I'm a bookworm. Or, more beautifully, a humanist like Erasmus. For me, a book, a text, is a "source." Humanists, in the fight against the falsification of history, called “ad fontes”, “to primary sources”. If you want to know what Plutarch said, read Plutarch. My narrow academic specialty as a historian is the study of historical sources.
That's why I don't read the Gospels to know what Jesus said. Text is my precious, but text is not my God. Through the Gospel of Matthew, it's Matthew who speaks, not Jesus. Jesus Himself speaks. God sounds, sounds continuously. Jesus is the source, and I am the source if I am truly alive, not just a biological organism. Every person is a source, flowing into a river, and then into the sea, into the ocean, and not dissolving in the ocean, because that's where the comparison ends. God is not an ocean, not the Sun; you cannot dissolve in Him, although sometimes you really want to disappear without disappearing.
"Jesus said to her, 'Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.'"
Everyone who drinks from the Gospel will thirst again and be dissatisfied. Jesus is reflected in the Gospel, but Jesus is not the Gospel. I believe not in the Gospel, not in a reflection, but in the God Jesus. I hear Him, I listen to Him, I respond to Him.
4 February 2026