Abstract
Most readers of the New Testament are, I would imagine, Christians. And for many, if not most, of these readers, the modern-language version of the New Testament they read is, or at least functions as, their New Testament.
In a sense, this is as it should be. After all, the heart of the New Testament, the sayings attributed to Jesus, is translation: Jesus spoke in Aramaic and perhaps a bit of Hebrew; his words are preserved, with very, very few exceptions, only in translation—Greek translation. So it is not completely unexpected that his words can be as easily cited,