Netanyahu and Pope Both Wrong About Jesus

“So Israel’s Prime Minister was arguing with the Pope over what language Jesus spoke” sounds like the setup to a weird joke. Which, actually, it is. Lasting just a few seconds, the dustup reflects centuries of attempts to claim Jesus through speech and to transform his native language and original words into sacred linguistic relics.

In case you missed it, during last week's meeting with the Pope in Jerusalem Benjamin Netanyahu asserted that Jesus’ language was Hebrew, then backpedaled quickly when the Pope corrected him, asserting that “He spoke Aramaic but he knew Hebrew.” What’s surprising isn’t so much that Netanyahu used language politically to gain territory for his side—what defines his goals better?—as the fact that any attempt to pin this first-century Judean holy man down to one language ends up concealing him and his world from us.