Christian apologists like Apostate Prophet make the false claim that “we have all the things that Jesus said,” yet this goes against their own scripture, which states that there are many more teachings of Jesus that did not make it into their books.
The Gospels themselves say, in plain language, that they contain only a portion of what Jesus did and taught.
Start with the closing words of the Gospel of John:
But there are also many other things which Jesus did; were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written. (John 21:25)
A few verses earlier, the same author says the same thing:
Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book. (John 20:30)
These two verses speak of deeds rather than words, but the author is telling the reader that his book is a selection, not a full record. The same Gospel then makes the point about teaching directly. Jesus says to his disciples:
I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. (John 16:12)
Mark says the same about Jesus’ public teaching:
With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it; he did not speak to them without a parable, but privately to his own disciples he explained everything. (Mark 4:33-34)
Mark gives us a handful of parables and tells us there were “many such” others. He also tells us Jesus explained “everything” to his disciples in private, and almost none of that explanation is recorded.
The book of Acts, written by the presumed author of Luke, describes the period after the crucifixion:
To them he presented himself alive after his passion by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days, and speaking of the kingdom of God. (Acts 1:3)
That is forty days of teaching from the risen Jesus on the central subject of his message. Not one discourse from those forty days appears in any Gospel.
Finally, Luke opens his Gospel by acknowledging that he was not the first to write:
Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things which have been accomplished among us, (Luke 1:1)
Luke is describing many earlier written accounts of Jesus’ life and teaching. Mark is almost certainly one of them, but Luke says “many,” and he knew of more material than any single Gospel contains.
Luke was not exaggerating. Other gospels circulated in the early centuries, and the church did not settle on the four we now have until well into the second century, when Irenaeus argued for them around the year 180. Some of the others survive in whole or in part, such as the Gospel of Thomas, discovered in Egypt in 1945, and the Gospel of Peter. Others are known only by their titles and a few quotations in early Christian writers like Origen and Jerome. These include the Gospel of the Hebrews, the Gospel of the Ebionites, and the Gospel of the Nazarenes. Many scholars also hold that Matthew and Luke drew on a now-lost collection of Jesus’ sayings, usually called Q, though that one is a scholarly reconstruction and not an attested book.
The practical picture fits all of this. Jesus’ ministry lasted months at the least and, on John’s chronology, years. The sayings of all four Gospels combined can be read aloud in a few hours. The authors tell us they were selecting, and they tell us how much they left out.
A Christian can argue that the Gospels preserve what the church judged essential. That is a theological claim, and it can be debated on its own terms. But “we have all the things Jesus said” is a different claim, and the Gospels refute it from within.
