Hughson T. Ong, «An Evaluation of the Aramaic Greek Language Criteria in Historical Jesus Research: a Sociolinguistic Study of Mark 14,32-65.», Vol. 25 (2012) 37-55

Did Jesus ever speak in Greek? This is the question I have sought to answer in this paper. Using M. Casey’s Aramaic and S.E. Porter’s Greek hypotheses as my starting point, I attempt to show based on sociolinguistic principles that Jesus must have been fluent and would have used Greek and Aramaic in his daily conversation with various audiences in different linguistic situations and contexts. Specifically, I show that the sociolinguistic situation in the three chronological episodes of Mark 14,32-65 necessitates a code-switch on Jesus’ part by virtue of his multilingual environment.