Jesus

The earliest of the four canonical Gospels opens with a single declarative sentence:

The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. — Mark 1:1 (BSB)

Across the four canonical Gospels and Acts, Jesus's recorded speech runs to roughly 31,000 words in the Greek text — variable across translations, but in the same order of magnitude as a short novel. The largest single share is in the Synoptics; John's Gospel records different material in a different register and contains the densest theological language of the four.

The Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke) share substantial overlapping material — the "synoptic problem" of source criticism — while John records material largely independent of the others. Jesus's most-quoted teachings (the Sermon on the Mount, the parables, the "I am" sayings, the Olivet discourse) cluster differently across the four.

Jesus is called many titles in the text: Christos / Messiah (the anointed one), Kyrios (Lord — which the Septuagint had been using for YHWH for centuries), Son of Man (Jesus's preferred self-designation in the Synoptics, drawing on Daniel 7:13–14), Son of God, Lamb of God, and many more. Each title has a distinct semantic history.

Jesus most likely spoke Aramaic as his primary language — preserved in a few transliterated phrases in the Gospels (Talitha koum, Mark 5:41; Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani, Mark 15:34; Ephphatha, Mark 7:34). He likely read and used Hebrew in religious contexts (the Sermon on the Mount cites Torah; Luke 4:16–20 has him reading from Isaiah in the Nazareth synagogue). Some Greek use is possible given the bilingual culture of 1st-century Galilee, but the Gospels are written in Greek and preserve the underlying Aramaic only in scattered glosses.