The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

376 The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context
urgent to take account of the Aramaic (and Proto-Mishnaic Hebrew)
factor in assessing not so much their meaning generally as their
meaning in such contexts. What has been argued here in respect of
Aramaic and Proto-Mishnaic Hebrew in the Jewish society of the first
and second centuries CE could be expected to hold good for other
'native' languages in other parts of the Greek-speaking world.
Bilingualism does not mean that such people speak their 'non-native'
language poorly, but that a degree of unconscious (and perhaps conscious)
accommodation takes place between both languages as they use
them. We may add to that that the people around Bar Kokhba could
clearly handle all three languages—Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek, but
nevertheless showed a conscious resistance to treating Greek as
belonging in their own world. That comes out interestingly in the Bar
Kokhba documents, where in the Aramaic and Hebrew texts, the writers
feel free to use the first person, whereas in the Greek material
they use only the third person. Even Josephus claims to have written
the first draft of his Jewish War first in Aramaic, and only thereafter
to have translated it into Greek. 31
An encouraging sign that at least an 'integrated' approach is
emerging towards the Aramaic question and its relationship to the rest
of the search for midrashic material and historical data in the New
Testament is the publication of a rather important article by Maurice
Casey, entitled 'Culture and Historicity: The Plucking of the Grain
(Mark 2.23-28)'. 32 In it he seeks to set the story of Jesus and his disciples
passing through the grainfields in its proper historical context,
and to do so he attempts to put it back into Aramaic, link it in with
known Rabbinic teaching concerning the Peah and the Sabbath, and
relate it also to the economic and other cultural factors of the time. He
concludes by observing that '...existing work on the recovery of the
Jesus of history is inadequate because it has not delved thoroughly into
the language and culture of Jesus and his contemporaries'. 33 It is certainly
the burden of this paper that the whole approach to the Aramaic
and Hebrew background of the New Testament must be linked in with
as full an historical, social and midrashic perspective as possible,
and that the atomistic 'spot the Aramaism' endeavours of the past,
31. War 1.3.
32. NTS 37 (1991), pp. 1-23.
33. 'Culture', p. 22.