For my birthday in 1971 I was given a "red-letter edition" of the King James Version of the Bible by my grandmother. Words printed in red indicated those "spoken by Jesus" during his earthly mission. I still have that Bible in my library. The cover is ripped, the zipper which ran from the top of the spine to the bottom around the pages has come loose, and there are a few water stains on some of the pages. A rose lays pressed in the center of the book, one taken from my grandmother's funeral a decade ago. It holds special memories for me, largely because it was the Bible I grew up with, the Bible I took to church during my childhood and teen years. I always kept it close on my nightstand and often read it as I went to bed. Many Christians today still believe that those red-lettered words are the authentic words of Jesus. Such readers of the gospels in which those red letters appear believe that the writers either had remarkable memories for recalling the exact words spoken by Jesus during his ministry or that the Holy Spirit inspired the authors to pen the authentic words exactly as they were uttered. But are they? Are the words in red, the words attributed to Jesus, actually words that he spoke and his audience heard? Or are the words, at least some of them, literary inventions, placed in the mouth of Jesus?

The Greatest Commandment

One of the most famous passages from the New Testament, printed in red ink in my childhood copy of the Bible, is Jesus's answer to a question of which of the commandments of God found in the Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament) was truly the greatest. Jesus's response is recorded in Matthew 22:34-37 and Mark 12:28-30 (Luke 10:25-27 has a similar story with the same reply, but it is not put on the lips of Jesus. The story is missing entirely from the gospel of John). With two attestations of the response, confidence in printing the words in red should run very high! Surely, a saying captured by two of the four gospel writers should be evidence enough that the conversation took place and that the gospel authors recorded it faithfully. Looking first only at Matthew's version of the story, let's reacquaint ourselves with the words of "the Greatest Commandment" and learn from where Jesus took them.

When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?" He said to him, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.'" (NRSV)

The Greatest Commandment, therefore, is "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind." This is taken from Deuteronomy 6:5. The commandment is actually one that the Jewish people were instructed to write onto the doors of their homes. Deuteronomy 6:6-9 directs,

Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

Observant Jews to this day follow the commandment by keeping what is known as a mezuzah (meaning "doorpost" in Hebrew) affixed to the doorframe of every room of their homes. The mezuzah is a piece of parchment inscribed with the verses from Deuteronomy 6:4-9 and 11:13-21. The verses compose what is known as Shema Yisrael, a Jewish prayer. The tradition dates back millennia and likely undergirds the reason someone like Jesus, supposedly a teacher of the true Jewish faith, would be asked about it.

Christians also revere the "Greatest Commandment" as a reminder to always put God first in their lives. Christians note that the Pharisees, Jewish scholars of Jesus's day whom the stories portray as constantly following and harassing him with questions on the finer points of Jewish law (of which they were supposedly the experts), tried to trap Jesus with the question of the greatest commandment. Jesus's answer showed that he understood fully the laws of Judaism, apparently confounding his enemies and giving them just one more reason to conspire to have him crucified. As one online sermon notes,

The religious leaders had been challenging Jesus and trying to trap Him for about 3 years. Every time, He eluded them, sometimes issuing a painful retort for them to dwell on during their journey back to Jerusalem. He went about His business in the countryside, healing, loving and teaching. What was different about the challenge this time? He was doing it in the heart of Jerusalem at the height of their greatest religious festival. When someone gets naked and dances in the street, you can ignore him. When he does the same thing in your living room, you're forced to deal with it. "Hoosiers" This challenge from Jesus was something the religious leaders were forced to deal with. They could no longer live in indecision. They thought they were challenging Him with the question concerning the greatest commandment, but He answered correctly, then used the occasion to launch His agenda for the day. Again, the challenger was challenged and the hunter was caught in his own trap.

Jesus told them the whole Law of God was summed up in the word Love; love for God and love for His people. With one question, He proved to them He is God in the flesh, something they refused to acknowledge to the point of conspiring against Him. But, He didn't stop there. He went on to tell the crowds of people that their leaders were hypocrites who didn't follow the commandment of Love at all. He told them not to follow the religious leaders nor to even give them a title of honor. He said no one but God deserves the honor of being called Master, Father, or Teacher...That a true follower of God is a servant.

So, the "greatest" commandment, to "love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind," holds special meaning –supreme meaning—for both Jews and Christians. But, did Jesus really say these words or could this entire scene be a literary fiction? And how can we know?

Did Jesus Really Say That?

