His Use of “Truly, I Say to You” Second, Jesus’ use of the words “Truly, I say to you” expresses His authority. This expression is historically unique and is recognized on all hands to have been the way Jesus marked off His authoritative word on some subject. The Jewish writer Ahad Ha’am protests, “Israel cannot accept with religious enthusiasm, as the word of God, the utterances of a man who speaks in his own name—not ‘thus saith the Lord,’ but ‘I say unto you.’ This ‘I’ is in itself sufficient to drive Judaism away from the Gentiles forever.”[7]
