What Did Jesus Mean?: Explaining the Sermon on the Mount and the Parables in Simple and Universal Human Concepts

by Anna Wierzbicka

In this highly interdisciplinary work, linguist Anna Wierzbicka casts new light on the words of Jesus by taking her well-known semantic theory of "universal human concepts"- concepts which are intuitively understandable and self-explanatory across languages-and bringing it to bear on Jesus' parables and the Sermon on the Mount. Her approach results in strikingly novel interpretations of the Gospels. Written in dialogue with other biblical commentators, What Did Jesus Mean? is both scholarly rigorous yet accessible.

Genres: Biblical Studies

528 pages, Hardcover

First published April 5, 2001

About the author

Anna Wierzbicka is Professor of Linguistics at Australian National University. Her many books include Semantics: Primes and Universals (OUP 1996), Emotions across Languages and Cultures (CUP 1999), and Experience, Evidence & Sense: The hidden cultural legacy of English (OUP 2010). Professors Goddard and Wierzbicka are co-editors of two collective volumes: Semantic and Lexical Universals and Meaning and Universal Grammar (John Benjamins, 1994 and 2002).

Reviews

[Josh Valdix · Rating 4 out of 5]

A delightfully odd commentary. At times singularly illuminating, at others strange. Sometimes drawing on bultmann, sometimes the Jesus seminar, sometimes john piper.

[Pkb · Rating 3 out of 5]

Without doubt, one of the strangest books I have ever read.