Most New Testament scholars agree that the gospel of Mark is the earliest of the four found in the Bible. From Mark, Matthew and Luke likely copied, revised and added to Mark's [1] story to create their own. Of Mark's gospel, roughly 90% of his verses are found in Matthew and 45% is found in Luke. As noted in Sanders and Davies's Studying the Synoptic Gospels,

...since Matthew and Luke are much longer than Mark, a smaller percentage of each of them is found also in Mark: for example, 600 of Matthew's 1070 verses are also found in Mark, 56%. It is intrinsically likely that Matthew and Luke copied Mark, since no author would have left out so much good material as Mark would have omitted had he been dependent on Matthew or Luke or both. (p. 62)

If we accept this observation, we are immediately confronted with the realization that the gospel authors may not have been traveling along with Jesus, either mentally or physically recording his words for later inclusion in their respective stories. If Mark was the first gospel, copied by both Matthew and Luke, that would explain why those three include the story of the Greatest Commandment while John does not (again, the details regarding the creation of the gospels, and the agreements between Mark, Matthew and Luke and John's independence is far too complex to discuss here. Suffice to say that this is the scholarly consensus, rejected only by extreme conservative apologists committed, both personally and professionally, to the doctrine of divine inspiration.) Alternately, many scholars believe there was another source from which the gospel writers worked, a lost gospel known as "Q" (from the German word for "source," quelle).

The best way to begin our study is to examine each of the versions of the Greatest Commandment story in parallel. We will include Luke's version here as well, even though he places the spoken reply regarding the commandment on another character in his story. His version will be important later in our study.

(Word-for-word agreement between Matthew and Mark is highlighted in bold. Word-for-word agreement between Mark and Luke is highlighted by italics. Word-for-word agreement between Matthew and Luke [against Mark] is highlighted in all CAPS. Word-for-word agreemnet between all three gospels are highlighted in red. Again, details regarding the study of gospel dependence is beyond the scope of this article but should readers be interested in a deeper discussion, the Bibliography below will assist in recommending books for further study. What I want to focus on here is the quotation of the Greatest Commandment as attributed to Jesus.)

The first thing that should be noticed is that none of the versions are exactly the same (with Luke being the most different). Mark has Jesus mention four things with which one should love God; one's heart, soul, mind and strength. Luke agrees (even while placing the quote in someone else's mouth) and also lists the heart, soul strength and mind. Note that while Luke agrees with the order of the words heart and soul, he reverses Mark's mind and strength. Matthew, however, lists only three things: the heart, soul and mind. Matthew is missing strength from his quotation. Why is this? Why would Luke follow Mark's order for the first two items but reverse the second pair? Why would Matthew also follow the pattern of pairing "heart" and "soul" but eliminate one of Mark's second pair?

A clue can be found in the actual quote of Deuteronomy 6:5,

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.

Notice that the original verse from Deuteronomy lists only three items with which one should love God, in keeping with Matthew's version of the quote, but actually uses a different word for the last item. Instead of mind, as in Matthew, or strength as is used by Mark and Luke, Deuteronomy's word is translated from the Hebrew as might. And therein lies our problem: the last Hebrew word of the commandment. The Hebrew word in the verse from Deuteronomy is m'od and, according to Dr. Joel M. Hoffman [2] in his study of the original words of the Hebrew Bible and the difficulty in translating them into modern English in his book And God Said: How Translations Conceal the Bible's Original Meaning, the word is extraordinarily difficult to define. Because the word only occurs as a noun in two places in the Bible (Deuteronomy 6:5 and its probable paraphrase in II Kings 23:25), finding context for m'od to decipher its original meaning is nearly impossible. Dr. Hoffman notes that

elsewhere [m'od] has adjectival or adverbial force. It usually means "very," as in God's famous observation at the end of the sixth day that everything was "very good." It's as though the phrase in Deuteronomy reads, "...all your mind and body and very." (p. 124)

Thus, the original meaning of m'od as a noun remains a mystery to modern translators. However, the mystery is not only presented to modern scholars trying to translate the text, but also seems to have been a problem with the ancient scholars of the third century BCE who translated the Hebrew texts into the Greek Septuagint [3]. Those scholars used the Greek word dunamis for the Hebrew m'od, a word meaning "strength." This is the reason most modern scholars follow suit and translate Deuteronomy 6:5 into English as ending with either the word strength or might. However, the true meaning of the Hebrew word was apparently as unknown to these Greek scholars as it is to modern translators. Dr. Hoffman observes, "...m'od doesn't usually seem to mean ‘might,' and usually dunamis is used for other Hebrew words [in the Septuagint]." (p 125)

