How We Know What Jesus Actually Said—And What’s Made Up

There’s a big difference between the religion of Jesus — a renewed spirituality centered on bringing more love into the world — and the religion about Jesus — a religion of requirements that’s all about believing the right things to get into “heaven.” (1)

The first is about following a way of life that Jesus modeled. The second comes from later believers who corrupted Jesus’s revolutionary message into a cosmic true or false test. It was the latter that was exploited by the rich and powerful to maintain their wealth and power.

But how do we know what Jesus actually said and did? How can we model our lives on his — and live out the religion of Jesus — if we can’t tell what in the Bible was genuinely from Jesus, and what is not?

To be sure — this is a very tall order. But thankfully scholars have been studying this question for nearly a century and a half. They have provided us with five handy questions that can help us tell what is likely authentic — and what is likely not.

It’s helpful to remember however that this is not a binary distinction: there is very little we can say with 100% certainty that Jesus said or did. (Here are five things we know for sure are true though.) It’s better to think of this a sliding scale.

Why This Is Challenging

First and foremost, we’re majorly hindered by the fact that Jesus himself didn’t write anything down. There’s no conclusive evidence Jesus could read or write either, and plenty of reason to believe he didn’t. Further, he spoke a language, Aramaic, none of us speak, and lived in a time and place that is almost inconceivable to the modern American mind.

The other main obstacle in this quest is that everything we do have about Jesus comes from at least two decades after his death. The earliest writings we have about Jesus are the letters of Paul, written in the 50s CE (Jesus was executed around 30–33 CE).

But Paul, who did not know Jesus and who quarreled with those who did, didn’t write anything down about Jesus’s teachings, sayings, parables, or life more generally. (2)

The four books of the New Testament that do tell us about Jesus’s life — the Gospels — weren’t written down until decades after that. Mark, the earliest, was written no earlier than 70 CE. Matthew and Luke, written with Mark in front of them, were probably written within 20 years of that. John was the last of the four Gospels to be written, anywhere from 90 to 120 CE.

This means that our earliest accounts of Jesus’s life come a generation or two after his death. (3) To be fair there are other gospels that tell of Jesus’s life that aren’t in the Bible, but none of them are universally considered by scholars to be authentic. (4)

All of this is further complicated by the fact that we do not have the original text of any of these documents. What we have are copies of copies of copies. The earliest complete manuscripts we have come from the 300s — and these copies have significant disagreements among them.

And then there’s the coup de grace: none of it was written the language Jesus spoke, and none of it was written in a language we speak. Remember: every act of translation is an act of interpretation.

What all this means is that the information we do have about Jesus was at first passed down orally before being written down, and then copied by hand over and over and over again before making it to a printing press. Needless to say, this transmission process gave bad actors plenty of time to corrupt and distort the original message of Jesus to fit their own needs.

5 Questions Scholars Use to Judge Authenticity

However, that doesn’t mean it’s all made up. There are certainly seeds of truth about Jesus’s life and teachings buried beneath the treacherous top soil of the corrupted New Testament. Our job — as seekers of Jesus’s true, original message — is to help dig up those seeds up and replant them.

As such, scholars who study the historical Jesus have developed five handy questions to help us judge if saying or story about Jesus is authentic:

1. Does it appear in more than one early, independent source?
2. Is it distinctive enough that it likely wasn’t just “made up”?
3. Does it fit with what we know about first century Palestinian Jewish life and culture?
4. Is it embarrassing? i.e., does it create problems early Christians had to resolve?
5. Is it easy to remember and pass on?

Answer yes to most or all five of these questions, and there’s a strong argument to be made that a passage is authentic. (5)

#1. Does it appear in more than one early, independent source?

When a saying or story appears in multiple, independent sources, scholars believe it’s more likely to be authentic. This is called multiple independent attestation.

