Dear Roy,

Good question, for which I believe the answer is no. There is no way to know what his actual words were. Not verbatim, not word for word, not framed by divine quotation marks. Jesus said many things we will never read or hear, and is reported to have said many other things that most scholars do not believe he said. So why pay any attention to any of it?

The answer is that scholars believe that some of his authentic words are indeed found in the gospels, particularly in the gospel of Mark, the earliest gospel. As the decades passed, and the last gospel to make it into the canon was written, the gospel of John, many scholars believed there were very few authentic words of Jesus recorded there. This does not mean, however, that the way the gospel writers framed his teaching is without value, especially as it has been adapted to the communities for which they were written. Some sayings must have been particularly memorable, and in the case of the parables, some brief narratives have probably come down to us more or less intact for the same reason that the plot and punchline of a joke hold together.

In the mid-1980s, a group of scholars studied the relative probabilities that Jesus said the words attributed to him. They called themselves the Jesus Seminar, and their technique was to color-code the sayings of Jesus based on their best scholarly guess as to how likely it is that the words are authentic. Red meant he very likely said this, or something close to it; pink meant he probably said it, but we can’t be sure; grey meant he probably did not say this; and black meant he did not say this, or anything like it. Would it have been nice if a stenographer had followed Jesus around and written down everything he said exactly as he said it? Perhaps. But even the adapted/redacted story we have is powerful, and reminds us that not just his words are important, but also the radical nature of the communities that heard them and lived them.

~ Rev. Dr. Robin Meyers