Do We Have the Exact Words of Christ, or a Paraphrase?
00:00:00.000 | Well, today we have a really important question about how we should think of the recorded
00:00:08.440 | words of Christ in our Bibles.
00:00:10.520 | Do we have the actual words of Christ, or do we have a paraphrase of what he said?
00:00:16.000 | The question is from Reston, who lives in Newton, Iowa.
00:00:18.640 | "Pastor John, as I continue to study the Bible, and specifically the actual text and
00:00:22.060 | transmission of the Bible itself, I keep returning to a debate over two Latin phrases.
00:00:27.560 | Ipsima verba, the very words, and Ipsima vox, the very voice or the gist of the words.
00:00:35.360 | The debate is whether or not the Gospel writers give us the exact words spoken by Christ or
00:00:39.320 | the paraphrased gist of Jesus' words.
00:00:42.900 | What do you think, and what bearing does it have on our Bible interpretation?"
00:00:47.520 | This question takes me back almost 50 years to the three years that I spent at the University
00:00:54.700 | of Munich in Germany, 1971 to 1974, working on a dissertation about the words of Jesus
00:01:02.920 | in Matthew and Luke, "Love Your Enemies."
00:01:06.920 | To write a dissertation for a German university in the 1970s about the words of Jesus was
00:01:15.400 | to be presented with this very question all the time.
00:01:20.480 | Can we peel away the layers of tradition and get back to the Ipsisma verba of Jesus, the
00:01:29.040 | very words of Jesus?
00:01:32.440 | So I had to immerse myself in the kind of scholarship that developed methods, formgeschichte,
00:01:39.800 | redaktionsgeschichte, literaturgeschichte, sachkritik.
00:01:43.160 | You have to immerse yourself in these things because that's the way the work was done,
00:01:51.600 | to peel away the layers and try to get to the Ipsisma verba.
00:01:56.960 | Now if you wonder whether I had a crisis of faith, you might be surprised about the nature
00:02:03.200 | of the crisis.
00:02:04.960 | It wasn't a crisis of my belief in the truth and worth of Scripture, but a crisis of my
00:02:12.800 | belief in the truth and worth of such academic scholarship.
00:02:17.120 | It really was a crisis.
00:02:19.520 | What was I doing?
00:02:20.720 | And what was—what had they done for two centuries in this country, Germany, and everywhere
00:02:26.040 | else that was influenced by higher criticism?
00:02:29.160 | It went something like this.
00:02:31.080 | Article after article that I read and book after book began and was pervaded by the words
00:02:39.600 | "wahrscheinlich" and "vielleicht," "probably" and "perhaps."
00:02:46.560 | And yet they tended at the end of the article, at the end of the book, to move toward what
00:02:53.600 | were called the assured results of critical studies.
00:02:58.760 | And I could never see a clear path.
00:03:01.760 | How did you get from all those "probablys" and all those "perhapses" to this so-called
00:03:09.200 | assured results of scholarship?
00:03:12.400 | It all looked like historical guesswork to me.
00:03:15.400 | And to my mind, they were not at all assured because they were built on guesses over and
00:03:21.760 | over and over again.
00:03:23.880 | That's what gave them the appearance of scholarship.
00:03:26.960 | And as a Christian who had come to trust in Jesus Christ as the Lord, Savior, treasure
00:03:34.600 | of my life, who had stood forth from the Bible with such compelling evidence to my mind and
00:03:41.940 | heart as real and reliable, I knew there must be a better way and more reliable way to come
00:03:50.600 | to a conviction about the truth of the person and the teachings and the work, the words
00:03:56.800 | of Jesus.
00:03:58.200 | What was at stake for me—this was the crisis—what was at stake for me was not whether Christ
00:04:04.040 | was real and the New Testament was true.
00:04:07.840 | What was at stake was whether any missionaries would give their lives for guesswork.
00:04:13.400 | I mean, really, scholars, come on!
00:04:16.480 | What's going to happen on Sunday morning with pastors who believe what you believe,
00:04:21.040 | who don't believe what you don't believe, who handle the Bible the way you do?