For example, the Greatest Commandment explicitly appears in all three Synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew, and Luke), while appearing in fractured, indirect forms in Paul’s letters and the Gospel of John. Furthermore, it appears in the letters of John and James. (6) This strong attestation suggests the authenticity of Jesus’s commandment to love God and love our neighbors.

Conversely, Jesus’s “I am” statements in John (“I am the bread of life,” “I am the way, the truth and the life”) appear only in that later gospel and nowhere else in early Christian literature. This suggests it is unlikely Jesus himself said these; it is more likely a later addition of some of his followers. (7)

#2. Is it distinctive enough that it likely wasn’t just “made up”?

If a saying differs from both traditional Jewish teaching and early Christian theology, it’s more likely to be authentic. For example, Jesus’ teaching that “the sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the sabbath” (Mk 2:27) challenged Jewish law in a way early Christians weren’t likely to invent. The early church wasn’t particularly interested in critiquing Jewish law, making this kind of radical statement that would have ruffled the feathers of Jewish leaders unlikely to be just made up.

In contrast, a statement like, “go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” at the end of Matthew (28:19) perfectly aligns with early church practices and Trinitarian theology that was developed in the centuries after Jesus’s death. It’s highly unlikely Jesus would have ever said anything like this.

#3. Does it fit with what we know about first century Palestinian Jewish life and culture?

Sayings that fit the historical and cultural context of first century Palestine are more likely authentic. Jesus’ parables about farming, fishing, and domestic life in Galilee ring true to his context. However, Jesus gives several detailed prophecies of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem that would “come true” some 30 years after his death. (8) It is much more likely, given the improbability of the destruction of temple, that someone added these later than Jesus having the ability to “see” into the future.

#4. Is it embarrassing? Does it create problems early Christians had to resolve?

This is similar to #2. If a saying or story or event could have embarrassed the early church, it’s more likely authentic because its unlikely early Christians would have made up an embarrassing story or detail. This is called the criterion of embarrassment.

The classic example of this is Jesus’s relationship with John the Baptist. Typically, the baptizer is more holy or more authoritative than the person getting baptized. This remains true today. Scholars believe the story of Jesus being baptized by John must have been well-known enough to need an explanation because all four Gospels go out of their way to explain this (embarrassing) detail. (9)

Compare that with the stories of Jesus’s birth — the infancy narratives — found in Matthew and Luke. With their miraculous virgin birth stories and fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies, both seem designed more to glorify Jesus. (10) It is the exact opposite of embarrassment! For that and other reasons, these stories are likely fabricated.

#5. Is it easy to remember and pass on?

Jesus taught orally in Aramaic, so it makes sense that authentic sayings likely have features that made them easy to remember and repeat. Verses and stories that are short and punchy, and/or have a parallel structure, surprise twist, or a memorable image are more likely to be authentic.

For example, Jesus’s saying, “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter God’s kingdom” has these features and is likely authentic. (11)

Jesus’s long farewell discourse in John 14–17 is the precise opposite of this. It lacks the brief, punchy, memorable style characteristic of oral tradition and instead reflects sophisticated Greek philosophy. Therefore, scholars believe it is very likely inauthentic.

Using these questions as a guide, scholars generally agree these types of saying are unlikely to be authentic:

• Long theological discourses about Jesus’ divine nature;
• Detailed predictions of his death and resurrection;
• Statements that sound more like early church doctrine;
• Teachings that seem to address later church conflicts;
• and stories that fulfill Old Testament prophecies too perfectly.

Why It Matters

When I meet “Christians” who have no interest in this information, quite honestly I’m puzzled. If you’re going to “give your life to Christ,” why wouldn’t you want to know — at least to the best of our ability — what Jesus himself actually thought, taught, and practiced? It’s infinitely more important than what Paul thought of Jesus, or what whoever wrote John thought of Jesus.

Understanding what Jesus did and taught is crucial to distinguishing between the religion of Jesus rather than the religion about Jesus.

