The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

374 The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context
impending liberation of Israel, 27 seen as the fulfilment of God's
promise or oath to Abraham. If now we take all of this together, we
may be forgiven for suspecting that running through parts of the
Gospel of Luke there is a strand of thought and tradition which coheres
surprisingly closely with what we know of how certain movements
within first and early second century Jewish society viewed their own
role: that of bringing (God's) liberation to Israel/Jerusalem. Given
further that the movement under Shimon bar Kosba certainly, and
some of the leaders of the First Revolt probably, 28 used Aramaic and
(Proto-Mishnaic) Hebrew as their preferred language(s) of communication,
it may be worth asking whether apparent Aramaisms (and/or
Hebraisms) in Lk. 1-2 and 24 may not have a rather greater claim to
be taken seriously as such than they might have if they had been found
in other settings, whether in Luke or elsewhere. It also emerges that
of the two languages Aramaic seems to predominate. However, at
Masada all three languages, Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek are found,
and in so far as the Greek material can be adequately assessed—it is
often in fairly fragmented state—it indicates that that language was on
the whole well-written: the editors of the Masada Greek documents
comment on 'the most remarkable fact...the apparent absence of
barbarisms and solecisms such as we encounter, for instance in the
necropolis of Beth Shearim'. 29 This is very important for our purposes,
since it suggests that where Aramaisms or Hebraisms do occur
in the New Testament writings, the chances are that they are all the
more significant than they might have been if we had been expecting a
generally poorer standard of Greek from the writers. If some of them
are bilingual, or if they had good translators, the chances are that the
work would be broadly well done—which is exactly what we find.
27. This revolutionary fervour was noted and discussed in detail by Paul Winter
in a number of valuable articles published in 1954-56, especially The Birth and
Infancy Stories of the Third Gospel', NTS 1 (1954-55), pp. 111-21; and
'Magnificat and Benedictus—Maccabaean Psalms?' BJRL 37 (1954-55), 328-47.
28. For the First Revolt, the discovery at Masada of a jar inscribed with the name
'Aqavia son of the High Priest H[anania]h' in Aramaic suggests that even people of
more prominent social status used Aramaic (Masada No. 461 (1237-878/1). See
Masada I, pp. 37-38.
29. Masada II. The Yigael Yadin Excavations 1963-65. Final Reports. The Latin
and Greek Documents, (ed. H.M. Cotton and J. Geiger, with a contribution by
J.D. Thomas; Jerusalem, 1989), p. 10.