Part 2: How Can We Know What Jesus Taught Most About?

If we are going to evaluate the claim that Jesus spoke more about money than heaven and hell, we need a consistent, fair, and thoughtful way to assess the words of Jesus recorded in Scripture. This part lays out the method used to test that claim and the interpretive framework that guided my conclusions. While it may seem odd to ask what it means for a passage to be “about”, as we’ll see this is a very important question to answer. We’ll also look at how misunderstanding the purpose of parables can lead us to misinterpret what Jesus was actually teaching, particularly when they include money.

Guiding Questions for the Study

To build a fair and transparent approach to evaluating this claim, I developed six core questions to shape the methodology:

1. Which passages are used to support these claims? I allowed proponents of the “Jesus talked more about money” claim to identify the supporting verses. This included sources like Crown Financial, Ramsey Solutions, and other widely circulated teaching materials.
2. Which Bible translation should be used? To minimize interpretive bias, I used the generally well-respected English Standard Version (ESV) for all passages, a formal translation that maintains close fidelity to the original languages.
3. What does “more” mean? The word “more” is ambiguous. Some proponents mean more verses, others more passages, yet others say parables? Different sources use different metrics, so I chose to evaluate the claims by passages, verses, and word occurrences.
4. How should parallel passages be treated? Many of Jesus’s teachings are recorded in multiple Gospels. Since the parallel passages in the gospels are describing the same events, I felt it best to consider these as a single passage, while still counting repeated words separately when evaluating word counts.
5. What qualifies a word or passage as being money, heaven, or hell related? I adopted a generous standard for financial terms. For example, I included the word “treasure” unless the context clearly showed a non-monetary meaning. For heaven and hell terms, I was more conservative, only including references that unambiguously addressed eternal destiny.
6. What does it mean for a passage to be “about” something? This is the most important and the most complex question in the analysis. To answer it, I developed a framework that distinguishes between what I call the “formal about” and the “functional about.”

What Does “About” Really Mean?

When we ask what a passage is “about,” we’re often asking two different questions without realizing it. We may be referring to either the form of the passage, that is, the surface elements, or its functional message, that is, the point it’s actually making.

To clarify this, I use two terms:

The “Formal About”: The formal about of a passage refers to the content elements used to convey a lesson. These are the objects, people, and actions described.

The “Functional About”: The functional about of a passage refers to its purpose or intended message, essentially the lesson Jesus is trying to teach.

Consider Aesop’s fable The Tortoise and the Hare. When asked what this story is “about,” there are two valid answers:

Formal About:
The story is about a tortoise who challenges a hare to a race after the hare mocks the tortoise’s slowness. The overconfident hare loses after taking a nap midway through the race, while the tortoise steadily makes his way to the finish line.

Functional About:
The story is about the value of persistence and the hazard of hubris.

Using these two ideas, the story uses the hare and tortoise formally to teach a lesson that is functionally about perseverance.

The difference matters. If we only focus on the formal elements, we might wrongly assume the story is a zoological insight about the differences between tortoises and hares or a comment on animal behavior. But no one reads Aesop this way. We instinctively look for the underlying message. We must apply the same approach to Jesus’s parables.

Parables: Money in Form, Heaven in Function

Many proponents of the “Jesus taught more about money” camp confuse these two concepts. If money appears in the parable, they count it as a teaching on money, even if the passage is explicitly stated to be about salvation, judgment, or the kingdom of God. Take Matthew 13:44, for example:

“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field…”

The formal about includes money. But Jesus says clearly that the story is functionally about the kingdom of heaven. This sort of misreading is both common and dangerous. It risks turning the form into the function, and substituting metaphor for doctrine.

Why This Framework Matters

If we don’t distinguish between formal and functional meaning, we can misclassify nearly every parable that uses metaphor. As a result, we risk distorting Jesus’s teachings to support an emphasis he never intended.

Consider this: If we applied the same logic to other parables, we might:

• Look to the parable of leaven in Matthew 13:33 for baking instruction
• Look to the house builder in Luke 6:46-49 for civil engineering
• Look to the great banquet in Luke 14:15-24 for event planning
• Look to the parable of the net in Matthew 13:47-50 for fishing
• Look to the parable of the trees in Matthew 12:33-37 for gardening help
• Look to the parable of the vineyard workers in Matthew 20:1-16 for labor relations

Of course, we don’t do that. So why do we make an exception for money? This question is the heart of the issue, and the reason why understanding what a passage is truly “about” is essential to reading Jesus faithfully.

What’s Next

In Part 3, we’ll dig into the actual data: How many of Jesus’s recorded statements were about money, and how many were about heaven or hell? And what can we learn from the numbers?