Brother Olivier-Thomas Vénard is a Dominican, normalien, associate professor and doctor of letters and theology. He has been a professor at the French Biblical and Archaeological School of Jerusalem for around twenty years.
The culture in which Jesus and his disciples lived was multilingual. Aramaic and Hebrew, attested by the Dead Sea Scrolls in particular, are of course the local languages. Greek, since the Hellenization promoted under the empire of Alexander the Great, had ended up becoming the “lingua franca” of the Mediterranean basin.