If Jesus spoke Aramaic, how did he speak to the Romans?

^{Eleftherios Tserkezis}

(Mind the gap between “spoke Aramaic” and “only spoke Aramaic.”)
Scholarship has long established that early Roman Palestine was far from monolingual. As many as four languages were known and spoken in the region — Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek and Latin. The real question, of course, is how widespread each of them was and on what occasions they were used. A plurality of scholars believe the common language in everyday life was indeed Aramaic. For trans-regional and cross-communal communi­cation, though, Greek was more useful; in fact, there’s even a growing minority of scholars who argue that Greek was the overall lingua franca. Hebrew was probably limited to a liturgical and educational context, and Latin was used in the army and administration.
Jesus grew up in a Jewish family, so Aramaic was probably his mother tongue. However, his native Galilee, aptly nicknamed “Galilee of the Gentiles,” was home to a diverse population for centuries, partly due to its strategic location on the North–South axis. By the 1st c. AD, both Greek and Latin must have had an above-average presence there. Moreover, if Jesus worked with Joseph as a craftsman (carpenter, mason, builder or whatever else the Greek téktōn is supposed to mean) for some years, it’s very likely he’d have interacted with Greek and even Latin speakers more than a farmer or shepherd would. It’s not hard to imagine he was at least capable of exchanging words with them in either tongue, preferably Greek.
All that, of course, needs to be put in context. The gospels offer but clues and tidbits on the subject, so scholarship works with conjectures. Also, it’s easy to misinterpret what multilingualism looked like back then. In the modern First World, bi/multilingualism is a sign of high status or a product of immigration and/or mixed families. In the premodern world, it was often incomplete and related to socio-political power dynamics (e.g., a humble and/or local language at home, a common and/or prestigious one publicly). All in all, Jesus was likely a sequential bilingual, who learned passable Greek as a child or teenager. Passive familiarity with Latin and some grasp of Hebrew can also be hypothesized.

HU