Dear Readers of The Words of Jesus,

One chilly Philadelphia morning in November 2005 at the AAR/SBL, Phyllis Tickle and I sat down, as is our wont, to chat about various things, both religious and personal. The conversation took its usual and enjoyable twists and turns, until a thought popped into my head. (I had long been wanting to find a project that Phyllis and I could work on together.) “What would happen,” I asked, “if you took just the words of Jesus from the New Testament, just what He said, and then wrote something about them?” Phyllis, who is generally unflappable, reared back and shot me a piercing look. I could tell she was taken with the thought, and we proceeded to talk, considering what she might do. She promised that she would think about it some more and, if it stayed in her heart and mind, that she would be willing to write it for Jossey-Bass.

Now, just over two years later, we are pleased to publish The Words of Jesus: A Gospel of the Sayings of Our Lord with Reflections by Phyllis Tickle. Much has happened in the intervening months, much going back and forth. Our first conversations were about the words themselves, as she sat amid seven or so translations, sifting and selecting and organizing. Neither of us realized what she was getting into. It is no trivial task to extract all the words of Jesus from the surrounding narrative—and we knew that. But we didn’t fully anticipate what would happen to and within Phyllis as she went about the work. As she says in her reflections, “The cost has been in the nights I lay sleepless and wrestling, like Jacob, with new perceptions about what it is to be both Christian and a self at the time.”

As the project progressed, our conversations were more and more about the reflections, just what she would say about her encounters with the words of Jesus. At first, she seemed to want to do a sort of survey of how others have thought about and encountered the words. But somehow, to me, that was not what I had hoped for in the book. Many others—scholars as well as people of faith—have written well about historical context, language, critical schools of thought, and other matters that are not particularly personal. What I wanted from Phyllis were her own personal responses and reflections—what had she found when she brought together all the “red-letter” words of the New Testament, how did that encounter change her, what did it mean to her in her lifelong walk with Jesus?

These questions prompted Phyllis to reconsider why she was doing this project and what it meant to her—and whether she was willing to share such deeply intimate thoughts and feelings about her faith with her audience. After all, Phyllis is a highly public figure; she travels and speaks almost constantly, yet the direction I was asking her to go was in a way more personally revealing than she had been in most of her previous works. We talked at length about it before she decided to go ahead, but go ahead she did, with her usual great enthusiasm and wonderful heart. I believe we both felt we were touching on something very important, not just to us but possibly to others. It was a great pleasure and delight to see the reflections take shape and to add my few editorial suggestions and comments, more like a little salt to an already heady broth, and to be part of publishing the final product.

I don’t think I am overreaching when I say that I believe the Holy Spirit was lingering nearby throughout this whole process, from our morning chat in that noisy convention hall in Philadelphia to the long months of work of organizing and presenting all the words of Jesus to the crafting of the reflections. We have been guided and blessed and not just in gentle ways. As Phyllis said in a recent interview, “What [Jesus] is saying is so radical and so clean and clear it is really a shock. It just rocked me…. [H]e is this persona that is stark and, well, godly. He is not some wandering carpenter who went for a new job. All of that is gone. What you’ve got is what probably made the children of Israel cringe and say don’t let us see this…. He says, it is here and I am it.”

We at Jossey-Bass are very proud of The Words of Jesus. We hope that you will read it, as Phyllis says, slowly and deliberately, really letting the words and the man-God behind them reach deeply into you. (You may find the Readers Guide, also available on this site, helpful in this process—it was put together by Elizabeth Wirls and Linda Marks, who led a study group and “road tested” the book.)

With all best wishes,

Sheryl Fullerton

Executive Editor, Jossey-Bass, A Wiley Imprint