I was having a discussion with someone the other day, and I used some quotes from the Bible, and the response was “Jesus didn’t say that”
Got me to thinking, are there any religions that are based on only what Jesus said in the Bible?
Not so far as I know. Nor would I expect to find one. If you think about it, “what Jesus said” is unimportant unless you believe that Jesus had some special position or authority and, while you can appeal to the bible in support of that proposition, much of the material you’d be appealing to is not accounts of what Jesus said. If you disregard accounts of Jesus’s life, deeds, death and resurrection, what reason have you got to pay any particular attention to what Jesus is noted as having said?
It’s not that, really, but there is a Christian movement, “Red Letter Christians,” that emphasizes the teachings of Jesus (so-called because in some old Bibles, the words of Jesus are printed in red ink).
And I see that the “See also” section of that Wikipedia article contains a link to “Jesusism,” which may be along the lines of what you’re looking for.
Thomas Jefferson went through the Bible, to cut out all miracles and condense the gospels to the “authentic” Jesus.
How Thomas Jefferson Created His Own Bible
It didn’t go any farther than him, although others could have done something similar.
The problem I think they’d run into is that there’s a LOT that Jesus didn’t say anything about…
Homosexuality? Nothin’. Masturbation? Nope. Priests, church services, hymns? Nada.
Also keep in mind that a lot of the gospels are writer embellishments and redactions long after the fact, to conform to the orthodoxy of the day. Whole “gospels” are dismissed as apocrypha because of doubtful authenticity and because they contradicted to dominant dogma at the time of the consolidation of church teachings around the Nicaean council. (Plus, many other works over the years were “updated” - consider that the reference to Jesus in the works of Josephus is generally believed to have been altered to suggest Josephus affirmed Jesus’ divinity.
The faith that Jesus taught and showed us was called ‘the way’. Paul started Christianity, which was apparently Paul’s way to do his divine mission, which was to get the name of Jesus known to the gentiles. There are great differences and contradictions between the two, as Paul seemed to mix what he knew as Saul (his former name) who was a jewish pharisee, with the gift of Grace that Jesus taught.
But as I see it when a person, coming through Christianity, finds the way, the ‘religion’ is then discarded, and the relationship with God, and your life plan path is revealed, is what is left. There is no need or room for religion. The best I can come up with as a definition is Follower or Disciple of Lord Jesus, where one is guided and instructed by the Holy Spirit, and can hear and recognize the voice of God through whatever way God wants to speak (thus no need for religion, as this person has a direct line to God and is God’s child - Jesus)
Well, except that the Jefferson Bible isn’t composed of only “what Jesus said” – it’s the material from the four evangelists stripped of what Jefferson thought fanciful and unlikely (even if Jesus said it) and assembled in chronological order.
The current edition (I picked one up at the Smithsonian last year) is a beautiful photoreproduction, with a binding that’s identical to the binding of the original. If you strip off the protective plastic dust jacket (which has all the usual jacket material), you could put it right on a bookshelf among a bunch of early 19th century books and the only way it would stand out was by looking new new and unused. I’ve read it twice.
Regarding the OP’s premise – I don’t know of any religion that’s based only o the words of the founder. In the cases of most religions, it’s a combination of the writings they have and a whole host of traditions and thins based on supporting and even apocryphal texts. It’s practically impossible to “reconstruct” religions even from their sacred texts, because there’s so much missing from the texts filled in by that tradition. Some aspects of religions even contradict parts of their sacred texts.
A religion based solely upon the words of Jesus* (and nothing else in the existing Evangelists) would be a very different thing. You run into trouble right away with Matthew 16:28 “Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.” Taken in a straightforward and literal sense, this implies that the Son of Man already came about 2000 years ago. To many, this means that the Apocalypse has already come.
*and which words? Which texts do you take as canonical? There are significant differences between the three Synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke and the Fourth Gospel of John. Do you reject John? How about the Gospel of Thomas? Or the infancy narratives, or…well, you se the point.
Thanks everyone for responding. Regarding this, are the actual words of Jesus that much different between the Gospels?
(I understand that they were written years later and whatnot)
And this: "The problem I think they’d run into is that there’s a LOT that Jesus didn’t say anything about…
Homosexuality? Nothin’. Masturbation? Nope. Priests, church services, hymns? Nada"
I would think that would be sort of the point.
Those gospels are pretty short books, you could read them yourself in a couple of hours.
Reading? BAH!
