The first writings about women in the church weren't written until 500 years after Christ. Christians and Jews practiced an amalgam of both religions in some Near East countries in the early days of Christianity. The first to write about the life of Jesus was Luke, who wrote 30 years after Jesus' death and was not a disciple. Those accounts were written in Greek, though Jesus and his followers spoke Arabaic. So not only were there different versions according to who was telling the story, but also the attendant problems of translating the gospel into a different language.
Gospel literally means good news.
Most of the apostles were illiterate, but secretaries did the transcribing, even for the literate. To illustrate how much material there is to be found about the era, he cites the fact that there are more textual references about the New Testament than there are about Plato or any other thinker in the ancient world. Imagine decoding the Greek renderings of that time when there was no punctuation.