What did Jesus say?

This morning (8/7/2021), I was talking to a couple of family members about houses on beaches. I asked how they built them or what they did for a foundation since they were on sand. One of them explained how they drive beams or poles deep into the ground until they hit some kind of solid foundation. The conversation reminded me of what Jesus said in Matthew 7 about building your house on the sand. He said,

Therefore, everyone who hears these words of Mine, and acts on them, will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and yet it did not fall, for it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of Mine, and does not act on them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and it fell—and its collapse was great. ~Matthew 7:24-27

I read this to the said family members as kind of a joke, inserting "tsunamis" along with the wind and rain. They were talking about buying a house on the beach, and the joke was that Jesus said only a fool would build a house on the sand. One of them wanted to challenge whether Jesus actually said it, so first he asked who wrote it, and then he asked when it was written. I didn't go into detail about that, and it's beside the point of this post anyway. This is just a preface to explain what got me to thinking about what I'm going to say in this post.

The point of this post is to talk a little bit of what I think about whether and to what degree the gospels accurately portray what Jesus said. I only want to speak in generalities here because otherwise this would be really long. Besides, I haven't done an in depth study on the sayings of Jesus, and I'm probably not qualified to do that anyway.

But I can talk in generalities, and I have just a handful of points I want to make. I want to talk a little about what we should expect of the gospels and also what the gospels actually show.

First, Jesus was an itinerant teacher. Like most traveling teachers we know of (e.g. Christian and atheist apologists), they give a lot of the same talks over and over again or they repeat the same things over and over again in their various talks. If you follow certain people, you begin to pick up on speech patterns, aphorisms, and one-liners they use. A person can be famous for a quote or two, and that quote gets repeated by their followers and even by people who don't follow them. We should expect that the same thing would be true of Jesus. Jesus likely had very devout followers--people who looked up to him in a way that nobody looks up to Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, or William Lane Craig. So we should expect that many of them hung on his every word. They followed him from town to town, hearing him say the same things over and over again. Some were part of his inner circle who eventually became apostles who then repeated those teachings to other people. So we should expect that at least some of the sayings of Jesus in the gospels would be almost verbatim what Jesus said. This would be true even if people didn't intentionally commit their teacher's sayings to memory. It would just stick as a matter of course.

That is probably the case in some of the more pithy sayings of Jesus as opposed to the long monologues. But we also see certain speech patterns that are peculiar to Jesus, like how he says, "truly truly I say to you. . ." or how he talks about the Son of Man in the third person even though it appears he's always talking about himself in those sayings. Jesus has a certain voice. We recognize "voice" in people we know really well. So if somebody were to try to fake a letter from your wife to you, you might read the letter and think, "That doesn't sound like how my wife speaks or writes."

Contrast that, though, with John's gospel. In John's gospels, the voice of Jesus often sounds more like the narrator than like the Jesus of the synoptics. I'll come back to this point in a little bit.

There are other reasons besides having a peculiar voice to think some of the sayings of Jesus are nearly verbatim when recorded in the synoptics. One is that they are multiply attested. For example, sometimes when Jesus tells a parable, he'll preface it by saying, "The kingdom of God is like. . ."

If you look at the synoptic gospels in parallel, you notice that while he might say the same things in similar words, the exact wording is often altered. This can be attributed to a combination of two things--Jesus himself likely altered the way he said things in different places and in different contexts, and the authors themselves might've altered the way Jesus said something to fit the context.

That brings me to another point I wanted to make which is that I definitely don't think everything the gospels quote Jesus as saying is verbatim what he said. I think in a lot of cases, especially in the longer monologues, they are trying to capture the gist of what Jesus said or taught. Returning to what I said earlier about John's gospel, I think John does this more than the synoptics. If Jesus himself varied how he delivered certain teachings, there's no reason for why the gospels authors shouldn't do the same.

There is a question, though, of what they intended to accomplish. Were they attempting to capture Jesus' sayings as accurately as they could, were they happy to capture what they took Jesus' teachings to be, but put them in their own words? Or were they making stuff up, maybe to attribute things to Jesus that they themselves already believed?

This can be partially answered by looking at the genre of the gospels, which is Greco-Roman biograpy. I've become so convinced of this position over the last year that I've decided to just state it as a fact rather than hedging by saying, "According to most scholars," or citing Richard Burridge. Anyway, Greco-Roman biography covers a wide range of styles. According to some ancient historians, the goal ought to be to capture the essence of what somebody said in a speech, but you ought to do it in an artistic way. I think John took more artistic license than the synoptics, but I think John accurately conveyed what Jesus taught. I am an inerrantist after all.

My suspicion is that once some saying of Jesus was committed to writing, authors who used that writing as a source took less artistic license than they would have if they were writing a completely fresh gospel. So Mark might have taken some artistic license in how he conveyed Jesus' teachings, but once he did, Matthew and Luke only altered them slightly. And I don't really know how much of that alteration is due to the artistry of Matthew and Luke or due to the fact that Jesus himself worded things differently from time to time. Even if Matthew and Luke were writing independently of each other about the same event, they might have worded things differently because nobody knows which way Jesus said a particular thing in one place as opposed to another place. If he said the same thing in slightly different words in Capernaum and Bethsaida, it could be that nobody remembered which way he said it in which place. But it doesn't matter unless the difference in wording fits the context better in one place than in another.

I suspect that in at least some Greco-Roman biography, authors made things up. In some cases, they might make up a speech to capture a moment that they think would've been appropriate for the occasion. Or maybe they went so far as making stuff up because it's what they wish the person had said. If I were looking at the gospels from a purely secular perspective, I wouldn't rule out that possibility in the case of Jesus either. But because I think the gospels are the word of God, I think that puts limits to how loosely they could have been written. I don't think, for example, that the authors would have Jesus saying something when Jesus never said any such thing, and I especially don't think they'd have Jesus saying something if it were actually contrary to something Jesus taught.

But even from a secular perspective, there's another reason to think the gospels accurately capture at least some of Jesus' teachings besides the fact that he was an itinerant teacher and is portrayed as having a peculiar voice. It's because it seems very unlikely that a religion that grew up around his memory would end up having nothing to do with the real Jesus. While a secular person might allow that legends grew up around Jesus, it's highly unlikely that the movement he started would diverge so thoroughly in such a short amount of time (especially during the lifetime of his apostles) that nothing of the real Jesus survived, and all of it was completely replaced by fiction. I wouldn't believe that no matter how anti-Christian I was. I would think the gospels must retain at least some of what Jesus said and did, especially the really important stuff, and I would think one could apply historical methods to discover at least some of the authentic teachings.

That is not to say it would be easy. If you look at the history of historical Jesus studies, you see that consensus is hard to come by. In spite of that, there is consensus on at least a handful of things. The Jesus Seminar attempted a few decades ago to see if they could reach a concensus, and they did reach a concensus on about 18% of the sayings of Jesus. They've been criticized as not being representative of scholarship as a whole, but if the critics had their way, that concensus would be higher, not lower, because the dispute wasn't in what the Jesus Seminar affirmed, but in what they denied.