I’m at work, so I have to wait until I get home. This is a pressing matter!
A little light reading.
There’s quite a bit of overlap among the first three gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke, called the “synoptic” gospels), though there’s also material that only appears in one or two of them, and there are sometimes slight differences even when the same material appears in more than one of them.
There’s not much overlap between the words of Jesus in the gospel of John and the synoptic gospels.
For more info, see the Staff Report Who wrote the Bible? Part 4 – Who wrote/compiled/edited (and when) the various New Testament Books?
I am not a theologian or biblical scholar, but isn’t this a matter of some debate that cannot be objectively be proven true or false?
Hey, cool. Thanks for that.
‘Only what Jesus said’ is hard to define in two ways.
The first isn’t so hard. You could take it to mean not literally what’s objectively known to have been said without reference to the Gospels, and just take it as what’s attributed to Jesus in the Gospels. That may seem obvious but not 100% since sometimes people argue about what Biblical scholars think is more/less likely to have been said or added later. I assume a religion based on ‘only on what Jesus said’ defines that as ‘all that is attributed to Jesus in the Gospels’.
The second is harder if you accept the first solution. Which is that the Gospels as written are full of references to the Jewish scriptures as foreshadowing Jesus and Jesus as a supremely knowledgeable teacher and interpreter of Jewish scripture (as it then existed). Major Christian sects (Roman Catholicism for example) emphasize all that was written in the Old Testament much less than some relatively smaller but high profile sects in the US do (literalist Evangelical Protestants). But it would still be a lot harder to remove the Old Testament entirely from Christianity than to remove New Testament writings other than the Gospels. Some religion could go back and change the judgments of the Roman era Church as to what was really scripture among all the writings vying for that label at the time, and kick Paul’s writings out. Because, obviously, the Gospels don’t refer to Paul. It’s a lot harder to have a meaningful religion based on the Gospels that entirely ignores the OT.
Yes, I was thinking this one.
I guess it depends on how you define your terms. Something, that it seems not unreasonable to refer to as “Christianity,” existed before Paul got involved with it.
But it absolutely is a matter of debate, and we’ll never know for sure, how much of what we think of today as “Christianity” originated with Paul, or how much different it would be if Paul had never gotten involved.
Still, it seemed wrong to me to claim, unequivocally, in the General Questions forum, that “Paul started Christianity,” for reasons explained in the article I linked to.
It does depend on definitions, but ‘invent’ is a fairly extreme word. If somebody said ‘Paul was a key figure in the spread of Christianity and the start of its evolution toward the dominant religion in the Western world’ it would be hard to argue with that from any perspective, pro- or anti- or genuinely neutral toward Christianity. I think claims like ‘Paul invented Christianity’ are really more a reflection on recent Western civilization and its conflicted relationship with Christianity, or among Westerners for or against Christianity (pretty much by definition there’s not a large % of people who genuinely don’t care one way or the other about Christianity but are still interested in discussing stuff like this 
). There’s a tendency to make statements that sound controversial that could be put in less controversial terms.
Also, in recent decades Christianity’s take on homosexuality has become much more important than previously when it was in line with society’s general take (whether or not society’s general take was dictated by Christianity, which it wasn’t necessarily). And Paul had something to say about that topic which Jesus did not, again under the assumption ‘what they said’ just means what is attributed to them. That’s a big elephant in the room in discussing Paul now.
But as the linked article said, there just isn’t much logic to the idea that Paul gained a following writing about his missionary work supported by existing churches founded by followers of Jesus…which didn’t exist until he came along. Anything’s possible, as in the whole thing could have been invented much later. Nobody can disprove that, but that doesn’t mean it’s plausible as a default assumption. And this is why I asked before what is meant by ‘what Jesus said’. If it’s what’s attributed to Jesus in the Gospels, though most or maybe all of that was probably written down after Paul, what the’s invention or reinvention exactly by Paul? The claim that ‘Paul invented Christianity’ generally goes logically with a view that the Gospels, especially John, don’t accurately reflect the ministry and message of the historical Jesus (if any). There’s no basic reinvention by Paul of what the Gospels say, again if not focusing on a few cases where Paul instructed Christians how to live their lives on topics Jesus did not touch on. In general Paul is less specific than Jesus, but along a basically similar theme. Again, with the key being definition of ‘what Jesus said’ as what the Gospels say Jesus said. Otherwise you have to define what other method the new religion based ‘only on what Jesus said’ would use to determine ‘what Jesus said’.