00:04:25.080 | Nothing's going to happen.
00:04:26.080 | That's what's going to happen.
00:04:27.080 | There's going to be no missionaries.
00:04:28.680 | Nobody will give their life for this kind of guesswork.
00:04:32.640 | So that's background.
00:04:35.720 | That's what came to my mind when I read this question.
00:04:37.920 | Let me say three things about the ipsissima verba, the very words of Jesus.
00:04:44.160 | First, we do not know what language Jesus spoke in every conversation and every teaching
00:04:52.200 | moment of his life.
00:04:54.960 | He could speak in Greek.
00:04:56.640 | He could speak in Aramaic.
00:04:59.020 | He could speak in Hebrew.
00:05:01.080 | But there is very good evidence that at least some of the time—most scholars would say
00:05:07.440 | most of the time, so a little bit of guesswork going on here, right?—he was speaking in
00:05:11.840 | Aramaic.
00:05:13.480 | The ordinary Semitic language of Galilee, Judea, at the time.
00:05:18.120 | Some of the evidence for that is that the gospel writers preserved some of his Aramaic
00:05:24.240 | words.
00:05:25.240 | Talath ha-Kum, Mark 5.41.
00:05:26.840 | Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani, on the cross, Mark 5.15.34.
00:05:31.640 | Efaphtha, open, Mark 7.34.
00:05:34.880 | Abba, Mark 14.36.
00:05:37.960 | These leftovers from Aramaic cause most scholars to say he probably spoke most of the time
00:05:44.400 | in Aramaic, which was a Semitic.
00:05:46.280 | It was related to Hebrew, very much like Hebrew in Judea, Galilee at that time.
00:05:52.040 | Which means we probably don't have the very words of Jesus in all the time because he
00:05:59.200 | didn't speak in Greek, and what we have is Greek.
00:06:02.280 | The New Testament was written in Greek originally, and we read it in our translations.
00:06:07.160 | And so even if he sometimes taught in Greek, which he may well have, readers of English
00:06:13.840 | today don't have the very words because they're reading English.
00:06:18.100 | So that's the first observation.
00:06:20.040 | Ipsissima verba, probably not, because he spoke in Aramaic and nobody reads Aramaic
00:06:26.040 | when they read the Greek New Testament today, which is the way they were written.
00:06:30.640 | So second observation, what is essential in connecting us reliably with the mind of Christ,
00:06:39.280 | what he really intended to communicate when he taught, is not the very words but the very
00:06:46.640 | meaning, the very intention that he had when he communicated with whatever words he used.
00:06:55.880 | Creating meaning, intention, is essential.
00:07:00.960 | Words are means to that end.
00:07:03.280 | So here's an example.
00:07:04.920 | What if you sent a friend to ask me if I thought you should purchase a subscription to a certain
00:07:13.360 | video service?
00:07:14.960 | And he reports back to you in writing in an email, "John said, 'Yeah, I am sure that
00:07:23.000 | would be a great use of your money.'"
00:07:28.920 | Now those are my very words.
00:07:31.980 | But what if I had said them to your friend like this, "Yeah, I'm sure that would be
00:07:38.040 | a great use of your money."
00:07:40.000 | The meaning, the intention of my words is, "Don't be stupid.
00:07:45.800 | Don't waste your money on that subscription."
00:07:49.440 | So the point is, my very words may not carry my meaning.
00:07:56.360 | People need to realize this about language.
00:07:59.720 | Meaning and language are not the same, and we need to be alert to how language communicates
00:08:07.640 | intention.
00:08:08.640 | I want to know what Jesus meant, what he intended me to understand.
00:08:14.560 | Whether I have his very words or not is relatively unimportant compared to, are the words that
00:08:22.800 | God used to communicate the meaning of Jesus doing that for us?
00:08:29.140 | The second point, then, is that we must not assume it is better to have the very words
00:08:35.540 | of Jesus than it is to have an accurate and faithful rendering of the meaning and the
00:08:43.680 | mind of Christ guaranteed by God in the inspiration of the Scripture.
