Can we really know what Jesus said?

Alex O’Connor recently asked me, can we really know what Jesus said?

It is a complex and fascinating question, which I want to address here in nuce.

The Problem

It seems that those who think we can – and in a moment, I shall count myself broadly among their number – face four key problems:

First, Jesus spoke Aramaic, but the Gospels were written in Greek. This means that we often depend (at best) upon a translation of Jesus’ original teaching.

Second, the Gospels were written in an oral culture. This means that many of Jesus’ teachings were likely passed down verbally before they were written down.

Third, the Gospels are ancient biographies. And ancient biographers and historians often granted themselves literary license with their subject’s words.

Finally, we find various discrepant teachings in the Gospels. These discrepancies inhere in both the content and the style of Jesus’ teaching.

In short, we almost never find in the Gospels the original Aramaic teaching of Jesus. And at almost every level of the process, there was an opportunity for Jesus’ teaching to be changed; both as his teachings were passed down orally and written down.

Jesus’ Teaching

Why, then, do Jesus scholars often speak as though they do have a grasp of what Jesus said? Why do they think they can recover the teaching of Jesus?

1. Recurrent Motifs

Memory often fails to serve, meanings change, and the wording of any individual saying may not capture Jesus’ original words.

Yet it is important to realise that knowing the key aspects of Jesus’ teaching does not depend upon the veracity of any particular teaching.

Since the Gospels are made up of many different streams and types of tradition - several of which were likely independent - we can track certain commonalities across those traditions; similarities which likely derive from a common source.

In this way, we can understand ‘the gist’ (a scholarly term!) of Jesus’ message without relying upon the complete reliability of any individual teaching or saying.

We do this even today. Think about the apocryphal witticisms of Winston Churchill, or the catch-phrases of C.S. Lewis. Many of the sayings attributed to these figures are not things they actually said. They are, technically speaking, ‘inauthentic.’

But does that mean they teach us nothing about Churchill or Lewis? Hardly! The very fact that Churchill and Lewis are remembered as having said these sorts of things gives us a window into their historical characters. For without the impact of the historical Churchill and Lewis, they would not have been remembered at all.

So it is with the Gospels. The Gospels are built primarily out of chreai, short anecdotes which were told about Jesus after his death. Like many anecdotes, they probably do not capture the full reality or verbatim phraseology of what he said.

Nevertheless, they do capture the essence of Jesus’ character; they capture the gist.

2. Oral Tradition

It is very regrettable that in New Testament studies, one of the best textbooks used to teach undergraduates – a textbook I have taught from myself – likens the process of oral tradition to the Telephone Game (or Chinese Whispers, as it is known here).¹

The very purpose of this game is to show a line of oral transmission can become corrupt – often with ludicrous results. Applying this analogy to the Gospels, whole swathes of Jesus’ teaching may have got lost in transmission. And the Gospel teaching material may be more akin to rumour than reportage.

Hearsay is a category which is recognised by experts on oral tradition. Yet it exists at the extreme end of the spectrum of an oral culture.² It does not adequately reflect the more careful yet complex process of oral tradition behind the Gospels.³

How do we know that the oral tradition was more stable than the Telephone Game?

One reason is the stability of the (once oral) traditions found in the Gospels. According to Jimmy Dunn, the Gospel traditions follow the principle of ‘variation within the same.’ This is characteristic of the preservation of oral traditions, passed on in an informally controlled environment.⁴

Another reason is the inherent memorability of some of Jesus’ sayings. Robert McIver likens the memorable form of some of Jesus’ teaching to the telling of a joke. There are typically slight variations in the way one tells a joke, but if one doesn’t remember the punchline, the joke itself is lost to memory.⁵