When we strip away the stories and sayings of Jesus that are likely to be inauthentic, and instead focus on those more likely to be authentic, we see that Jesus emphasized God’s love, challenged religious and social authorities, and called for radical transformation of both individuals and society.

Jesus was not concerned about where you would spend eternity. That’s an invention of his later followers. Rather, Jesus was deeply concerned with how we treat each other — particularly the poor and marginalized — and the transformed world that emerges when his followers bring more love into the world.

And that’s the difference between living the religion of Jesus — instead of the religion about Jesus.

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Footnotes:

1. This is an idea first articulated by the great Howard Thurman. I wrote last week in more detail about the difference between the religion of Jesus versus the religion about Jesus.
2. Paul explicitly states that he did not receive his gospel from any human source but through direct “revelation” from Jesus Christ (Gal 1:11–12), and emphasizes that he did not consult with the apostles who knew Jesus before beginning his ministry (Gal 1:16–17). His conflicts with Jesus’s original disciples, particularly Peter and James, are documented in Gal 2:11–14, where Paul describes publicly confronting Peter in Antioch, and in 2 Cor 11:5 and 12:11 where he sarcastically refers to Jesus’s original disciples as “super-apostles.”
3. Most scholars date Mark to around 70 CE because it appears to reference the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple (Mk 13:1–2), which occurred in that year. Matthew and Luke both used Mark as a source, so they must have been written later. Additionally, Luke’s prologue (Lk 1:1–4) indicates he knew of multiple written accounts of Jesus, suggesting a date in the 80s CE. The Fourth Gospel’s high Christology and developed theology point to a late first or early second century composition.
4. While dozens of non-canonical gospels exist (like the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Mary, and various infancy gospels), scholars generally date these to the second century CE or later. The notable exception is the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of 114 sayings attributed to Jesus discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945. While some scholars like John Dominic Crossan argue that some sayings in Thomas may be as early as or earlier than Mark, the majority view is that Thomas, in its final form, dates to the late first or early second century and shows signs of later Gnostic theology. For more, see Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (Oxford, 2003).
5. This methodology was popularized by The Jesus Seminar, a group founded in 1985 by Bible scholars Robert Funk and John Dominic Crossan. The group’s reputation has come under fire from the academy in recent years for the way they voted to determine authenticity using colored beads. However, their basic criteria remains widely used in historical Jesus research, even as scholars have (rightly) moved away from their voting system.
6. The Greatest Commandment appears directly in Mt 22:36–40, Mk 12:28–31, Lk 10:25–28; and indirectly in Jn 13:34–35, 15:12–17, Rom 13:8–10, Gal 5:13–14, Jas 2:8, Mt 5:43–48, 1 Cor 13:1–13, 1 Jn 3:11–24, 4:7–21.
7. The “I am” statements found in the Gospel of John are the bread of life (6:35), the light of the world (8:12), the door (10:7), the good shepherd (10:11, 14), the resurrection and the life (11:25), the way the truth and the life (14:6) and the true vine (15:1). Also, contrast Jn 8:12 with Mt 5:14, the earlier saying, where Jesus proclaims you are the light of the world. Who is it? It can’t be both.
8. Jesus prophesies the destruction of the temple in Mt 24:1–2, Mk 13:1–2, and Lk 21:5–6. This event was as likely in Jesus’s time as me “prophesizing” with the same detail the destruction of St. Peter’s Basilica some 50 years from now. Not very likely at all!
9. The criterion of embarrassment is exemplified in Jesus’s baptism by John, explained in Mt 3:13–15, Mk 1:9–11, Lk 3:21–22, and Jn 1:29–34. Each Gospel explains the event differently. See if you can spot the differences!
10. The infancy narratives are found in Mt 1:18–2:23 and Lk 1:5–2:52.
11. The saying is found in the Synoptic Gospels: Mt 19:24, Mk 10:25, and Lk 18:25.