The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

THE ARAMAIC BACKGROUND OF THE NEW TESTAMENT
Max Wilcox
Research into the Aramaic background of the New Testament practically
from its outset has been overwhelmingly concerned with questions
of philology, and also to some extent, source criticism.
These quite properly included the following: (a) how to define,
identify and isolate, Aramaisms; (b) which dialect or dialects may be
reflected in them; (c) which texts provide the most appropriate data
for establishing this; (d) whether or not they are all from the same
dialect; (e) whether they may not be due merely to conscious or
unconscious influence of the [!] translation idiom of the LXX or of one
or more of the other known Greek Old Testament versions; or
(f) whether the expressions in question may after all be due not to
some kind of Aramaic influence on the Greek but simply to the use of
the Koine.
The results were then looked at for their contribution to the solution
of problems of sources and composition of the Gospels and Acts.
However, none of these approaches paid serious attention to the
historical setting within which Jesus and his early followers lived and
worked, namely, Jewish society of the first century CE.
This may have been understandable in the first half of this century,
but the discoveries in the Judaean desert, from Qumran to Nahal
Hever, have changed the ground rules. We now have actual texts,
religious, political and personal in Aramaic, Proto-Mishnaic Hebrew
and Greek, a good many clearly dated to the first and early second
centuries CE. We also have, at long last, the emergence of concern for
the social history of that period—the history not only of the so-called
'great and glorious' but of the ordinary people who had to grapple
with the day-to-day economic, cultural and political upheavals of their
society, and who—according to the Gospel record—were the object of
so much of Jesus' attention. Here the Masada evidence, so far as it
goes, seems to indicate that Aramaic was the major language and in