Jesus Didn't Say, "Believe in me." - Part One

This article lays the basis for solving a mystery. The solution is not here, but in the second part of this discussion. However, you may not trust in that analysis if I don’t lay the groundwork first.

In analyzing the verse John 14:12 (He that believes in me…), I noticed something very strange. A deeper analysis showed that this oddity did not affect just this verse, but every verse that is translated as Jesus asking others to “believe or trust in" him. I had missed this in almost two decades of analyzing Jesus’s words because the idea of “trusting in" Jesus is so firmly established in English, probably because of our Biblical history. Throwing off my assumptions, I returned to a strict translation of the Greek source. I discovered that Jesus meant something very different from trusting or believing in him.

This is an important philosophical point because much of Protestant Christianity is based upon Luther’s concept of “faith alone.” So, I will go very carefulling in explaining what Jesus said and didn’t say.

The Greek word translated as “faith” is the noun from the same root as the Greek verb translated as “believe.” In an earlier article, I explained that pisteuo (πιστεοῦ), does not refer to religious faith. It means “to trust” and “to rely on.” The verb takes an indirect object, working like the English verb,“tell.” When we say “tell me,” the “me” is an indirect object. In Greek, when they say “trust me,” the “me” is an indirect object. One example is John 14:11 where Jesus says “trust me.” When Jesus says to trust anything—the Divine, the prophets, or the Old Testament—the indirect object form (dative case) is always used.

So, how often does Greek use the preposition “in” after the verb translated as “believe” in Greek literature? And how often in the Bible? This took some research, but the answer was surprising, especially since such huge claims are made about “trusting in Jesus.”

An Uncommon Phrase

In English, there is a vague difference between “believing” something and “believing in” something, but I suspect this idea comes mainly from the influence of the Bible. We believe a statement, that it is true. We believe a person when what they say is true, but we believe in a person or something when we believe it exists. For example, children might believe in Santa Claus or in the Tooth Fairy. Adults might believe in a flat earth or in a communist utopia.

The question is: was there a similar distinction in ancient Greek?

I wasn’t able to search all of Greek literature, but the Liddell, Scott, Jones Ancient Greek Lexicon (LSJ) is the best-known non-biblical Ancient Greek-English dictionary. Its listing for pisteuo shows no examples of the verb’s use with the Greek preposition translated as “in,” except in the New Testament.

Does the phrase “trust in” appear in the Greek Old Testament, the Septuagint? While I couldn’t search for all possibilities, I was able to search on those we would expect to find: “trusting in the Lord,” εἰς τὸν κύριον, and “trusting in the Divine,” εἰς τὸν θεόν. They didn’t exist. There was not one occurrence of either phrase used with the verb pisteuo. Since I am pretty confident that the OT tells us to believe and trust in God, it must do it in the ordinary way, using an indirect object, not with this “in” phrase.

We, therefore, know that this phrase wasn’t common in Judean Greek at the time, since the Septuagint was written only a hundred years before Jesus. So, how common is the phrase in the Greek New Testament? Except for Jesus’s use, which we will discuss in a moment, it is very rare. It occurs four times. The Pharisees use it in John 11:48 after its use by Jesus. Peter uses it when speaking to a crowd in Act 10:43. Paul uses it when speaking to the elders of the church in Act 20:21. And Paul again uses it in Phil 1:29, writing to the Philippians. The object of the “in” phrase is always Jesus, not the Divine, not the Prophets, and not the OT.

Then came the real surprise. Jesus uses the verb translated as “to believe or trust” in sixty-nine verses. When he refers to trusting in the prophets, the Divine, or the OT, he uses a dative object not the “in” phrase. He uses the “in” phrase eleven times, always referring to himself. But in two of those verses, he also refers to trusting “in the Divine” (John 14:1) and “in the one who sent me” (John 12:44) as well as himself. Is he saying both as the same thing about himself as the Divine or is he saying something different about himself? Certainly, Christianity like to equate the two, but Jesus avoids doing so.

In Me

The first problem is that the phrase translated as “in me” doesn’t mean that. The phrase that does mean “in me” is en moi (ἐν ἐμοί), which means “within me” or “in me,” in the sense of remaining inside. We see it used in John 14:10 and in the following verse, John 14:11:

KJV: Believe you not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me? the words that I speak to you I speak not of myself: but the Father that dwells in me, he does the works.

Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father in me: or else believe me for the very works' sake.

In the first of these verses, the “dwells in me” actually means “remains in me." The form of the “me” means staying in place, not moving.

However, in the very next verse, John 14:12, Jesus uses a different phrase also translated as “in me.”

KJV: Verily, verily, I say to you, He that believes in me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I proceed before my Father.

The Greek phrase “in me” is eis eme (εἰς ἐμὲ), which can’t mean “in me” in a similar sense While eis can mean “into,” its sense is always physical movement into a physical place. This eis can also mean many other things, but none of them have an obvious connection to “trust/believe.” Those meanings include: "up to (of time)," "until (of time)," "as much as (of measure or limit)," "as far as (of measure or limit)," "towards (to express relation)," "in regard to (to express relation)," "of an end or limit," and "for (of purpose or object)."

So what does eis eme mean? My first approach was looking for Jesus’s other uses of this phrase without the verb “trust.” Surprisingly, there were only two. They are parallels of each other, Matthew 26:10 and Mark 14:6, referring to the woman perfuming his feet before his death. In these verses, the eis eme means “for me” as a purpose or benefit as in Matthew 26:10.

Literal: Why are you handing out a beating to this woman? Because she worked, by herself, a good work for me?

The “for me” doesn’t seem to work with the verb “trust/believe.” What meaning does work? That will take a longer examination, looking at what makes sense in terms of what Jesus said, which we will perform in the next article.

Conclusions

Today’s religious leaders focus on trusting “in Jesus,” but is that what Jesus was asking us to do? This is a central pillar of modern Christianity, but does it make sense in the context of Jesus’s actual words? While there is a slight difference in the technical meaning of “believing” and “believing in” in English, there was no such distinction in ancient Greek because no one said “believing in.” Jesus invented the phrase to say something else. He and his followers clearly used it in a very specific way.