Apparently there is no definitive source for the bible- just a consensus of what scholars believe or have believed or have interpreted through the years.
There are lots of different English translations of the Bible. The first of them date back to medieval times.
For example, the King James version of the Bible- which I learned a great deal about. First published in 1611, based on 47 scholarly opinions and translated from Greek, Latin and Hebrew. What I found interesting is that no great single event happened in 1611- that was just the year they all got together and came up with one English version of The Bible.
The earlier translations had been criticized on various textual grounds, so King James commissioned the leading British scholars of his day to produce a better English language text. It was a major scholarly project of the time. They broke the Bible down into smaller segments and assigned them to different groups of scholars to translate, then they rotated the results, giving those finished translations to different teams to read and criticize.
There is nothing that makes this version more definitive or authoritive, it's just "the new version".
Or at least it was new in the early 17'th century. It subsequently became kind of old and traditional.
There have been many different English translations since then. Some of them tried to improve the translation from Greek and Hebrew into English so as to capture more of the original meanings of the words. Foreign words, especially those from ancient languages, can't always be substituted one-for-one with modern English words without adding many new connotations that weren't present in the original, while losing many other connotations that would have seemed obvious to ancient Hebrew and Greek language readers. Other subsequent translations tried to make the thing more readable, modernizing the English language used and removing the 17'th century archaisms. While those translations may have been slight improvements, and even big improvements in a few disputed spots, I think that the modern consensus is still that the KJV was a very good translation, by and large.
The Roman Catholics have their own version of The Bible as well.
Theirs comes to us by way of the medieval Latin Bible. The Hebrew and Greek text was translated into Latin in late antiquity.
As far as the New Testament texts themselves, they were written 30+ years after the event happened and written probably in Aramaic- all those books are now lost. At some point it was translated to Greek then to English, and we've been rewriting it ever since.
Jesus is thought to have probably spoken Aramaic. That was the day-to-day language in Palestine at the time. (Hebrew had become kind of a liturgical language by his date, but if Jesus was learned in the scriptures, then he'd probably learned some Hebrew too.) My understanding is that the consensus is that the New Testament was originally composed in koine Greek, which was the day-to-day language of the Jewish diaspora in the Hellenistic eastern Mediterranean outside Palestine. ('Koine' is the Hellenistic Greek dialect that came into wide use outside Greece after the time of Alexander.) Then it was subsequently translated into Syriac, the late version of Aramaic used in Syria and Palestine. Paul seems to have written his letters in Greek and probably preached in that language.
There's a vast literature on Biblical textual criticism. One of the problems with old texts is that printing presses didn't exist in ancient and medieval times. Books were laboriously copied by hand in dim candle-lit scriptoria, so over time, copying errors could find their way into texts and be reproduced by subsequent copyists. There's actually a whole science of ancient and medieval manuscripts of all sorts called paleography. As an example of what paleographers do, the presence of small copyist's errors in widely dispersed manuscripts can be used to define different textual families and then used to investigate the transmission and propagation of texts and larger patterns of intellectual influence. For example, if we know that a scribal error crept into a 10'th century Byzantine Greek text, and if that same textual error is later found in Balkan manuscripts and in southern Italy, then we have a pretty good idea who the Balkan and southern Italian copyists were in communication with and where they had obtained the texts they were copying.
It is comforting to find say, the Dead Sea Scrolls and see we're not that far off with the Old Testament and it'd be nice to one day find the New Testament's "Q Bible" from which the books draw information from.
The simularity of the Dead Sea Scrolls OT texts and the medieval Hebrew texts used in most of the earlier English Bible translations suggest that those medieval texts were probably pretty good, with only minor scribal errors and nothing in them that dramatically changed religious doctrine. And some New Testament texts from late antiquity have been discovered and used to make small corrections to the text in some of the newer English translations.
The 'Q' thing is an entirely different kind of problem in my opinion. It's not a simple question of manuscript transmission of received texts. With 'Q' we are facing new issues of editing, authorship and theological motivation.
The problem there is that our only knowledge of Jesus comes to us through the New Testament. And the NT is the product of Paul's churches and the Christian church that subsequently grew out of them and embraced the Pauline doctrines as orthodoxy. What we have today was written to preach those doctrines and that's why it was subsequently copied and preserved. The question is whether the NT accurately presents Jesus as he actually was or whether it kind of re-writes him to suit a theology.
The probable existence of an early 'Q' document (from the German word for 'source') suggests that there were already collections of Jesus' sayings in circulation in the broader Christian sect beyond Paul's churches. Unfortunately 'Q' hasn't survived. (The question arises, why not?) But we do have the later non-canonical Gospel of Thomas that seems to have been based on some earlier 'Q'-like collection of Jesus' sayings and contains significant differences from the four canonical gospels. Just based on evidence like that, there seems to have been quite a bit of internal diversity among the early Christians. There were apparently more than one of these 'sayings gospels' of Jesus' supposed words in circulation and there do seem to have been significant variations between them. It's apparent that lots of editing and redacting were going on in the earliest years of Christianity as the earliest texts that survive today were being composed. The situation might have been a lot more open and fluid then than it would become in later years. Unfortunately, very little information about those formative events has survived.
