The collection of documents we know as the New Testament, however, had begun life at around the same time that Paul visited Ephesus in the first century AD. In around AD 61, a Jew who had become a Christian wrote the account of the life, ministry, and death of Jesus of Nazareth, which we know as the Gospel according to Mark. Although the author of this extraordinary document may have had access to a compilation of the sayings of Jesus in a Semitic language, the language he wrote in himself was the everyday Greek spoken across all of the eastern Roman Empire. By the end of the first century,
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