Was Latin spoken amongst Jews?

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Previously, we have seen that Aramaic was the dominant language spoken amongst Jews in Israel in the first century A.D. Many lessons have shown that Aramaic was the language most commonly spoken - not just in Israel, but across the whole of the Middle East (for centuries).

However, while acknowledging that Aramaic was an important language, people often want to know more about the other languages in use at the time - namely, Greek, Hebrew and Latin.

In other lessons in this series about the history and background of Aramaic, we have looked at the extent to which Jews spoke Greek.

And in the lesson, What about Hebrew?!, we looked at whether Hebrew was a spoken language in Israel in the first century A.D.

But in this lesson, we examine Latin - the official language of the Roman Empire - to see how much it was spoken by Jews in Israel at the time of Jesus.

Together, these lessons continue to build the background to the New Testament - that although other languages were in use, over and over again, we see that Aramaic was the dominant language...

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