I keep running into a debate over two Latin phrases: 'ipsissima verba' (‘the very words’) and 'ipsissima vox' (‘the very voice’), or the gist of the words. The debate is whether or not the Gospel writers give us the exact words spoken by Christ, or the paraphrased gist of Jesus’s words. What do you think? And what bearing does this have on our Bible interpretation?” Can we peel away the layers of tradition and get back to the 'ipsissima verba' of Jesus, the very words of Jesus? So, I had to immerse myself in the kind of scholarship that developed methods to get to Jesus’s words. You immersed yourself in these things because that’s the way the work was done to peel away the layers and try to get to the' ipsissima verba.' Now, if you wonder whether I had a crisis of faith, you might be surprised about the nature of the crisis. It wasn’t a crisis of my belief in the truth and worth of Scripture, but a crisis of my belief in the truth and worth of such acade...