Roberta Grimes

What Does He Mean?

Posted by Roberta Grimes • December 20, 2025 • 12 Comments
Jesus, The Teachings of Jesus

Day by day, Day by day,
Oh Dear Lord, Three things I pray.
To see thee more clearly, Love thee more dearly,
Follow thee more nearly, Day by day. 

Oh… Day by day, Day by day,
Oh Dear Lord, Three things I pray.
To see thee more clearly, Love thee more dearly,
Follow thee more nearly, Day by day. 

Day by day, Day by day,
Oh Dear Lord, Three things I pray.
To see thee more clearly, Love thee more dearly,
Follow thee more nearly, Day by day.
— Stephen Schwartz, from “Day by Day,” from “Godspell” (1971)

For my whole life, I have struggled to ever better comprehend what Jesus actually meant by all the things that He said during the three and a half years when He taught on earth two thousand years ago. Almost as soon as I was able to read such sophisticated language as is in the Bible, I was attempting to read the four Biblical Gospels in a little copy of just the Gospels that some Mormon visitor had given to each of the children in my Congregational Church’s Sunday School. And even as a young child, almost every time that I attempted to read those Gospel words, I seemed to be finding new shades of meanings in what Jesus was saying there to us. So to deepen my perspective, by the age of eleven I had graduated to reading the whole Bible through, from Genesis right through Revelation, just a couple of pages every night. I wanted to see what added perspective all the rest of the Bible might add to what Jesus was saying there in just His four Books. And then of course I went on to major in early Christian history in college.

One of the things that I learned in college was that if I hoped to understand my treasured Jesus’s deepest thoughts, I would have to deal with some additional complications. For one example, Jesus spoke Aramaic while He was on earth, but His teachings were first written down in ancient Greek some sixty or so years after His resurrection. So there would be His first translation. And later on, of course, would come a second translation from Greek into Latin in the early Middle Ages. Then after additional centuries had passed would come yet more translations, into English and into other modern languages. And with each translation, additional fallible human translators had to make decisions which sometimes did at least some level of violence to what Jesus originally had said in the lyrical and emotional language that was His original Aramaic. The classic example often used to illustrate this problem is the ancient Greek word “Metanoia”. What Jesus almost certainly first said in Aramaic, which then was translated into Greek as “Metanoia”, was “transform your mind.” But the early Medieval Christian monk who first saw that word “Metanoia” in Greek is known to have translated it into the Latin command that we must “repent”. And that is how the insistence that we must “repent!” ended up as a command from Jesus throughout the first Latin translations of His spoken words. Even though it surely was nothing that Jesus ever said, or indeed that He ever would have said!

But remember that by the Middle Ages, that monk who was Jesus’s first translator from the Greek into Latin was a member of the Roman Emperor Constantine’s fear-based Christian religion, which is the Christianity that still prevails in the world today. That monk never knew the genuine Jesus, nor did he have any idea of what the genuine Jesus actually had taught. And the Christian religion of that Medieval monk who was privileged to translate the words of Jesus was built not around love, of course, but instead his Christianity was centered on the ancient Hebrew religious idea that Jesus had come to die as a pure sin-sacrifice to redeem us from God’s judgment for our sins. Jesus had been a sin-sacrifice without blemish. That whole pure sin-sacrifice idea had been a concept central to the religion of the ancient Hebrews, and well known to the Apostle Paul. It was familiar as well to the Councilors at the Council of Nicaea who had created Constantine’s Christian religion. The monk who created that translation therefore readily believed that the Jesus he was sure must have founded the Christianity that he so devoutly followed very much later on would of course have ordered us all to “repent”!

But Jesus was not the founder of what eventually became modern Christianity. What Jesus Himself created was “The Way,” which was the beautiful and simple love-based spiritual way of life that He taught to His disciples. The Way then grew rapidly for the first two hundred years after Jesus’s death and resurrection, all around the Mediterranean Sea until it had amassed millions of followers as far away as Rome. And our great tragedy as we try to more deeply understand the true Jesus now is the inexorable fact that human history is written by its winners. The Romans decided that they could use The Way, but not in its original form. So they ruthlessly persecuted it, and they crushed it and nearly wiped it out. By the early 300s, there was almost nothing left of Jesus’s original Way but its scriptures, which still had the name of Jesus attached to them when Constantine resurrected The Way in 312, and it then was formalized as Roman Christianity at the First Council of Nicaea in the year 325 CE. By then, The Way had allowed all sorts of spiritual side-theories and dogmas to develop; and in order for it to be useful to Rome, Constantine’s version of Christianity needed to be transformed from a spiritual movement and way of life into a fear-based religion that would make it an efficient means of mass human control. Nicaea’s formal version of Christianity was therefore built around a lesser dogma that had developed within The Way, which was that Jesus’s death on the cross had been a sin- offering required by God to cleanse us of our sins.

Still, the core of Jesus’s teachings when He was on earth had not been focused on sin. And the Councilors who were creating this new religion of Christianity under Constantine’s direction, and were assembling their new religion’s sacred Book, held a sufficient reverence for the teachings of Jesus that fortunately they left nearly all of His teachings just as they had received them, and they put what they added in the course of building their new religion just at the back of each of their chosen four of the many accounts of Jesus’s words that were then in circulation. Thomas tells me now that He and some of Jesus’s other followers not then in bodies were influencing the minds of many of the Councilors at First Nicaea, and at the six other first millennium councils. So they were able to shape to a considerable extent what happened at all of those councils, especially with regard to the selection and preservation of those four Biblical Gospels.

