Although our four canonical Gospels are extant only in Greek, during recent years scholars in increasing numbers have come to the conclusion that originally they were composed, in whole or in part, in Aramaic. A moment's reflection is quite enough to indicate how plausible is the suggestion. No scholar has ever dreamed that the Roman Empire was a linguistic unity. Although we have always known that Latin was the language of administration and of culture west of the Adriatic, while to the east it was Greek, year by year the evidence has been piling up that the Empire was not bilingual but polylingual.' In the West, to be sure, the barbarous native languages persisted only in spoken form, but they did persist. For instance, Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, writing near the end of the second century, explains his lack of literary artifice by the fact that he tarries among the Celtae and must as a rule use a barbarous dialect.2 Anecdotes about legionaries, possessors of the coveted Roman citizenship, who spoke no Latin point the same moral. In North Africa, Phoenician continued so long in written use that Neo-Punic epigraphy has been added for us to study as an independent discipline. Greek was written at the imperial court as fluently as Latin. Aramaic inscriptions occur sporadically throughout Italy and the western provinces. The first known reference to Christians, scrawled on the wall of what was apparently a house church at Pompeii, is by that fact certainly earlier than A.D. 79; the sneer is in Aramaic written in Latin characters.3 But it is in the Near East-the Greek-speaking half of the Empire-which by more than two thousand years had anticipated the