What Languages Were Spoken in First Century Judaea and Galilee?

A concept put forward in older dictionaries and commentaries is that Hebrew was not spoken or used in the time of Jesus Christ and the apostles in Judaea and Galilee. Rather the language spoken was Aramaic. This idea was so pervasive that references by Eusebius that the Gospel of Matthew was written in the Hebrew language were footnoted to read Aramaic. During the last 60 years, however, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and other archaeological remains show that Hebrew was alive and well as a language, even under the Roman occupation of the land.

A recent article by Jerusalem Perspective sets out to analyse the languages based on a large part of the epigraphic record of inscriptions and coins from the Second Temple Period. It establishes that Hebrew was an actively used language in the land, existing alongside Aramaic and Greek.