Most NT scholars don't simply study Greek. Apart from modern languages, they also study Hebrew and usually some other languages such as Coptic or Latin. However, familiar with a language, even competent, and being an expert are very different things. A fair number of NT specialists are far more familiar with Latin than they are Hebrew, let alone Aramaic. Maurice Casey is an exception. His specialty, and his work, largely consists of the relationship between the Aramaic of Jesus' day and the Greek of the gospels. So much so, in fact, that his views are often considered rather "out there" in that where others see a Semitic influences on some line or phrase from a gospel, Casey goes from influence to reconstructing the underlying Aramaic, and then proceeds to construct rather creative arguments about what these hypothetically recovered Aramaic can tell us. He's just about as close to a Aramaic primacist one can get among scholars.
Yet, in his monograph Aramaic Sources of Mark's Gospel (Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series), Casey does go on at some length about the importance of various texts in Semitic languages, including the Peshitta, for understanding the "Aramaicisms" of the Greek gospels. However, he is nonetheless careful to note that "One major problem is the choice of Aramaic source material. This is frequently late in date. Nor is it always particularly Galilean, the justifcation occasionally offered for preferring one form to another" and, an even larger issue is the "the perils of using translation Aramaic" like the Peshitta (p. 45a). He also cites (p. 56) one of the foremost authorities of the Peshitta Jan Joosten on the relationship between the Greek NT and the Peshitta specifically, stating "Joosten's study of Syriac versions of Matthew shows careful analysis of translation technique, going from Greek into Syriac" (italics in original).
Which brings us to another puzzle: Jesus spoke Aramaic, but the Peshitta is Syriac. What's going on here? Language, in just about every possible way, resists clear demarcations, definitions, formalizations, and nice, neat solutions. The differences between related languages are no exception. Simplistically, we have dialects which are variations within the same language, like British English vs. American, different languages, and different language families such as the Germanic or Romance languages.
And sometimes such distinctions pose relatively few problems. However, quite frequently two people speaking the same language but different dialects are basically unable to communicate because of the differences in accent, idioms, grammat, etc. Sometimes it is easier for a person who knows one language to understand what is spoken or written in another closely related language then for people who merely speak different dialects.
Things become worse when issues like time are incorporated. I've had plenty of students insist that Shakespeare isn't modern English, but it is (early modern, but modern nonetheless). Go back a few centuries to middle English and the texts become largely unreadable. Go back even further, to texts like The Battle of Maldon or Beowulf and you find what looks more like German than English. For English, then, a few centuries means all the difference in the world.
For languages like Greek or Syriac, the reverse is true (actually, English is pretty abnormal here, mainly thanks to the Norman conquest). However, neither one is static. Speakers of modern Greek can't read Plato or Homer or the Gospels without being taught ancient Greek. The same is true for most Semitic languages (and, in certain cases, this is where two dialects of the same language, e.g., Arabic, are sufficiently different such that certain speakers can't understand one another).
Generally speaking, within a particular time period, different dialects of Aramaic didn't create much of a problem. So, for example, someone who can read Jewish Palestinian Aramaic won't have much difficulty with other Aramaic dialects in the Talmuds and Midrashim. But Aramaic is not simply a bunch of dialects with the relatively minor differences found in the dialects in the early Rabbinic writings. In fact, even here the similarity isn't so clear cut. Jewish Palestinian Aramaic and Samaritan Aramaic are closer to one another (they are "Western" dialects) than they are to, say Mandaic or Syriac.
The real problem, however, isn't regional dialects but periods. "Aramaic" (like Greek) is around 3,000 years old. But this is as meaningful as saying that English has been around for since before Beowulf. Jesus lived in the first century. The Aramaic of that period is called as a whole Middle Aramaic. However, unlike the Imperial Aramaic which preceded it (600-200 BCE), where the textual record at least suggests a fair degree of uniformity, Middle Aramaic (which ends around 200 CE) is characterized by local dialects. For scholars like Casey, J. P. Meier, Fitzmeyer, Jeremias, and numerous others have tried to reveal the Aramaic influences on the Gospels, the fact that we don't know what dialect Jesus spoke is not a trivial issue. In this period, texts which mainly belong to one dialect frequently incorporate words, idioms, and phrases from other dialects, and even other languages (mainly other Semitic languages).
At the beginning of the third century, though, things begin to shift again. There are still numerous dialects in this period (including Syrian), but we see a massive increase in textual representation of these dialects. Compared to the hazy, haphazard dialects of Jesus' era, a time in which even someone with his background not only likely knew Hebrew but also perhaps Greek, and in which load words, mixed dialects, and similar "fuzzy" boudaries characterized not just Aramaic but the local languages of the Roman empire, the dialects of "Late Aramaic" (from the beginning of the 3rd century to around 700 CE) are easier to distinguish. It is in this period that we find the Syriac dialects of the Peshitta.
Anybody who has spent time translating distinct languages such Navajo into or from English, or (less radical) German into or from Russian, is aware of the "artificial" quality to translations. In fact, even people who read enough translated works from certain periods and certain lanaguages get this sense without knowing a thing about the original language.
The Aramiac/Peshitta primacy websites and their variants which likewise posit an Aramaic original the Greek gospels were translated to point to Semiticisms in the gospels and the fact that Jesus spoke Aramaic and various other things as "evidence".
In The Da Vinci Code, there's a great part in which the British specialist "quotes" from an apocryphal gospel in which Jesus is said to be Mary's companion and even used to kiss her often on the "mouth". Ignoring the fact that the text, which contains, alas (like most recovered texts) a number of gaps, is missing where Jesus used to kiss Mary (another possibility is "hands"), what's great is how the brilliant academic explains that the real significance is "companion". The reason, he says, is because "as any Aramaic expert" would tell you, the word for "companion" literally meant spouse.
The reason this is at all relevant is the way in which the above gaff is amusingly completely inaccurate. The gospel in question wasn't written in Aramaic, but in Coptic, and the word in question isn't actually Coptic but a Greek loan word.
Here, then, is a text which actually not written in Greek, yet contains a Greek word. Why? Hellenism, however inapt a term it is, literally means "Greek-ism" or the influence of Greek culture which spread across what became the Roman empire thanks to that paragon of the Greek nation, the quintessential Greek Emperor Alexander the Great (who was Macedonian, not Greek). It's why a Coptic texts contains a Greek word, why Philo was so familiar with Greek philosophy, why Greek, not Latin, was the first language (or at least a second language) for about half the Roman empire, and why there were enough Jews who couldn't speek Aramaic and didn't know Hebrew that the LXX was composed. It's also why the fact that Jesus spoke Aramaic (even if he knew no Greek whatsoever), is utterly irrelevant. Not only is it practically a given that some of his followers knew Greek, and rather likely that his teachings and stories about him were necessarily repeated in Greek (for those who couldn't understand Jesus' Aramaic adequately enough), the idea that we'd expect even Mark, let alone the other gospels (which were composed after the Christian population was probably more converted Gentile than Jewish) to be written originally in Aramaic is baseless.
But even if the gospels were written in Aramaic, and even if Paul actually composed his letters in Aramaic, that still doesn't change the fact that the Aramaic of Jesus wasn't even the Aramaic of some of his contemporaries, and it was quite distinct from the language of the Peshitta, which is not only in Syriac, but is a dialect of Aramaic from a different time period than the one in which Jesus and the gospel authors lived.
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