Thank you for this treatment of Jesus' words: "I am the way, the truth and the life." You say it's challenging for non-Christians but I wonder if it's challenging to anyone. It really is a mysterious utterance.

I wonder, for example, if Jesus being "the truth" is a prompt to followers to themselves tell the truth or to work toward truthfulness in earthly situations. I don't associate Christians with truthful speech or investigations aimed at producing truth, so I take the religion to understand the verse differently. But then, the words of Jesus don't seem to much affect Christians. They're more seen as décor.

The "story" of this post seems really to be your taking issue with the case made by Neil Douglas-Klotz, that the words of Jesus can be speculatively re-translated from Greek to Aramaic and then to English, generating a quite different meaning.

I don't know that Jesus even speaks Aramaic, and the idea of translating it from Greek to Aramaic to English and imagining that is more "authentic" seems seems very doubtful.

But the people who pursue that case might really only be trying to access some kind of spiritual teaching related to Jesus without having to show submission to Christian clerics, who are often monsters but who assert ownership of the text of the gospels.