The editorial record for this site: what the text is, how passages were selected, and what was added.
All scripture text is public domain. Two translations, extracted from the same verse ranges:
Jesus' direct speech is marked in the source files by USFM red-letter tags (\wj ...\wj*). WEB's tags are treated as authoritative; the same verse ranges are applied to KJV. No speech attribution was inferred beyond what the tags mark.
371 passages — every passage where Jesus speaks in the four Gospels (Matthew 125, Mark 76, Luke 120, John 50) — plus the Thomas parallels. The red-letter material spans 1955 verses in which Jesus speaks. Acts is excluded: Jesus speaks there only in post-ascension visions, not as a direct participant in dialogue. Psalm 22 is quoted at the crucifixion as context, marked as quotation.
Include the immediate dialogue and setting that makes each passage comprehensible. Exclude narrator commentary and transitions.
Passage boundaries follow Aland's Synopsis of the Four Gospels (standard § numbering), adjusted by editorial judgment where Aland groups material a single passage can't hold. Where an Aland section contains materially different sayings at the same narrative moment (e.g. foot washing vs. betrayal prediction at the Last Supper), both appear rather than one suppressing the other.
Two passages are parallel when they map to the same Aland Synopsis § number, matched by verse-range overlap. Parallel links are bidirectional and edited by hand where Aland's automatic cross-references connect passages from different narrative contexts.
Thomas-canonical parallels follow established scholarly consensus mappings, applied conservatively — a saying is mapped only where the parallel is well established. Sayings with no canonical parallel appear in the appendix without a forced placement.
The default scroll is a curated chronological reading: Mark's narrative order as the structural skeleton, discourse blocks kept contiguous in their source gospel's arrangement, epoch guardrails against gross misplacements, and editorial gospel selection where the gospels overlap. Five other orderings are available: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John in chapter order, and the Aland Synopsis in § sequence.
Translations are public domain. The compilation and editorial work is licensed CC BY-NC 4.0: quote and remix with attribution to jesuswords.me, non-commercial.
This site has no named author and publishes no commentary. The editorial work is curation — selection, boundaries, alignment — and its full extent is what this page documents. Corrections and challenges: editor@jesuswords.me.