From “The End of Biblical Studies” (Prometheus Books, 2007):
“Even if we were to find the original Greek texts behind all the Greek manuscripts we now have, we would end up only finding a translation of Jesus’ own words. And Greek translations, by definition, cannot be the “original” text of anything Jesus said in Aramaic.”
What Hector is arguing here is that even if we were to one day suddenly discover the autographs of the New Testament writings, we still wouldn’t have anything we could logically call “original”. Jesus, being the Galilean Aramaic speaker that he was, would not have been speaking in Koine Greek, and therefore, finding the autographs of the New Testament which were presumably written in Koine Greek would only give us another translation to work with.
