is the bible still in jesus's native aramaic language?
Several people have tried to respond to this, most of it has been pretty right on too. But there have been a few minor points that I might disagree with. Rather than responding to each individually, I'll try to tackle the whole of it in this one post.
Short answer: The Bible was not written in Jesus' native Aramaic in the first place.
Long answer:
You are correct that Jesus' native language would have been Aramaic, but there is little evidence to suggest that any of the Bible was written in Jesus' native tongue.
The first books of the Bible were written (according to tradition) by Moses in Hebrew. Collectively they go by various names: The Pentatuech, the Torah, the Books of the Law, or the Books of Moses. (Of course, someone else had to pen the closing scene of Moses death and added that to complete Moses' story.) Individually they are known as Genesis, Exoduc, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.
Over time the remaining books of the Hebrew Bible (you may know it by the name Tanakh) or what Christians call the Old Testament were written. Nearly all of these books were also written in Hebrew. I say nearly, because there are traces of Babylonian Aramaic creeping into the text of parts of the book of Daniel, but this is only just a few chapters in which this is found; othewise the entire Tanakh is in Hebrew.
Sometime, during the Babylonian Captivity, the name for the period between 605 and 539 BCE, during which many of the elite citizenry of the nation of Judah was kept as POWs in Babylon (modern Bagdhad), the daily Hebrew language used by most Jews was sufficiently modified to emerge as a new language, Aramaic, that would become well enough established, that by the time of Jesus it was Aramaic, and not Hebrew, which was the common language spoken by most Jews in Palestine. However, the Tanakh was still read in Hebrew, and Hebrew was used and studied for religious purposes. Given that Jesus was literate, remember most people were not, it is certain that Jesus not only spoke Aramaic, but also Hebrew.
It is even likely that Jesus also spoke Greek in addition to both his native Aramaic and his educationin Hebrew. This is because, while Aramaic was the common language of most Jews, Greek was the
lingua franca of the world that had been under the rule of Alxendar the Great, which Palestine had been. Strange as it might sound, Greek was the unifying language of the Roman Empire; even in Rome, the common people spoke Greek. Greek was used on a daily basis for commerce and industry. Because of the development of a global commerce, it was common for any written document that was to be used by the common people to be written in Greek -- they have even found routine items equivlent to a grocery list from excavations of 1st century sites in Israel that were written in Greek. For this reason, when the first letters that would eventually become the New Testament were written, since they were written to churches in the Greek speaking world (mostly in Asia minor and Greece), they were written in Greek. Later, when the Gospels were written, these too were written to be read by the whole world and thus were also written in Greek. (The one possible exception to this is that some think that before Matthew was written, that there might have been a proto-Matthew that was written in Hebrew. The reason for this is that the content of the book of Matthew shows strong indications that his intended audience was either Jewish Christians and there are anacronisms of a few Aramaic words that made it into the Greek text untranslated.)
However, it must be noted that we do not have the original autographs of any biblical book. The best we have are copies of copies. Some of these are quite ancient. Some are so old that all we have a fragments, for instance the old piece of the New Testament is a small postage-sized piece of the Gospel of John, dated to about 100 AD (probably less than 10-20 after it was written), and that is in Greek. In fact, all of the oldest pieces we have of the New Testament (be they small fragments or entire books) are universally in Greek. It isn't until the 300s that we find copies of the New Testament in any langauge other than Greek. Among hte first copies in other languages, copies that begin to appear in the 4th and 5th century), are copies in Latin, Coptic, and Syriac -- Syriac being what Aramaic had evolved into by the 4th century, in fact you will still hear many people refer to a Syriac edition of the Bible as being written in Aramaic they are so closely related. (Note: ancient Syriac and modern Syrian are NOT the same language, even though they too are related.)