00:08:49.880 | So here's the third observation.
00:08:52.360 | The Bible itself presents us with a doctrine, a teaching, about its own inspiration by God
00:09:00.240 | and its truthfulness and reliability, which secures for us not the less important very
00:09:09.660 | words of Jesus in Aramaic or Greek or Hebrew, but a true and reliable communication of what
00:09:18.440 | Jesus meant, what he intended to communicate with the words that he used.
00:09:25.780 | Do we have that now truthfully and faithfully communicated in the language of Scripture,
00:09:32.580 | Greek and Hebrew?
00:09:33.580 | And the answer is yes.
00:09:35.860 | And I've tried to gather all my thoughts about these things, that how we know the Bible
00:09:42.620 | is true in a book written a few years ago called A Peculiar Glory, how the Christian
00:09:49.000 | Scriptures reveal their complete truthfulness.
00:09:52.220 | I recommend that.
00:09:53.220 | If you want to go deeper into how I think the Bible shows itself to be true, that's
00:09:58.860 | where I tried to say it all that I understood.
00:10:02.380 | My argument is that God has provided a self-authenticating Scripture which enables the simplest believer
00:10:12.860 | by the Holy Spirit through the divine marks and evidences of the Scripture itself to know
00:10:20.540 | that they are true and to know with such confidence that they can justly give their lives for
00:10:29.820 | this truth.
00:10:30.820 | So, let me close with one paragraph from that book about the message of Jesus in the New
00:10:37.740 | Testament in particular.
00:10:39.140 | It goes like this.
00:10:40.580 | "Jesus came to bear witness to the truth," John 18, 37, "with all authority, with all
00:10:47.180 | the authority of God," John 17, 2, Matthew 28, 18.
00:10:51.980 | "He planned and prepared that truth and authority to be preserved through a band of
00:10:59.620 | apostles whom he would guide by his Spirit into all the truth needed for the foundation
00:11:06.220 | and preservation of his church," John 14, 25, 16, 12, Ephesians 2, 20, 1 Corinthians
00:11:13.860 | 2, 13.
00:11:14.860 | "In perfect harmony with God's will for Christ and Christ's will for his church,
00:11:21.780 | those spokesmen," those apostolic spokesmen, "put their teachings into writing with a sober,
00:11:28.620 | conscious sense that what they wrote for the church," including the record of Jesus'
00:11:34.180 | teaching in the Gospels, "would be her infallible charter till Jesus would come again."
00:11:40.860 | End of the paragraph that I quoted.
00:11:42.380 | So I conclude that, for the most part, not having his very words is not a loss for the
00:11:49.460 | church, since he himself planned that there would be preserved for us a faithful and true
00:11:57.020 | and infallible writing of what he wanted communicated.
00:12:03.260 | Really good.
00:12:04.260 | Thank you, Pastor John, for walking us through this debate and how you've thought through
00:12:06.580 | it over the years.
00:12:08.500 | Appreciate that.
00:12:09.500 | And thank you for listening.
00:12:10.500 | You can find those episodes in our archive or submit a question to us, like Reston did
00:12:13.020 | today.
00:12:14.020 | Do all that online at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.
00:12:15.020 | Well, it's Christmas week, and we have two episodes coming up on Christmas themes.
00:12:22.260 | On Wednesday, we're going to look at the fundamental question over why Christ needed a body to
00:12:26.420 | begin with, the incarnation.
00:12:27.940 | That's on Wednesday.
00:12:29.380 | And then on Friday, we're going to address a question on the holiday itself and look
00:12:34.500 | at the Germanic roots for why we celebrate Christmas on December 25th, and should we
00:12:39.880 | celebrate the birth of Christ on what is basically a reclaimed pagan holiday.
00:12:45.700 | Two great questions.
00:12:46.700 | Should be a good week.
00:12:47.700 | I'm Tony Reinke, and we'll see you back here on Wednesday.
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