The way that the Christian Bible was assembled at First Nicaea with what we now know was spiritual guidance, and then carefully preserved thereafter, allowed the precious words of Jesus to be largely preserved. Yes, there are some contradictions within the Gospels themselves as to what we are told that Jesus said, but those contradictions come largely from translation concerns, from Christian dogma-based contradictions, from some First Nicaea Councilors’ additions, and from the frank fact that as they invented their religion, the Councilors never thought to check to see whether they were going directly against any of the spoken teachings of Jesus, the Prophet that they were claiming as their nominal founder. Here are examples of each of these problems

• Translation Concerns. Some older Biblical translations still show Jesus calling on us to “Repent,” when what He really said was that we should “Reform or renew our minds.” Modern English translations are generally freer of this kind of distortion.
• Jesus had to speak circumspectly because He was often speaking directly against the prevailing religion. And in fact, Jesus came to free us from all religious restrictions! It is important to keep these facts in mind. For example, since the prevailing Hebrew religion when and where Jesus taught on earth was largely focused on sin, and perhaps we might even say that it was in some ways obsessed with sin, Jesus often has to responds to the issue of sin, although in His own teachings, Jesus never focuses on sin. Instead, His teachings focus on love and forgiveness. That is a crucial distinction! Jesus is often quite casual about disregarding sins. For example, consider this passage: “At that time Jesus went through the grain fields on the Sabbath, and His disciples became hungry and began to pick the heads of grain and eat.But when the Pharisees saw this, they said to Him, ‘Look, Your disciples do what is not lawful to do on a Sabbath.’ But He said to them, ‘Have you not read what David did when he became hungry, he and his companions, how he entered the house of God, and they ate the consecrated bread, which was not lawful for him to eat nor for those with him, but for the priests alone? Or have you not read in the Law, that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple break the Sabbath and are innocent? But I say to you that something greater than the temple is here. But if you had known what this means, ‘I desire compassion, and not a sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the innocent. For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.’” (MT 12:1-8)
• The Councilors Added a Number of Things That They Likely Wished That Jesus Had said. And what they added often directly contradicts what Jesus did say, and what is objectively true! For example, when Jesus asked His disciple, Simon, who Simon thought that Jesus was, the disciple is reported to have said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus then reportedly said to him, “Blessed are you, Simon, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but My Father who is in heaven. I also say to you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of Hades will not overpower it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatever you bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven” (MT 16:16-19). This is obviously one of the Councilors’ later additions! Note: “Petros” means “rock” in Greek, but Jesus spoke Aramaic; Jesus did not build a “church”; hades does not exist, and anyway it would not have gates; the kingdom of heaven has no keys; and Jesus could give no human being the power to bind or to loose anything in heaven.
• Some of what the First Nicaea Councilors Left in the Gospels That Was Said by Jesus Directly Contradicts the Core Dogma of Their New Christian Religion. This really confused me when I was a child! The most notable of these problems is that the Christian religion as the Romans designed it has Jesus dying as a pure sin-sacrifice. But Jesus tells us right there in the Biblical Gospel of John that neither God nor Jesus ever judges us. Jesus says, “For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son, so that all will honor the Son even as they honor the Father” (JN 5:22-23), and “If anyone hears My sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world” (JN 12:47). Therefore, no sin-sacrifice is needed! And if no sin-sacrifice is necessary, then Jesus didn’t need to die as a sin-offering, did He? His death and resurrection were, after all, just what He said at the time that they were: His own triumphant demonstration of our eternal life.

Then too, of course, there is the fact that Jesus never was speaking in a vacuum. His words always were at least in part dependent on what was going on around Him, who He was addressing, and what the stage of His ministry was at the time. This point is especially important! Jesus was always sensitive to His listeners, and He spoke very differently, for example, to clergymen, for whom He had very little use, than He spoke to poor widows perhaps, or to earnest young seekers, or to his closest disciples and intimates. Modern Christians will often pluck a few of Jesus’s words from the Gospels and cite them just in sentence-fragments, as if they had been great proclamations. And if you do that, you might misunderstand Jesus’s Mind pretty severely!

As the religion that the Roman Emperor Constantine created seventeen hundred years ago is falling apart around us now, it is fragmenting pretty severely. I recall that when The Fun of Dying was first published in 2010, I was astonished to learn that there were then some ten thousand denominations of Christianity in existence. And now, just fourteen years later, amazingly, there are more than forty-five thousand forms of Christianity extant worldwide. Unbelievable. Yet still, there is just one patient and infinitely loving Jesus! Amazingly, there is enough of Him for all of us to share. And Jesus has one clear message preserved for us in one set of four Gospels by Him, by my Thomas, and by the rest of Jesus’s faithful minions. All the struggles of the past two thousand years are now nearly altogether past! And Constantine’s Christianity is looking pretty hopeless at this point. So Jesus does ask that we try to all begin to come together and resume The Way again now, dear ones, if we possibly can? 

Day by day, Day by day,Oh Dear Lord, Three things I pray.
To see thee more clearly, Love thee more dearly,
Follow thee more nearly, Day by day by day by day…
Stephen Schwartz, from “Day by Day,” from “Godspell” (1971)