Sung Min Park Peter’s Code Choice in the Pentecost Sermon: A Historical Sociolinguistic Approach to the Prestige Religious Language of the Jerusalem Church
https://jgrchj.net/volume21/JGRChJ21.3Park71-102.pdf
This research navigates the scholarly discourse on the Prestige Religious Language within the early Jerusalem church, focusing on the code choice for the dissemination of the Jesus tradition. The scholarly debate primarily centers around two hypotheses: (1) the ‘Aramaic Jesus Tradition’ hypothesis, which posits that Jesus’s teachings were initially conveyed in Aramaic and later translated into Greek, and (2) the ‘Early Greek Jesus Tradition’ hypothesis, suggesting that Greek was the original language of Jesus’s teachings in the earliest stage of first-century Christianity. The study challenges the Aramaic hypothesis for not adequately accounting for the complex linguistic choices in a multilingual context, advocating instead for a sociolinguistic approach to understand Peter’s use of Greek during the Pentecost sermon. Paul’s Greek preaching shows the early adoption of Greek as the Prestige Religious Language within the official settings of the Jerusalem church due to the complex multilingual environment where a large number of Greek speakers did not understand Aramaic. The findings suggest a higher likelihood of the Jesus tradition being circulated in Greek, highlighting the importance of sociolinguistic perspectives in unraveling the linguistic landscape of early Christianity.