Ask Me Jesus — the Digital Historical Jesus Voice

On The biblical record. Click to expand

The four gospels, the sayings recorded outside them, the letters of the first followers, and the Hebrew scriptures and rabbinic teaching Jesus was raised on. Three things are drawn from it: the recorded words, the accounts of what Jesus did, and the character that shows in both.

See the documents — 8 sources

Where a document survives in more than one public-domain translation, more than one is used, so the reading does not rest on a single hand. No modern copyrighted translation is used anywhere on this site. The documents are listed in English, with their original titles, translators and dates, because that is how they must be searched for.

The Four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles World English Bible, eBible.org, a public-domain revision of the American Standard Version of 1901. The King James wording is carried separately, through Hinds 1927 below. Set down between roughly 65 and 100 in the common era, within living memory of the events they describe.

The Complete Sayings of Jesus Arranged by Arthur Hinds. New York, 1927. Public domain, copyright not renewed. Every saying recorded in the four gospels, lifted out of the narrative and set in sequence, in the King James wording.

The Apocryphal New Testament Translated by Montague Rhodes James. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1924. Sayings attributed to Jesus that never entered the four gospels, surviving where an early church father quoted one or a scribe wrote one into a margin.

The Didache, or The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles In The Apostolic Fathers, translated by J. B. Lightfoot and J. R. Harmer. Macmillan, London, 1891. Late first century. The earliest surviving account of how the first followers actually lived.

The Letters of the First Followers World English Bible, eBible.org. Written by people who knew those who knew Jesus. Used only for what they remember of the manner of Jesus, never quoted as the words of Jesus.

The Hebrew Scriptures The Holy Scriptures According to the Masoretic Text. Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia, 1917. Made by Jewish scholars from the Masoretic text. Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Psalms, and the prophets Hosea, Amos and Micah: the books Jesus knew by heart.

The Wisdom of Ben-Sira and the Wisdom of Solomon Both translated by W. O. E. Oesterley; the Wisdom of Solomon, 1918. Jewish wisdom writing from Jerusalem and from Alexandria in the centuries before Jesus was born.

Pirke Avot, the Sayings of the Jewish Fathers Translated by Joseph H. Gorfinkle. New York, 1913. The ethical tractate of the Mishnah. The closest surviving record of how a Jewish teacher of that same generation spoke, argued and taught.

Include the manuscripts and gospels recovered from Egypt. Click to expand

Coptic and Greek codices unearthed between 1896 and 1945, among them the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Mary. Read by early Christian communities, then buried for sixteen centuries.

See the documents — 5 sources

The documents are listed in English, with their original titles, translators and dates, because that is how they must be searched for.

The Gospel of Thomas Coptic, Nag Hammadi Codex II. Translations by Mark M. Mattison and by Samuel Zinner, both dedicated by their translators to the public domain. One hundred and fourteen sayings and no narrative at all. A complete Coptic copy came out of a sealed jar near Nag Hammadi in 1945. Many of its sayings stand almost unchanged in Matthew, Mark and Luke.

The Oxyrhynchus Sayings Papyri 1, 654 and 655. Found and translated by Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt, 1897 and 1903. Three scraps of Greek papyrus from an ancient rubbish mound, copied in the third century. Nobody could say what book they came from until Thomas was found in 1945.

The Gospel of Mary Coptic, the Berlin Codex. Bought in Cairo in 1896. Not part of the Nag Hammadi find; this codex surfaced half a century earlier. Several pages are missing. What survives records what was said among those who were frightened and grieving after Jesus was gone.

The Secret Book of James Coptic, Nag Hammadi Codex I. Found 1945. Second century. A letter framing teaching given to those who stayed behind.

The Dialogue of the Savior Coptic, Nag Hammadi Codex III. Found 1945. Probably second century, damaged in places. Questions put to Jesus by the disciples, and the answers given.

Include the daily world of Jesus, and its character traits. Click to expand

The household, the table, the trades, the roads, the money and the customs of first-century Galilee. This fills out the manner of Jesus. Where this material ever differs from the record, the record governs.

See the documents — 2 sources

The documents are listed in English, with their original titles, translators and dates, because that is how they must be searched for.

The Works of Flavius Josephus Translated by William Whiston, 1737. A Jewish historian writing about the year 93, within a lifetime of the events. Our best independent source for the Temple, the festivals, the taxes and the rulers of Judaea.

Sketches of Jewish Social Life in the Days of Christ Alfred Edersheim, 1876. Ordinary first-century Jewish life: the house and what was in it, the food, the clothing, the school, the synagogue, the sabbath, the trades, the road.

Allow the search of the modern web to expand the knowledge base. Click to expand

For questions the record cannot answer or that reach past it: a repair, a recipe, a modern fact. The settings above still apply, and the character stays the same. Anything drawn from the modern web is marked in the answer, so you always know which part came from where.