Most scholars agree that the language of Jesus and his disciples was Aramaic, which means that they never would have written a New Testament in Greek. Further these same scholars note that the sayings of Jesus, as found in the four Gospels, bear traces of having been originally translated from Aramaic into Greek The Jerome Biblical Commentary tells us: ". . . the words of Jesus, as recorded in the Gospels, definitely show Ara[maic] influence.... Since Aramaisms are strongest and most frequent in the words of Jesus, an Aram[aic] saying-source, either written or oral, underlies the Synoptic Gospel tradition"' (Vol. II, pp. 11-12)
First of all you need to know that the hot-bed of religious scholarship in the first century was Alexandria, Egypt. It was the melting pot for all world religions and provides fertile soil for all religions to mix and exchange views. So we find in Alexandria a little of everything as far as religions myths and stories.
Next you need to know that there is a distinction between the Gospels stories of Jesus' life and the actual quoted sayings of Jesus. This needs to be kept in mind. In other words, while most scholars agree that the most primitive "New Testament" consisted only of the sayings of Jesus, which were likely composed in, or translated from Aramaic, they note that the actual stories surrounding Jesus' life and death, as found in Gospels, were most assuredly composed in Greek. This betrays the Alexandrian influence upon the accounts recorded within the New Testament which are taken from pagan mystery religions and written into the life of Jesus. Such is the Alexandrian influence.
What I say now is at the crux of the problems revealed so far. Scholars, being virtually unanimous that the New Testament was composed in Greek, while at the same time incorporating the Aramaic sayings of Jesus, offer compelling evidence for the accusations that it was later Greek-speaking church fathers who composed the New Testament as we know it. Until the Christian church realizes this truth there may be no hope for her education into the corruptness of the New Testament. The true Apostles did not write the Gospels and many of the supposed letters of Paul were never penned by him. Biblical criticism whereby internal evidences are scrutinized reveals such details.
Evidence for the demonstration that it was the Greek-speaking church fathers who composed the New Testament and not the Jewish followers of Yeshua is seen easily in 3 facts:
As if that was not enough, the scholarly contention that the original New Testament contained only the sayings of Jesus was given a tremendous boost by the discovery in Egypt in 1947 of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts, specifically a gospel account now known as The Gospel According To Thomas. The entire manuscript was written in Coptic and dates to ca. AD 350, while some portions, in Greek, date to ca. AD 140. Actually, the entire MSS. is but a translation of a second century original composed in Greek. This gospel, in certain respects, is actually the oldest known complete MSS. of the NT in existence. But, significantly, it is a Gnostic Christian production containing only the sayings of Jesus and therefore rejected by orthodox Christians. More than likely the main reason why The Gospel According To Thomas is rejected by Christianity is that if they admit that these sayings of Jesus were indeed all there was to the original gospels, then there is a very big problem with the modern four Gospels, because there is much more than the sayings in the accounts of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John! Added to that one's knowledge of Aryan-Sun Myths and their crucified saviors and sun-gods, along with the stories comprising their lives which date up to thousands of years before Jesus, then it is hard for an objective reader of the New Testament to find a story about the life of Jesus in the New Testament which has not be told previously multiple times over about these pagan gods (http://paganizingfaithofyeshua.netfirms.com)
Answer for yourself: Are you a thinking believer?
Answer for yourself: Are you an objective believer who wants the facts and the truth at all costs?
To the thinking believer there is only one conclusion to which one can arrive: The New Testament is a woven tale by non-Jews who patterned this "Jesus" which was preached to them after their own pagan g-ds and only changed the names of them thereby conforming "this Jesus" in the image of their pagan g-ds and their pagan religions. The results of such efforts is the New Testament which is a collection of articles which betray such plagiarism. But one must have the knowledge before hand if one is to see and recognize such alarming perversions as applied to the Historical Jesus.
The editors of The Complete Gospels explain that, "The frequent word-for-word agreements between Matthew and Luke are impossible to account for if both were independently translating from Aramaic (p. 250).
