Language:
English
Year of publication:
2010
Titel der Quelle:
Journal of Religious History
Angaben zur Quelle:
34, 1 (2010) 36-54
Keywords:
Dalman, Gustaf,
;
Jesus
;
Christianity and other religions Judaism 1800-2000
;
History
;
Antisemitism History 1800-2000
;
Aramaic language, Talmudic
;
Hebrew language
Abstract:
The theory that Jesus spoke and taught exclusively in Aramaic rather than Hebrew achieved its present dominant position in the late 19th century due to the work of Gustaf Dalman (1855-1941), a leading German Aramaic scholar of his time. Before Dalman, churchmen and academics assumed that, while Jesus spoke some Aramaic, Hebrew was his and other Judean Jews' main language. Argues that Dalman's "de-Hebraising" of Jesus and the Gospels, his insistence that Aramaic was Jesus' mother tongue, was driven by ideology rather than evidence: his goal was to extract Jesus and Christianity from Judaism. Dalman was a director of the Institutum Judaicum in Leipzig, a Protestant institution which tried to convert Jews. The Judenmission movement, to which Dalman devoted his life, adopted antisemitic views from the increasingly antisemitic atmosphere of late 19th-century Germany. Dalman's attitude toward antisemitism was, however, ambivalent, and he never went so far as to deny any Jewishness of the "Aryan" Jesus.
DOI:
10.1111/j.1467-9809.2009.00829.x
URL:
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