I've been wondering; If Jesus spoke Aramaic or some other dialect, then everything had to be translated into Greek.
Not necessarily. It has been argued (albeit with little evidence to support the claim) that Jesus knew and sometimes taught in Greek. The evidence, such as it is, comes mainly from our knowledge of the dynamics of lanuage use and language acquisition in multilingual regions in general, as well as what we know of these dynamics in and around the first century and the regions of the Roman empire.
It's almost certain that Jesus spoke Aramaic as a first language. It's also probable he knew Hebrew, as although it was a "dead language" it was still taught through scriptural study and spoken when these texts were discussed. It's
possible he knew Greek, or some Greek, but I would say it's pretty unlikely his competence (if he had any) was such that he
could teach/preach in Greek, let alone
did.
Add to that the very real possibility that several of the people that heard Jesus speak must have gone off and repeated the stories orally.
There's an important thing to note: in all the gospels, we have stories about Jesus, in which he may be quoted saying this or that but the thrust (and most important component) of the story isn't the exact words here or there, but the message of the story itself (excepting the times in which it may be that the story developed around a teaching of Jesus, in order to provide context). We also have parables, apothegms, and other oral "genres" woven into the gospels. Cross-culturally, these are both transmitted and receieved via different mechanisms than are reports of some incident or event.
Also important to keep in mind is that it is very likely Jesus repeated himself many times (that's what teaching tended to be in those days), and in ways which deliberately made memorizing them easier.
The sayings of Jesus could have been spread orally in several different languages.
They clearly did. But the question is when did this start? It has been argued (I think convincingly) that this "translation" started immediately. In other words, even though Jesus appears to have deliberately avoided regions heavily populated by gentiles, he clearly interacted with them, and it seems likely that some of those who heard him teaching (or heard of his teachings while he was alive) were not sufficiently familiar with Aramaic. It is likewise very likely that some of his followers
were competent in Greek, and began the translation process while Jesus was still living. Thus an early form of the Greek "sayings" (teachings, parables, etc.) of Jesus likely began to be "fixed" while he lived.
I would think that at least some of the stories must have been "creatively" repeated and very different than the original words spoken by Jesus.
Cross-culturally, "stories" (i.e., eye-witness accounts about some event which are passed on, quickly becoming 2nd-hand, 3rd-hand, etc.) are highly likely to result from initial accounts that were wrong to begin with. Law enforcement, psychologists, and anthropologists (among others) are quite familiar with this phenomenon. Most such "stories" are another type of genre altogether: rumor.
However, a caveat is important. First, a lot depends on the circumstances surrounding whatever the story describes. If someone runs into a lecture hall waving something in his hand and screaming "I've got a gun" before running out, chances are everbody will say he had a gun when in fact it was a banana (this has been done). However, if instead of the above, the lecture hall was used as the location for some university course (which means that both the lecturer and audience had a certain degree of familiarity with one another and with the structure of the class), and in one particular lecture what started out as a particular student asking a particular question and ended up in a shouting match between teacher and student, it's far more likely that the rest of the class would independentally describe what happened fairly accurately.
The latter situations is more akin to what we have with Jesus: he had a regular following in a time and place where even rumor often becomes fairly "fixed" (even if, by the time that happens, there is nothing factual left). It's very likely that many of the incidents recorded in the gospels became incorporated into the "oral memory" of the community of followers early on. Although this doesn't help much when it comes to the initial inaccuracies reported by eye-witnesses (which are inevitable), it does mean that the accounts were repeated among eye-witnesses (a check against inaccuracy in some cases) and again were transformed into a "fixed" oral form to be readily transmitted.
Now, of course we have the written Gospels based on what is presumed to be the "original" Greek manuscripts. Yet, are even they, merely a translation?
Not to hear Maurice Casey tell it. The answer is yes and no. No, because even if some of what Jesus taught he repeated in Greek, and even if some of the accounts were initially repeated in Greek alongside of Aramaic (rather than a translation), the authors of the gospels did more than just write down orally repreated material. They incorporated it into literary constructions. And yes, because although the attempts to "reconstruct" underlying Aramaic are (I believe) almost completely fruitless, that doesn't mean there isn't a clearly discernable Aramaic influence on the texts.
