What did Jesus actually teach?

Mark compresses the whole message into the first words Jesus speaks, before he has called a single follower: "The time is fulfilled, and God’s Kingdom is at hand! Repent, and believe in the Good News."

Much of what he teaches after that is an elaboration of the phrase. It is not a doctrine of God, a system of belief or a set of rituals. It is an announcement, with a time on it.

A farmer sows. A seed is small and then it is not. The kingdom is compared to things rather than defined, and the comparisons are domestic, agricultural and short.

Between the two, Mark says something that is still argued over: "To you is given the mystery of God’s Kingdom, but to those who are outside, all things are done in parables", so that "seeing they may see and not perceive". On that account the stories are not a teaching aid. They sort the audience. A few verses later Mark also says he spoke in parables "as they were able to hear it", and leaves the two side by side.

Matthew sets six sayings against older ones with the same move, the opening varying a little: "You have heard that it was said ... but I tell you". Murder becomes anger. Adultery becomes the look. The rule moves inward, where no court can follow it.

The same chapter has "love your enemies, bless those who curse you", and ends the sequence with "you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect". Many readers take that as a standard nobody meets. Wesley taught that a Christian can reach it in this life, as perfect love rather than freedom from every fault.

Luke introduces three of the best known stories with an objection: "This man welcomes sinners, and eats with them." The stories answer it, and the answer is the father running toward the son who spent everything: "this, my son, was dead and is alive again."

Mark and Matthew have it too, put to his disciples: "Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?" Whatever else is in dispute, the first three accounts agree on this objection to him, and it was about who he ate with.

A century of work has gone into criteria for this: a saying that no early Christian would have invented, a saying attested in independent sources, a saying that fits first-century Galilee and not the later church.

The chapter cited here appears in a volume that states the case against them in its title: Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity. The criteria test one saying at a time. The shape of the teaching does not depend on any one saying: the kingdom, the parables and a reversal that favours the poor recur across the sources, and are harder to argue away than the wording of any particular line.

One reading has it imminent and cosmic: a decisive intervention about to arrive, which is how the urgency and the "time is fulfilled" read most naturally. Another has it present and already operating, growing quietly, which is how the parables of seed and leaven read most naturally.

Both readings are in the texts. The argument is whether they can be held together or whether one of them is the later church’s work, and it has been made in both directions.

Matthew gathers into three chapters what Luke has partly in a shorter sermon on a level place and partly scattered along the journey to Jerusalem. Unless the same things were said on more than one occasion, as Augustine allowed, at least one of them is arranging rather than recording, and arrangement is itself a claim about what the teaching is.

That does not make the sayings less likely to be his. It makes the shape of the discourse an editorial decision, and the shape is most of what a reader takes away.

He taught in Aramaic. Much of what Matthew and Luke drew on reached them already in Greek. Even where a saying goes back to him intact, what a reader has is a translation made by someone who heard it, or heard about it, and no Aramaic original survives to check against.

A few words come through untranslated, which is a hint of how much did not. Mark keeps one and then tells you what it means: "Talitha cumi!", which means, being interpreted, "Girl, I tell you, get up!"

Whether a hard saying was said fiercely or gently changes what it means, and nothing in a manuscript carries that. The traditions about him disagree about it in the usual direction: each one hears the voice it expects.

Methodists after Wesley have read the ethic as a programme to be attempted, the Lutheran Formula of Concord as the law explained "spiritually", so that sinners "learn to know their sins aright", and the Anabaptists at Schleitheim as the constitution of a community rather than a rule for individuals. Those are not small differences, and all three are read out of the same chapters.

A reader with no stake in the outcome can still ask a useful question of each one: what work does the line about being perfect do in it?

Sayings this short and this concrete travel without their context, and a parable is unusually easy to finish in your own favour. The instructions about the other cheek alone have led some readers to total pacifism and others to a moderate line, which tells you about the citing more than about the teaching.

The check available to a reader is the one this site can actually offer: the chapters are linked below, and they are shorter than the arguments about them.