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 [1] " 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. [2] 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: 'Elwi, elwi, lama sabacqanei. 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,
