The Gospel of Mark is written in Greek, though Jesus spoke Aramaic. Moreover, Jesus' ministry was exercised among Jews, whereas, by the time Mark's Gospel was written, many of Jesus' followers were Gentiles, and this Gospel shows traces of Gentile self-identification. It follows that the change in language from Aramaic to Greek was part of a cultural shift from a Jewish to a Gentile environment. If therefore we wish to recover the Jesus of history, we must see whether we can reconstruct his sayings, and the earliest accounts of his doings, in their original Aramaic. This should help us to understand him within his own cultural background.

For this purpose, we must establish a clear methodology, not least because some people are still repeating every mistake with which the history of scholarship is littered. I therefore begin with a critical Forschungsberichte. This is not a comprehensive catalogue of previous work, but a selective discussion of what advances have been made, what significant mistakes have been made, and the reasons for both of these.

The early fathers give us very little reliable information about the transmission of Jesus' words in Aramaic before the writing of the Gospels. Eusebius has the apostles speak ἡ Σύρων φωνή (Dem. Ev. III.4.44; 7.10), his name for the Aramaic dialects contemporary with him, but he gives us no significant help in getting behind the Gospel traditions.