scrolls in connection with Ara- maic and Hebrew writings, and he claims to have found no instance, prior to Eusebius (4th c. CE), in which “Hebrew” denotes Aramaic.5 It is true that confusion sets in with Eusebius, as Penner notes, but there is little warrant for reading this confusion into the New Testament. As I argue below, the interpretation of τῇ Ἑβραΐδι διαλέκτῳ as “Hebrew” is also supported by the (seldom consulted) logic of the narratives in Acts. G. Dalman, Jesus–Jeshua: Studies in the Gospels (London 1929) 18, writes “The ut- 3 terance of the voice heard by Saul of Tarsus on the way to Damascus was in ‘the Hebrew language’ (Acts xxvi. 14), i.e. in Aramaic, the language in which our Lord used to speak, and which was also that of Saul”. Cf. E. Haenchen, The Acts of the Apostles: A Commen- tary (Oxford 1971) 620, “Paul begins an Aramaic address”; F. Millar, The Roman Near East: 31 BC - AD 337 (Cambridge, MA 1993) 364-5, “But then [Paul] turns to the crowd and addresses them ‘in Hebrew dialect’–by which, if he understood the distinction at all, the author of Acts ought to have meant Aramaic”. Given the years Paul spent in Arabia, there is little doubt that he knew Aramaic. Penner, “Did Paul Speak Hebrew?”. The view that the New Testament could mean 4 “Aramaic” when it says “Hebrew” is actually an old one: F.J. Thomson, “SS. Cyril and Methodius and a Mythical Western Heresy: Trilinguism: A Contribution to the Study of Patristic and Mediaeval Theories of Sacred Languages”, AnBoll 110 (1992) 67-122, esp. 76, points out that the fifth-century writer Nonnus had already supplied “Aramaic, Latin, and Greek” for Jn 19,20’s notice that the superscription on the cross was in “Hebrew, Latin, and Greek”. Penner explains the fact that a number of Aramaic or Aramaic-looking words are 5 labeled as “Hebrew” in John (e.g., “Bethesda” [5,2], “Gabbatha” [19,13], “Golgotha” [19,17]) as due to their being proper nouns. He gives the example of referring to “Nova Scotia” as the “English” name for Nouvelle Ecosse, when in fact what is being called “English” is really Latin (“Did Paul Speak Hebrew?”). For a table of Aramaic words in the New Testament, see A. Millard, Reading and Writing in the Time of Jesus (Sheffield 2001) 142.