This article originally appeared on Religion Dispatches.. Israel’s Prime Minister was arguing with the Pope over what language Jesus spoke” sounds like the setup to a weird joke.

Rediscovering the Language Jesus Spoke Steven Gertz Millions of Americans have spent two hours listening to the characters in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of The Christ speaking in an exotic ...

“We cannot know for sure which languages Jesus spoke,” declared Professor Dineke Houtman, an expert on Judaism and Christianity from the Protestant Theological University in the Netherlands.

As a first century resident of Judea, Jesus likely spoke Aramaic, a Semitic language that survives today in small Christian and Jewish pockets in the Middle East. Aramaic, like Arabic, relies on a ...

We know that the language Jesus spoke most commonly was neither Hebrew nor Greek but his native Aramaic, the language of his home and his primary listeners. Only a handful of Jesus’ exchanges are ...

"We cannot know for certain what languages Jesus spoke. However, given his family background in Nazareth, we can assume that his everyday language was Aramaic," Houtman concluded.

As a man from Nazareth, Jesus most spoke Aramaic - a language that emerged in Syria and shares some similarities with Hebrew. Some have suggested that Jesus' Aramaic name was 'Isho' - a version of ...