So what does all of this mean for our study of Jesus's gospel reply when questioned by his enemies about which of the many commandments in the Hebrew Bible was the greatest? Recall Matthew, Mark and Luke all agree, as does the Septuagint, on the first pairing of things with which one should love the Lord God: heart and soul (or, as Dr. Hoffman translates the Hebrew, "body and mind." See below). However, just as the Greek scholars toiling three hundred years before the gospel writers sat down to pen their stories had difficulty translating the last word from the Hebrew, m'od, into the Septuagint, Matthew, Mark and Luke seem to have struggled to do the same (even though, as noted, Luke places the quote on the lawyer's rather than Jesus's lips). Now, how could there be such a remarkable similarity in struggle over the final word of the Great Commandment, in all three of the gospels which have it as well as the Septuagint translation of Deuteronomy 6:5, if the gospel writers of Mark and Matthew were merely putting down in ink what they heard Jesus utter on the occasion of his enemy's challenge, Luke what he overheard a lawyer say, or what was inspired of all of them by the Holy Spirit? Why struggle on just that same spot regardless of who is doing the speaking? The answer, of course, is obvious.

What we see here in the gospels stories of the Greatest Commandment is in all likelihood an oral legend which circulated in the early Christian community about Jesus in which he is shown to know the Hebrew Scriptures better than his enemies. The details of the story probably varied in different versions of the legend which eventually made it to the gospel writers which is why the story varies widely between them. What we see in the gospels regarding the story are literary constructions. We observe evidence of the writers modifying the story in their own styles but each struggling to translate the latter portion of Deuteronomy 6:5 just as much as the Greek scholars did in the third century BCE, and just as much as translators of the KJV did and modern scholars do as well. It's easy to visualize each of the ancient authors, knowing this legendary story of Jesus, working with a copy of the Septuagint and perhaps other versions of the Hebrew text, struggling to translate Deuteronomy 6:5 into their own stories. They were not recalling the actual words of Jesus or his enemies. They were working at the translation of Deuteronomy 6:5. The scholars translating Deuteronomy for the Septuagint decided dunamis was the correct word for the Hebrew m'od. The author of Matthew decided m'od meant something else entirely and chose to use dianoia (mind) instead. Mark could not decide if m'od meant dianoia (mind) (as did Matthew) or ischus (a Greek word for strength, unlike the scholars of the Septuagint who had chosen dunamis) so he opted to include them both. Luke, like Mark, was indecisive and also chose to include both dianoia (mind) and ischus (strength) but reversed Mark's order of usage. But none of the gospel authors had any problem with the first pair of words found in Deuteronomy 6:5 and they follow one another, and the Septuagint, perfectly.

It's a mystery why Matthew decided to translate m'od as mind, however. This translation is not found in any other version. M'od does not indicate mind anywhere in the Hebrew Scriptures. In fact, as Dr. Hoffman explains, the first part of the commandment is usually translated into English as including the words "heart" and "soul" for the Hebrew levav and nefesh. However, levav in the Hebrew referred to more than just the physical heart or a person's emotions and nefesh in no sense referred to an ethereal, immortal entity as is imagined by modern readers when they read it translated as "soul." Nefesh "referred specifically to everything about life that could be touched," while levav "represented thoughts, emotions, fears, etc." (pp. 121-122). Dr. Hoffman sums it up best this way:

...the Biblical view was that our lives have two parts: our physical side (nefesh) and our harder-to-define, impossible-to-see nonphysical side (levav).

We don't have anything like that in English for human life, but we can understand the concept by looking at two words from the realm of computer science: "hardware," which, like nefesh, is touchable; and "software," which, like levav, cannot be touched...

The past few decades have seen increasing interest among Western doctors and researchers into the "mind-body" connection. Even though the word "mind" is usually limited to rational thought, not emotion, and even though the word "body" does not normally refer to the breath, in the phrase "mind-body" both terms are broader and more inclusive. The point of the mind-body connection is precisely that our physical well-being is intimately connected with our non-physical well-being. Sorrow or anxiety can cause physical illness. Good news can help an ailing patient. When researchers proclaim a "connection between the mind and the body," they are referring to the levav and the nefesh...

