All the gospels as we know them were originally written in Greek. There are no Hebrew or Aramaic first hand accounts that have been found.
Even if Jesus manifested before me right now and asked me to believe he is the one and only savoir it would not make any difference to me. I would still have to put in hard efforts coupled with grace to realize the kingdom of heaven. The truth as I see it is that no enlightened being is going to make his form, his personality an exclusive entry point in to salvation. It was the Church who created this theology in order to control the masses. Christians are generally lazy. I sometimes sit for hours in the empty church and people come and go say a prayer light a candle and leave. People think Jesus, the saints, Mary, God will do it all for them, no need to put oneself through anything remotely transformational.
How does it feel to live surrounded by people who you 'know' are going to hell?
Most of apostles (Peter and Paul included) spoke Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek, but it was the empire of Rome that did their level best to destroy the Christian libraries and halt the progression of Jesus Christ's gospel message.
The field of archeology continues to undercover more and more extant manuscripts and have their authenticity validated with great intellectual vigor. Back in 2012, textual critic Dan Wallace announced the discovery of a 1st century manuscript of Mark (results pending publication via EJ Brill) in addition to various 2nd century biblical manuscripts (all of which are significant findings). Slowly but surely the gap between the present and the writing of the originals closes, but that doesn't mean we're without confidence in our present materials.
The field of textual criticism is dedicated to the understanding the transmission and copying process of these ancient documents and has done so for decade after decade. Their level of certainty is so great that they certify the New Testament with a 98.5% level of accuracy and reliability. Even the great liberal textual critic Bart Ehrman (who is an admitted God hater) has stated in the appendix of the 4th edition of his famous book
Misquoting Jesus that "the essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament" (please note that this appendix was removed in later additions of the book
).
Further, the use of dead languages such the Koine Greek, Aramaic (sister language of Arabic) and Hebrew (derivative of ancient Chaldean) has helped preserve the integrity of the writings given the development of these languages has both stopped and their usage ceased. It's as if time halted with the biblical writings so that further linguistic corruption could not occur.
Now, what truly troubles me is your statement that even if Christ were to manifest in front of you it wouldn't be enough to convert or convince you of his truthfulness and righteousness. This is unfortunately the point in the discussion in which I know that answering the objections of the God-hater is pointless.
For most God haters they aren't looking to have their objections answered.....they're simply looking for their next objection. You can surf the net and find atheist sites with lists of biblical objections...some substantive yet most trivial. If the substantive objections are answered first (and the vast majority can be) that should satisfy the remaining trivial objections, but it doesn't. It's a rabbit hole that God haters - who admittedly have no level of satiation - travel down endlessly.....always looking for the next way to object to God.
You say Christians are lazy and that they don't seek personal transformation. That tells me you don't understand Christianity and you certainly don't understand concepts of salvation, justification, imputation and sanctification. I don't claim expert level understanding of the theology, but I certainly grasp these concepts and can communicate them to others (and have on these boards repeatedly). Still, there isn't any point in me AGAIN presenting these materials here because you've clearly put forth that interaction with Christ himself (even if accomplished on your terms) wouldn't be sufficient. So even if you pitch further objections and I continue to bat them away it won't make a lick of difference for you. Hopefully it will for others. I don't think you're a bad person (quite the opposite), but I don't think you seek discussion about God to understand his truth....it's merely to validate yourself.
