Ask Me Jesus

The record it was built from

Every document is named here, with its translator, its edition and its date, so that anyone who wants to check a line can go and find it. Nothing is hidden. Nothing in the record itself has been paraphrased. All of it stands in the public domain.

The record of his words

What he is reported to have said, and what he is reported to have done, in the earliest documents we possess.

• The Four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles King James Version, 1611, in the standard Oxford text of 1769. And the World English Bible, eBible.org, a public-domain revision of the American Standard Version of 1901. Set down between roughly 65 and 100 in the common era, within living memory of the events they describe. Two translations are carried side by side: the King James for the cadence in which these words entered the English language, and a modern one for plain sense.
• The Complete Sayings of Jesus Arranged by Arthur Hinds. New York, 1927. Public domain, copyright not renewed. The standing scholarly arrangement of the sayings, and for a century the book people reached for when they wanted the words on their own. Not a translation but a gathering: 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. The agrapha: sayings attributed to him that never entered the four gospels and survive only where an early church father quoted one from memory, or where a scribe wrote one into the margin of a manuscript. Some are very old. Some are late. Each is given as it stands, and the reader is left to weigh it.
• 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, and about two thousand words long. The earliest surviving account of how the first followers actually lived: how they prayed, how they fasted, how they ate together, how they treated a stranger who came to the door.

The world he lived in

The scriptures and teaching a Jew of first-century Galilee grew up inside, and the histories that record the streets, the households and the festivals of that world. Jerusalem in his lifetime was one of the great cities of the earth, in the company of Rome, Alexandria, Antioch and Damascus, and these documents are what we have of it.

• 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 he would have known by heart.
• The Wisdom of Ben-Sira, or Ecclesiasticus Translated by W. O. E. Oesterley. Cambridge University Press. Written in Jerusalem about 180 years before the common era by a teacher who kept a school. Short, hard-edged proverbs on money, speech, friendship, parents and death. He would have known it.
• The Wisdom of Solomon Translated by W. O. E. Oesterley, 1918. Jewish wisdom written in Greek at Alexandria, probably in the century before he was born. The point where the Hebrew tradition meets Greek thought.
• Pirke Avot, the Sayings of the Jewish Fathers Translated by Joseph H. Gorfinkle. New York, 1913. The ethical tractate of the Mishnah, carrying the sayings of the rabbis from roughly two centuries before him to two centuries after. The closest surviving record of how a Jewish teacher of his own generation spoke, argued and taught.
• The Works of Flavius Josephus Translated by William Whiston, 1737. A Jewish historian and eyewitness commander writing about the year 93, within a lifetime of the events. Our best independent source for the Temple, the festivals, the sects, the taxes and the rulers of Judaea.
• Sketches of Jewish Social Life in the Days of Christ Alfred Edersheim, 1876. A study of ordinary first-century Jewish life, built from the rabbinic sources: the house and what was in it, the food, the clothing, the school, the synagogue, the sabbath, the trades, the road.

The manuscripts recovered from Egypt

Texts that were read, copied and then buried, lost for sixteen centuries, and lifted out of the sand within the last hundred and thirty years. They are among the great manuscript discoveries in history. Different readers hold them differently, so the finding and the date of each is given plainly here and you can weigh it for yourself.

• 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: no birth, no miracles, no cross, only the words. 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, which is what makes the rest of them worth reading.
• The Oxyrhynchus Sayings Papyri 1, 654 and 655. Found and translated by Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt, 1897 and 1903, and published immediately. Three scraps of Greek papyrus pulled out of an ancient rubbish mound in Egypt, copied in the third century. They were the oldest record of sayings of Jesus in the world, and for nearly fifty years nobody could say what book they came from. Thomas was found in 1945 and the question was answered.
• The Gospel of Mary Coptic, the Berlin Codex. Bought in Cairo in 1896. Not part of the Nag Hammadi find, and unconnected to it: this codex surfaced half a century earlier. Several pages are missing and it breaks off mid-sentence. What survives records what was said among those who were frightened and grieving after he 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, and damaged in places. Questions put to him by his followers, and the answers given.

On the translations. Every source used here stands in the public domain, and every translator is named above. Where a document survives in more than one public-domain translation, more than one is carried, so that the reading does not depend on a single hand. No modern copyrighted translation is used anywhere on this site. When the digital voice speaks a recorded saying, it speaks it in plain modern English rather than in seventeenth-century wording, because that is how it would be said to you now. The record itself is untouched, and it will give you chapter and edition the moment you ask.

On stepping beyond the canon. The control above the question box is off unless you turn it on. With it off, every word comes from the documents named on this page and nowhere else. With it on, a question the canon cannot answer is answered in two parts, and the part that comes from the modern world is marked as such in the answer itself, every time, with its source named. Those searches are served by the Brave Search API, over Brave's own independent index of the web. The subjects the digital voice will not discuss are closed in either setting, and are refused before any search is made rather than after.