What Jesus Didn’t Say
Biblical historians have long held that the New Testament abounds in sayings incorrectly attributed to Jesus. In order to assemble as complete a collection of authentic sayings as possible, they have, for the most part, been intent on seeing how the sayings deemed authentic are connected to one another, and attempting to picture their specific contexts. In What Jesus Didn’t Say, Gerd Ludemann flips the coin and focuses on the inauthentic words of Jesus not only those thought to be clear inventions, but also sayings that exhibit noteworthy alterations to their original form and intent. For his selection, he uses sayings that: are attributed to Jesus after his crucifixion; presuppose a pagan rather than a Jewish audience; involve situations in a post-Easter community; reflect the editorial influence of the author. According to Ludemann, the sheer abundance of inauthentic Jesus-sayings demonstrates that, soon after his sudden and dramatic death, he became the center of a new faith. From the very beginning, Christians imagined what answers Jesus would offer to the questions that arose among them. When the words they recalled no longer seemed adequate, they revised or invented new sayings to suit the existing situation.
A book about what someone did not say! What a novel idea. More and more Christians have become accustomed to the idea that the historical Jesus very likely didn’t say everything attributed to him in the Gospels. Numerous books have been written to identify what he most probably did say. This is the first book I have come across focused instead on what Jesus didn’t say.
While the extensive list will most likely make the book unacceptable to conservative Christians, and while some of the more liberal Christians will find the contents too laborious to wade through for what they may get from it, in the Introduction, Ludemann offers information that is both interesting and valuable to any who wish a deeper understanding of the birth and development of the early church and the resultant bible.
Ludemann presents his criteria for judging the inauthenticity of the material he selects. It shows a rigor that confirms that he is indeed a scholar.
“First, words are inauthentic in which the risen Lord speaks or is presupposed as the one who speaks, for after his death Jesus no longer spoke.
Second, all reported sayings of Jesus are to be suspected of inauthentic if they involve situations in a post-Easter community.
Third, like the previous category, serious suspicion attaches to any attribution that reflects the editorial influence of the final author.
Fourth, those words are inauthentic which presuppose a pagan rather than a Jewish audience, for it is certain that Jesus was active in an exclusively Jewish sphere.”
He also presents his criteria for authenticity, which I’ll not present here.
He shows us in the introduction to Luke that . . “many have attempted to compose a narrative about the events which have come to fulfillment among us”, indicating that there were numerous gospels in existence at the time. He also reminds us that none of the material in our canon was written by eye witnesses and that the gospels were written not to offer an objective and historical account of events, but to promote acceptance of a new and developing faith.
While I had long known that New Testament scholars had taught that not all of the sayings attributed to Jesus were spoken by him, I was surprised that Ludemann offers us twenty seven sections that he judges as inauthentic. I will offer only numbers 1 – 4 and 10 – 12 as illustration:
1. In the Temple of Jerusalem: The First Words of Jesus
2. At the Jordan: Words to John the Baptist
3. In the Desert: Words to the Devil
4. In the Synagogue of Nazareth: Inaugural Sermon
10. In Jerusalem: Answer to the High Priest
11. In Jerusalem: Dialogue with Pilate
12. In Jerusalem: Words on the Cross
For those who find it hard to accept that there are words falsely attributed to Jesus, the story of Jesus being taken to a mountain and tempted by the Devil is a good one to think about. Were there witnesses who say it happened? If there were witnesses, what did they see and hear? If there were no witnesses, did Jesus tell the story to someone?
There are so many other stories that plainly were not eye witness accounts that it should not be that difficult to accept that we are reading the works of a new religious movement that was creating itself and evolving from roots already present in the culture at the time.
In his conclusion, Ludemann sums it up well, saying:
“Any contemporary person who turns to the New Testament for objective information about Jesus is bound to come away feeling queasy. Although early Christians acclaimed truth as a component of holiness and condemned lying as one of the sins they had supposedly overcome, the utterances attributed to Jesus in the New Testament Gospels are for the most part heavily redacted or wholly invented sayings intended to edify the earliest Christians, many of whom were waiting for Jesus to return from Heaven. Unfortunately, the Church today often proclaims these texts to be the Word of God, even though scholars, many of them committed Christians—long ago discredited them as inauthentic.
Ludemann’s latest book appears to be an attempt to show how so many inauthentic sayings found their way into the Gospel accounts of Jesus. Redaction criticism has taught us much about the early Christian communities. However, the modern critical distinction between authentic and inauthentic sayings is misleading and raises questions about the integrity of the early Christian redactors. The early Christian communities regarded all of the sayings as authentic because they were mediated to them from the risen Jesus through his spirit-filled apostles and prophets on a regular as needed basis. They made no distinction between the teachings of the Jesus of history and the revelations that came to them through their leaders from the Christ of faith. As one of these, Paul claimed to have seen the risen Jesus, and also that the exalted Christ Jesus was speaking authoritatively through him to his communities. Modern scholarship has shown there is very little about Jesus recorded in the Gospels that is “history remembered.” What is remembered and recorded in the Gospels is the spirit-taught, post-resurrection testimony and teaching of apostles and prophets, inspired by the spirit of Christ, many of whom, like Paul had never met the historical Jesus. The Gospel of John places a premium on the things revealed by the spirit of truth over the words of the historical Jesus. From its inception the Jesus Movement was mystical and charismatic.