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John 17:17 Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth.
This site has one purpose: to enlighten us about what Jesus said and how he said it. Its articles take about five-minutes to read. Each article contains surprises you will not hear anywhere else. New articles are published weekly and monthly one or two are free to our non-paid subscribers.
While the Greek of the New Testament has been faithfully preserved for two-thousand years, those translated it into English have various agendas to satisfy. Some of this is perfectly sincere, shaded by how Jesus has been interpreted over the last couple of millennia, but too much of it stretches Jesus’s meaning to the point where his original words are unrecognizable. In many cases, the meaning over the words have changed due to the influence of common Christian teaching.
My work at ChristsWords.com seeks to restore Jesus’s words to how his listeners at the time would have heard him. The Jesus that people then heard was a lot of fun. I often focus on how he said things because his most frequent form of speaking was humorous, often with a detailed setup and then a punchline, often with two different meanings. He was clever, witty, and enlightened his listeners by entertaining them.
If some of Jesus’s verses seem harsh, judgmental, and condemning to you, that is an artifact of translation. He does tease his critics, but it is usually in a light-hearted and often self-deprecating manner. If you don’t think you like Jesus, this is only because the English translation of his words reflects the attitudes of his translators more than his own. If you love Jesus, I hope you love him more after a weekly diet of these articles.
Typical Biblical translations offer a very limited view of the meaning of Jesus’s words. They have gradually grown less and less faithful to Jesus’s actual words. The original English version, the King James, cared about translating each of his words, despite their poor Greek sources. More modern Bibles have moved more to paraphrasing him, not to as much to update the language as to make the words conform to a clear set of preconceptions. The definitions of Greek words in Strong’s Biblical Lexicon are based upon how the Bible is translated from the different versions of the twenty-seven texts of the New Testament, not how those same words were understood more broadly in the common tongue (koine) of the time.
In writing these articles, I shine a light back two thousand years, to before those teachings were established. It is for those who want to get back to how Jesus was heard by the first generation of Christians. T do this, I draw upon the more general, most broadly understood meaning of his Greek. I use the Liddell, Scott, Jones Ancient Greek Lexicon for my English definitions and how the Greek words were used. This is based upon how all ancient Greek texts have been translated into English. This is a much larger and unbiased sample The Loeb Classical Library of Ancient Greek currently consists of over 520 volumes, consisting of 1,600 separate texts.