These facts along with corrupt church history and the confused state of both the Protestant and Catholic so-called original Greek New Testaments, have caused a few scholars to claim that the whole of the New Testament was originally written in Aramaic. Although on the surface this argument seems logical history itself doesn't support the claim.
There is a New Testament translation that has been promoted by many as the only reliable text because it is allegedly a translation from the original Aramaic writings of Jesus' apostles. The translation, known as the Peshitta, which means the "simple version," purports to have been copied, century after century from the original Aramaic manuscripts—which notably are conveniently missing. The Peshitta is reproduced in English in the Lamsa translation. There are a number of flaws in this claim. First of all, history tells us that the earliest version of what came to be called the Peshitta, known as the Old Syriac, contained only the four Gospels and not the entire New Testament. Although those who promote the Peshitta somehow date this work to ca AD 160, the second problem is that the only "original" of the work survives in quotations found in later writings.
The fact is that the earliest surviving manuscripts of the Peshitta date only from the fourth and fifth centuries. They are The Sinai Palimpsest (Sinaiticus) and Cureton's MSS., which is called the Curetonranus. But scholars point out that these MSS. are really of little value because they were made from an early Greek text with many "Western features," which is to say the Western texts used by the early Roman Christian Church. To throw a further "wrench into the works" the editors of The Oxford Companion to the Bible tell us that the Greek text in question was itself revised "on the basis of an early form of the Koine, or Byzantine Greek NT Text; this revision, eventually called the Peshitta, emerged in ca 400 AD to become the standard New Testament of the Syriac Churches" (The Oxford Companion to the Bible, p. 754)
In other words the "original" texts of the Peshitta did not originate from the first century Aramaic-speaking apostles, but came from both early Western and Byzantine Greek texts, which we have been discussing throughout this study.
To completely understand the composition of the Peshitta let's look a little closer at its pre-history, meaning the works that formed its foundation. They include a so-called harmony of the Gospels called the Diatessaron. According to the church father Eusebius the compiler of the Diatessaron was a man named Tatian who was a native of Mesopotamia and a disciple of Justin Martyr, meaning that he received his Christian education and training via the Church of Rome. In other words it is a Catholic production. This is made even more clear since Tatian is said to have originally composed the Diatessaron in Latin (The New International Dictionary of the Christian Church, p. 296). Biblical historians also tell us that this Tatian changed the text of the Gospels during his translation work to support his extreme hostility to sex. Despite this open tampering, Tatian's work was widely accepted in the Eastern Christian Churches where it made a serious impact on Christian scholarship (Fox, The Unauthorized Version, pp. 139-140). It was in the Eastern Churches, remember, that the Byzantine texts originated.
All of this takes us to the Greek MSS. behind the Peshitta. Regarding these, we read the following in The Encyclopedia Britannica: "The MSS. differ considerably in reading, and each has certainly been influenced by the Diatessaron [of Tatian…Catholic theologically influenced], so that in Syriac-speaking lands about AD 400 the Gospel was extant as a Harmony and as 'separated Gospels,'. . . the single copies having many discordant readings, just as had been the case in Latin before Jerome. To remedy this, Rabbula, bishop of Edessa from 411 to 435, prepared a revised edition of the 'Separated Gospels,' freely correcting the text from Greek mss. such as were then current at Antioch: this edition he established by authority and suppressed the Diatessaron with such success that no Syriac copy of the Diatessaron survives, and of the unrevised version only Syr. S and C. Rabbula's revision is now used by both the great divisions of the Syriac-speaking Church: to distinguish it from the elaborate later revision of the (Jacobite) Old and New Testament it is usually called Peshitta, i.e. the simple version." The editor's conclusion is that, "The Peshitta has only the value of a post-Nicene revision (14th ed., vol. 3, p. 517).
The long and the short of it is that the so-called Peshitta is nothing more than its rival translations—a book produced by questionable men inside a notoriously corrupt church, all of which does little for the "infallibility of the bible" argument!
Now on to the last article in this series.