i am the way

A lot of conversations about having an open faith come to a crashing halt when someone says, “Jesus said ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the father except through me.’” But is that statement as clear as it is presented to be? 

First, Jesus probably did not actually make this statement. The line is only found in John, the latest and most elaborate biography of Jesus, written around 50 years after Jesus lived. The line occurs in the midst of a 4-chapter-long monologue by Jesus (John 14-17) prior to his betrayal. The author would not have been attempting to write a verbatim account of Jesus’ words fifty years later; he would have been developing a piece of literature that he felt reflected, honored, and furthered the Jesus tradition. So while Jesus may have said something like this, the exact statement was probably a creative development of the author or the early church. If it was a central part of Jesus’ teachings, it would likely have been included in the other three Gospels. 

Second, if Jesus did say “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” he would have spoken it in Aramaic, not the Greek of John 14:6, much less the English of our Bibles. Meanings shift and change language to language, so we have to be careful with assuming those words mean what they have meant to us. 

Finally, even if Jesus spoke those words with those same approximate meanings, we tend to read them through our own theological traditions. Reading the line “No one comes to the father except through me,” I always assumed it meant “No one gets into heaven without believing in Jesus’ death and resurrection,” but that’s not what it says. I don’t know exactly what it means, but I’m recognizing that it could have a variety of interpretations. 

I hope this can help discussions from getting hung up on one verse. Jesus, faith, and Bible are complex, and that’s part of the beauty of it all.