“The faith of a grain of mustard seed”: A semantic and intercultural perspective
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Anna Wierzbicka
Anna Wierzbicka is Professor of Linguistics (Emerita) at the Australian National University. She has published twenty five books. Her latest book is
The Nicene Creed in Minimal English :Why Christianity Needs Universal Human Concepts (2025, Palgrave). Her work engages linguistics, anthropology, cognitive science, philosophy, psychology and religion. In 2024 she was named an Inaugural Highly Ranked Google Scholar, ranked 5 in linguistics, within the top 0.05 % across all disciplines.
Abstract
The expression “faith of a mustard seed” is a variant of “ faith as a grain of mustard seed”, which entered the English language via the King James Bible (1611), as part of the translation of Jesus’ saying: “Verily verily I say to you, if ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, ‘Remove hence to yonder place’, and it shall remove, and nothing shall be impossible unto you” (Matthew 17:20, KJV). The article argues that the common interpretation of this saying – according to which Jesus was telling people that even a very small amount of faith has great power and can “move mountains” – is mistaken. On the contrary, Jesus points to a small seed as an example of great faith (“I can be a tree, I want to be a tree”) and as a teacher for us people: we too can be transformed if we steadfastly believe in Jesus as the one “sent by God” and never doubt. Further, the article explores the question of how Jesus’ sayings about “faith” can be translated into languages which don’t have a word like “faith”(that is, the majority of the world’s languages). Using examples from the translations of the Gospels into Australian languages Warlpiri and Pitjantjatjara, and from the Hawaii Pidgin Bible, the article seeks to show that these sayings, which were intended, indirectly, for the whole humanity and which have been translated into thousands of languages, provide a unique opportunity for studying translatability and the limits of human understanding across languages, centuries and cultures.
About the author
Anna Wierzbicka is Professor of Linguistics (Emerita) at the Australian National University. She has published twenty five books. Her latest book is The Nicene Creed in Minimal English: Why Christianity Needs Universal Human Concepts (2025, Palgrave). Her work engages linguistics, anthropology, cognitive science, philosophy, psychology and religion. In 2024 she was named an Inaugural Highly Ranked Google Scholar, ranked 5 in linguistics, within the top 0.05 % across all disciplines.
Acknowledgements
This article owes a great deal to the discussions with, and feedback from a number of colleagues, in particular to David Nash, Charbel El-Khaissi, Sandy Habib, Mark Durie, Cliff Goddard, Carsten Levisen, Elżbieta Janus, and Mary Besemeres. I am also grateful for his last-minute comments to David Wilkins, to whom this article is dedicated.
Appendix: The faith of a mustard seed
[Jesus said this to the Apostles when they asked why they could not heal an epileptic boy]: “Because of your little faith. For truly, I say to you, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there’, and it will move, and nothing will be impossible to you.” (Matthew 17:20, ESV)
A Minimal English explication
We can think about it like this: Jesus wanted to say this with these words:
I say to you:
You couldn’t do it because you didn’t think like this all the time:
“Jesus is with us. We know who Jesus is. When Jesus is with us, God is with us”.
You know that it is like this:
People often think like this:
“I want to do something very good.
If I do it, some very good things will happen because of it.
It will be very bad if I don’t do it.
I can’t do it; because of this, these very good things will not happen.”
When these people think like this, they feel something very bad.
I say to you all:
Don’t think like this. Think like this:
“Jesus is with me. I know who Jesus is; when Jesus is with me, God is with me.
When God is with me, I can do very good things, as God wants.”
Very good things can happen because of this, as God wants.
If you think like this all the time, if you want to think like this all the time,
you can do very very good things, as God wants.
I say to you:
Think about a small seed.
If it is in the ground, if there is water there, something can happen to this seed,
something can happen in the seed.
After this, it can be not like before, it can be a big tree.
This can be very good for many birds, it can be very good for many people.
I say to you:
You can all think like this:
“A mustard seed is very small.
When it is in the ground, it always thinks like this:
‘I want to be a big tree, I can be a big tree’.
Because it always thinks like this, after some time, it can be not like before.
If a small seed can think like this, I can think like this.”
“If I always think like this, I can be not like before.
I want to think like this.”
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© 2025 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- This special issue is dedicated to the memory of Istvan Kecskes
- What did we learn from Istvan Kecskes? Introductory notes
- Research Articles
- Indexical shift
- Event guises and subsituations: A truth-conditional reply to Pietroski
- Rooth-Partee conditionals and the symmetry of disjunction
- “The faith of a grain of mustard seed”: A semantic and intercultural perspective
- Silent imperatives: A multimodal approach to warning expressions
- Negotiating interactional routines in the openings of intercultural first encounters
- An exploration of quasi-proper names based on Japanese data: Insights from cross-linguistic and language-specific perspectives
- Illocutionary conditionals and discourse strategies in aphasia: A corpus-based analysis
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- This special issue is dedicated to the memory of Istvan Kecskes
- What did we learn from Istvan Kecskes? Introductory notes
- Research Articles
- Indexical shift
- Event guises and subsituations: A truth-conditional reply to Pietroski
- Rooth-Partee conditionals and the symmetry of disjunction
- “The faith of a grain of mustard seed”: A semantic and intercultural perspective
- Silent imperatives: A multimodal approach to warning expressions
- Negotiating interactional routines in the openings of intercultural first encounters
- An exploration of quasi-proper names based on Japanese data: Insights from cross-linguistic and language-specific perspectives
- Illocutionary conditionals and discourse strategies in aphasia: A corpus-based analysis
