Well, today we have a really important question about how we should think of the recorded

words of Christ in our Bibles.

Do we have the actual words of Christ?

Or do we have a paraphrase of what he said?

The question is from Reston, who lives in Newton, Iowa, Pastor John, as I continue to study

the Bible, and specifically the actual text and transmission of the Bible itself.

I keep returning to a debate over two Latin phrases, Ipsima Verba, the very words,

and Ipsima Vox, the very voice or the gist of the words.

The debate is whether or not the gospel writers give us the exact words spoken by Christ or

the paraphrase gist of Jesus' words.

What do you think and what bearing doesn't have on our Bible interpretation?

This question takes me back almost 50 years to the three years that I spent at the University

of Munich in Germany, 1971 to 1974, working on a dissertation about the words of Jesus

in Matthew and Luke, love your enemies.

To write a dissertation for a German university in the 1970s about the words of Jesus was to

be presented with this very question all the time.

When we peel away the layers of tradition and get back to the Ipsima Verba of Jesus,

the very words of Jesus, so I had to immerse myself in the kind of scholarship that developed

methods from Geschichte, redactions Geschichte, literature Geschichte, sach critique, immerse yourself

in these things because that's the way the work was done to peel away the layers and try to get

to the Ipsima Verba. Now, if you wonder whether I had a crisis of faith, you might be surprised about

the nature of the crisis. It wasn't a crisis of my belief in the truth and worth of scripture,

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