Until 1945, and the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls the oldest copies of any Old Testament book were Hebrew copies dated to about 800 CE. But in the collection of books known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, were found some (not all) books of the Old Testament that date to about 200 BCE, more than 1000 years earlier than the previous earliest copies of Hebrew literature. They allowed for comparison in between the two sets of books. While not identical, the reported differences were so small (something akin to missing or adding a comma here and there) as to not change the reading of the texts. Some cite this as evidence of the integrity of the copying process, though I believe it must credited only to the copying done of the Old Testament by Jewish scribes. The copying of the New Testament shows many scribal glosses, most accidental errors, one or two with obvious intent. Fortunately the large number of copies of the New Testament (more than any other book of it's antiquity) allows for comparison between the various copies, giving scholars the ability to even recognize lines of copies and where mistakes were made, and thereby work their way backward to the most likely text from which the copies were originally made.
Just as in time the books of the New Testament were translated into other languages, so too were the books of the Hebrew Bible (or the Old Testament). Tradition says that this happened around 200 BCE when the Jews produced a Greek edition of their scriptures. This Greek translation was known by the name
The Septuagint (or
LXX), and was written in the same type of Greek (Koine Greek) that the Christian New Testament would later come to be written in. For this reason, many non-Hebrew speaking Christians preferred to use the LXX rather than the Tanakh when referring to the Jewish scriptures. If you take a look at quotes of the Old Testament found in the New Testament and then compare them with the original verse in the Old Testament passage from which it was taken, you will see some changes, sometimes signficant changes. This is because when translating the Bible today, translators primarily use the Hebrew copies of texts of the Old Testament to translate it into English, but the earliest Christians were used to using the Greek translation for their own writings and when these are translated into English it has gone through a double translation process that produces these different readings. If one were to find a Greek edition of the Septuagint, these New Testament quotations taken from the Old Testament match better what was written in the Greek translations of the Old Testament.
The production of the Septuagint, and its use by the first century Christians, is also behind why Catholics and Protestants appear to have two different Bibles. Careful readers of the two will note that there are 7 more books in the Catholic Bible than in the one used by in most protestant churches. This is because when the canon of the scripture (the list of "official" books) was finally settled in the 4th century, the Church had gone through a long process of consensus building regarding the books to be recognized to make up the New Testament, but they simply adapted the practice of the first century Christians in accepting the books that were part of the Greek edition of the scriptures used by the Jews for the Old Testament. This was unquestioned until the time of Martin Luther, who objected to so many things that the Catholic Church had done. And by the time of Luther, the Jewish world had tried to distance itself from anything associated with Christianity. They had quite using the Greek edition of the scriptures and only read from a Hebrew Bible. When some of the Catholic Churches favorite passages for arguing for some of its unique doctrines regarding Mary where to be found in the LXX, those books that included those passages became unpopular in Jewish circles. The Jews had not "officialy" listed a canon of scripture like the Christian Church had done, and so what was and was not to be viewed as Holy Scripture often varied. For instance, some strict Hasidic Jews only recognize the Books of Moses. Most Jews would read the commentaries on the books of Moses and other writings by the prophets as much as they read the Hebrew Bible itself, these works were known as the Mishnah, the Midrash, and the Talmud. So it wasn't until after the Christian Church with its view of the scriptures rooted in the Jewish scriptures and some Christian doctrines that the Jews objected to being gleaned from them, that the Jews acted to make an "official" list of the accepted books of the Hebrew Bible. And this list was missing 7 books that had been found in the Septuagint and accepted by the early Christian church as sacred scripture. So, when Luther decided to translate the Bible into German, he looked at the Bible actually used by the Jews and worked from that list of books to produce his Old Testament rather than the list used by the Church in Rome. Thus became the tradition of Protestant Bibles having 7 less books in their Old Testament than the Catholic Bible.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Now, I know that was a long answer to a short question, but I saw some of these other issues coming up in the discussion that followed and others are things that come up repeatedly in thread after thread. So, I just thought I would try to address it all at one time. Sorry, if it was beyond most people's interest to read.
Something over which I will constantly be agonized.