Accordingly, we can translate Deuteronomy 6:5—and therefore also Matthew 23:37, Mark 12:30, and Luke 10:27—as "love the Lord your God with all your mind and body..." (pp.122-123)

What Matthew was writing, therefore, when using dianoia for the Hebrew m'od, was something more like "You shall love the Lord your God with all your mind, and with all your body, and with all your mind." Matthew was being redundant! This shows the struggle that the authors had translating Deuteronomy 6:5 and it appears Mark and Luke copied the same mistake into their own gospels (or, if we follow conventional scholarship and assume Markian priority, then an indecisive Mark included both "mind" and "strength" in his version of the tale with Luke following his lead but reversing his word order while Matthew dropped one of the choices and opted for the redundancy. It's also possible that all three gospel writers were working independently from another shared, but now lost, written source –known as "Q" by scholars—and rewrote their versions from there. But these details are beside the point of this article).

Conclusion

The gospel variations of the story of the Greatest Commandment exist not because the gospel authors didn't know what Jesus really said. They did not have faulty memories of the event. They in fact had no memory of any such event. The variations exist not because the Holy Spirit couldn't inspire an accurate dictation of Jesus's words. The reason the gospel authors do not agree on the wording of the second half of the Great Commandment is because they were doing what the Greek scholars three centuries before were doing, what the translators of the KJV Bible were doing, what current scholars continue to do, and that's struggle with trying to translate Deuteronomy 6:5 into a language other than ancient Hebrew. They were trying to incorporate the passage from Deuteronomy into their gospels to demonstrate the legendary status of their story's hero. The gospel authors, as evidenced by this struggle with word choice in the text, were not recalling a memory of Jesus being quizzed by his religious enemies on the Hebrew Scriptures. The gospel authors were not bathed in the inspiration of the Holy Spirit to accurately write a history of Jesus's ministry on earth. They were merely involved in a literary fiction and ran into a translation difficulty as they tried to incorporate the passage from Deuteronomy 6:5 into their own gospels.

Apologists may argue that the differences in the wording don't reflect a struggle with the translation of the text of Deuteronomy and claim instead that the stories actually reflect different occasions during Jesus's ministry when he replied to quizzes about the greatest commandment. Of course, such an assertion ignores the same struggle shared by the scholars of the Septuagint and modern translators. It also doesn't explain why Jesus (or the lawyer in Luke) would have verbally struggled with the second half of Deuteronomy 6:5, choosing different words for the ending on different occasions but properly using the same words for the first half. In other words, if these storied differed only because they occurred at different times in Jesus's ministry, why would Jesus not struggle with the first word pair in the commandment, always using the same pattern of "heart/soul" (or "body/mind") but freely mix and match only the last word, choosing either "mind" on some occasions, "strength" on others and combining both "mind" and "strength" on other occasions? Apologists won't be able to satisfactorily answer these questions because they only have speculation and their preconceived notion that the gospels are reporting accurate history. What the above study underscores is that we don't have a Bible which was inspired by an inerrant supernatural being, a "Holy Spirit." What we have here is evidence of what exactly this is: a literary creation. Get out those red-ink erasers!

NOTES

1. The names attributed to the gospels are not thought to be the actual authors of the text. So, while Matthew the tax collector and Luke the physician are credited with writing the gospels bearing their name, the gospels originally circulated anonymously and it wasn't until later in Christian tradition that the names were associated with the gospels. Details regarding this and the scholarly consensus on gospel composition are too complex to get into here. Please consult my Bibliography for books to expand this study.  Return to Text

2. From Dr. Hoffman's website: "Joel M. Hoffman, PhD, an expert in translation, Hebrew, and the Bible... Dr. Hoffman is the chief translator for the popular 10-volume series, My People's Prayer Book (winner of the National Jewish Book Award) and for My People's Passover Haggadah, both from Jewish Lights Publishing. He is the author of the critically acclaimed In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language (NYU Press). He writes a biweekly column on Hebrew for the Jerusalem Post."  Return to Text

3. "Septuagint" is the name given to the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures.  Return to Text

SOURCES

Hoffman, Joel M. (2010) And God Said: How Translations Conceal the Bible's Original Meaning. Thomas Dunne Books

Sanders, E.P and Margaret Davies. (1990) Studying the Synoptic Gospels. Trinity Press International

Bibliography (For Further Research)

Achtemeier, Paul J., Joel B. Green and Marianne Meye Thompson (2001) Introducing the New Testament: Its Literature and Theology. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

Ehrman, Bart D. (2007) The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. Oxford University Press

Perrin, Norman and Dennis C. Duling (1982) The New Testament: An Introduction. Harcourt Brace Jovanovic.