The gospel of John relates a memorable detail of the crucifixion of Jesus that doesn’t appear in the synoptic gospels: fixed to Jesus’s cross is a sign on which Pontius Pilate wrote the same thing in three ways: Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Judeans.  That detail, when I took my first New Testament college class, brought to my attention the multilingual character of Jesus’s world.  Later I learned that the common language of the region was something called Aramaic, which wasn’t Greek but wasn’t Hebrew either.  And things got even more complicated after that.  Bruce Chilton’s recent book Aramaic Jesus sets forth layers of complexity still, showing how the constellations of Semitic languages in Roman-occupied Palestine and beyond play into the narratives and rhetoric and language by which we receive Christian traditions.  Christian Humanist Profiles welcomes back to the show Dr. Bruce Chilton.