Where in the Bible does it say ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive’?

A farewell at Miletus

About AD 57, Paul is hurrying to reach Jerusalem by Pentecost with money collected for its poor. He will not stop at Ephesus, so he sends for the church’s elders to meet him at Miletus, down the coast (Acts 20:16–17). There he gives the one speech in Acts that Paul addresses to fellow Christians. It ends with a quotation.

In all things I gave you an example, that so laboring you ought to help the weak, and to remember the words of the Lord Jesus, that he himself said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’

Then he kneels and prays with them. They weep and embrace him, “sorrowing most of all because of the word which he had spoken, that they should see his face no more” (20:38), and they walk him to the ship.

A saying no Gospel records

Search Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and the line is not there. The odd part is that Luke, who wrote Acts, also wrote a Gospel and left it out of that one. Sayings of Jesus that survive outside the four Gospels are called agrapha, Greek for unwritten things, and this is the best known of them. John’s Gospel admits how much was left out: “There are also many other things which Jesus did” (John 21:25).

For decades before the Gospels were written, Christians passed on Jesus’s words by mouth, and Paul quotes some of them himself. On divorce he writes, “not I, but the Lord” (1 Corinthians 7:10), and he repeats the words over the bread at the Last Supper (11:23–24). Around AD 96 a letter from the church at Rome, 1 Clement, praises the Corinthians for being gladder to give than to receive, the earliest echo of the saying (1 Clement 2.1).

Why Paul said it there

The quotation caps an argument about money.

I coveted no one’s silver, gold, or clothing. You yourselves know that these hands served my necessities, and those who were with me.

Paul made tents for a living (Acts 18:3) and refused to be paid by the churches he founded, even though, as he wrote, “the Lord ordained that those who proclaim the Good News should live from the Good News” (1 Corinthians 9:14). He quotes one saying of Jesus to explain why he did not use another. He was also carrying a gift: the collection of the churches of Macedonia and Achaia for the poor in Jerusalem (Romans 15:25–26), which Acts mentions only later, as “gifts for the needy” (24:17). To Corinth he had written, “God loves a cheerful giver” (2 Corinthians 9:7).

The saying’s cousins

The idea has close relatives in the Gospels: “Freely you received, so freely give” (Matthew 10:8), and “Give, and it will be given to you” (Luke 6:38). Jesus even tells his host to invite the poor, “and you will be blessed, because they don’t have the resources to repay you” (Luke 14:14). Blessed, makarios, is the word of the Beatitudes, which is why some translations say happier. Jewish wisdom had its own version in Sirach, a book in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles: “Don’t let your hand be stretched out to receive, and closed when you should repay” (Sirach 4:31). Aristotle said that generosity shows more in giving than in taking (Nicomachean Ethics 4.1).

Better to give than to receive

In English the line became a proverb, repeated every Christmas, and many people assume it comes from the Sermon on the Mount. It comes from Acts: Jesus’s words, remembered by Paul, written down by Luke, and found nowhere else.