Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

It is impossible to talk about Jesus without mentioning his language—not whether he spoke Aramaic, and also Hebrew or Greek. That question can be quickly answered: in Galilee, that is, where Jesus grew up, people spoke a West-Aramaic dialect. It was no different in Jerusalem, apart from a somewhat different accent. Aramaic was the common language, and it was also Jesus’ everyday language. The gospel tradition gives us only a few of the Aramaic words Jesus used: for example, ’abba’ = my father (Mark 14:36), gehinnam = hell (Mark 9:43), ’elohi

= my God (Mark 15:34), ’ippetach = open! (Mark 7:34), kepa’ = rock (John 1:42), qorban = sacrificial offering (Mark 7:11), mamona’

= property (Matt 6:24), pasḥa’ = Passover (Mark 14:1), rabbuni = my lord (Mark 10:51), reqa’ = fool (Matt 5:22), telita’ qum

= little girl, get up! (Mark 5:41).

Jesus heard Hebrew in the synagogue when the Sacred Scriptures were read. Probably he knew long passages from the Hebrew Bible by heart. And fragmentary knowledge of Greek was probably indispensable for him as a worker in the building trades. It is possible that Jesus worked for years in Sepphoris, which was only about four miles from Nazareth. That city had been completely destroyed after an insurrection; this was done by the Roman legate Publius Quintilius Varus, the later loser of the so-called Varus battle in Germania. In the time of Jesus, Sepphoris was rebuilt on Herod Antipas’s orders.

Creative Language

But none of that is what we mean by Jesus’ “language.” We are referring to his speaking style, his way of putting the reality of the reign of God into words. It would be revealing if Jesus had used an imprecise, vague, or bombastic style. In that case we would simply say, “Your speech betrays you.” But the case is exactly the opposite. Jesus’ language was accurate. It was specific and precise. It was concise and pointed. There was not an ounce of extra fat in it. For example, one day while he was speaking, a woman in the crowd interrupted and shouted at him: “Blessed the womb that bore you, and the breasts that nursed you” (Luke 11:27). In many translations and commentaries this shout is entitled “benediction of Jesus’ mother.” But that simply misses the point of what the woman was saying, because it is Jesus himself who is being called blessed here; this is done by exalting his mother. That is good oriental style (and not unknown in Greek culture, either). In the East one praises someone by praising his or her mother and abuses someone by slandering her or his mother.¹

But how does Jesus respond to this shout of “blessed the womb that bore you”? He answers: “Rather: blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it” (Luke 11:28).

What is that all about? An official correction of what the woman had said? Certainly not! The woman had paid Jesus a compliment. As a polite oriental gentleman, Jesus offers a compliment in return. The woman, after all, had been listening to him. Therefore, she herself is being called blessed.

But at the same time Jesus’ answer contains a very tactful clarification. He does not praise this woman alone as blessed but includes all the listeners in his reciprocal compliment. Certainly he could not say, “Rather: blessed are you who hear the word of God and keep it,” because Jesus cannot tell whether everyone in the crowd is keeping God’s word. Therefore the indirect “blessed are those” is altogether appropriate here. And yet that by no means exhausts what Jesus’ clarification contains, for he not only opens the reciprocal compliment to a larger group of people, ultimately the “new family” now coming to be in Israel (cf. Mark 3:35). No, he also indicates that “hearing” alone is insufficient. “Doing” has to follow. Ultimately he even says: it is not a matter of admiring me as a person but of doing the word of God.

How many words have I just used, and had to use, to explicate Luke 11:27-28! Jesus was better. He said it all in a single brief statement that could scarcely have been formulated more succinctly. A polite return compliment—and yet at the same time a whole block of theology, for this little statement made it clear to everyone that the listeners, when they heard Jesus, were hearing the word of God itself.

Obviously such brevity and exactness are also connected to the catechetical aims of the later gospel tradition: Jesus’ words and parables were used for preaching and baptismal instruction after Easter. For that purpose they had to be compressed and divided and shaped in such a way that they could be easily remembered. The strict form of many of these texts thus rests on the necessities of the later tradition.