How did Jesus respond when questioned by the high priest?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Leans toward a genuine contradiction

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

At Jesus' hearing before the high priest, Mark 14:62 has him answer the question 'Art thou the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?' with an unqualified *egō eimi* — 'I am.' Matthew 26:64 renders the reply *sy eipas*, 'thou hast said,' and Luke 22:70 *hymeis legete hoti egō eimi*, 'ye say that I am.' Under the dominant Two-Source/Markan-priority model, Matthew and Luke are working from Mark's text and revising it, so the differences are best read as deliberate redaction rather than independent recollections of the same words.

The weight of Mark's phrasing is hard to overstate. *Egō eimi* is the bald form of the divine self-designation that stands behind the Septuagint's rendering of the Tetragrammaton in Exodus 3:14 (*egō eimi ho ōn*) and the recurring 'I am he' (*'ănî hû'* / *egō eimi*) of Deutero-Isaiah (Isa 41:4; 43:10; 46:4). Joel Marcus argues in the Anchor Yale Bible that Mark intends the reader to hear this theophanic resonance: this is the climactic moment at which Jesus openly avows divine identity, and it is precisely why the high priest tears his garments and the council convicts him of blasphemy (Mark 14:63-64). The directness of the answer is load-bearing for Mark's narrative logic.

Matthew softens the declaration into the circumlocution *sy eipas* and then pivots the emphasis to the Son of Man saying with the adversative 'nevertheless (*plēn*) I say unto you, Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power.' Luke goes further, dividing the single Markan question into two (the Christ question in 22:67 and the Son of God question in 22:70) and giving each a deflecting answer — 'If I tell you, ye will not believe' and 'Ye say that I am' — so that the affirmation is routed back onto the interrogators. The apologetic harmonization, defended by Blomberg and Carson, holds that *sy eipas* is an idiomatic Semitic affirmation, a 'yes' with a measure of deliberate reserve, so that all three evangelists report substantially the same affirmative answer. The grammatical observation has merit: 'thou hast said' can indeed function as a guarded affirmation in Semitic idiom, and Bock's detailed study of the blasphemy charge shows the answer was heard as affirmative enough to ground a conviction.

But the harmonization does not erase the difference it needs to erase. *Sy eipas* and *hymeis legete* place the assertion in the questioner's mouth; *egō eimi* places it unreservedly in Jesus'. The evangelists chose distinct Greek formulations, and the choice runs against the grain of the usual assumption that later tradition heightens Christology. Here Matthew and Luke appear to be dialing back Mark's most direct claim — a pattern Ehrman documents in *The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture*, where he notes the tendency of some witnesses and redactors to soften statements that could sound either presumptuous or theologically hazardous. The plausible motive is twofold: the unfiltered *egō eimi* could read as self-aggrandizing in a way that embarrassed later readers, and it made the blasphemy verdict land almost too neatly, as though Jesus had volunteered his own condemnation. Whatever the motive, the data are clear. One can grant that *sy eipas* affirms and still observe that it is not what Mark wrote.

Where the critical reading lands: genuine compositional contradiction, the product of Matthean and Lukan redaction of Mark's *egō eimi*.