Summary: http://rexweyler.com/ The voice of Jesus survived decades of oral transmission before written records appeared, and then centuries of revision thereafter. Jesus wrote nothing and spoke in Aramaic. The gospel authors composed in Greek, and some forty years elapsed between the execution of Jesus and the first written narrative accounts. The earliest surviving complete manuscripts of the popular gospels appear three centuries later. Scholars presume that versions of the gospels appeared earlier than the surviving manuscripts, but we possess no originals and hundreds of variant copies. We might wonder then: How accurately did the message of Jesus survive decades of spoken discourse and centuries of revision? Historians and text scholars have developed advanced methods of analyzing language to reveal layers of borrowing and revision in ancient manuscripts. The Matthew and Luke gospels, for example, appear to copy the Mark account and early collections of sayings. Portions of these early sources have been discovered in manuscript fragments. Meanwhile, startling new texts – the gospels of Mary, Thomas, Philip, and others – have risen from their desert graves to provide fresh sources of Jesus sayings.
