He Used 'Mammon' Without Ever Defining It

In his recorded speech, Jesus uses the word 'mammon' on four occasions: twice in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6:24) and twice in the parable of the unjust steward (Luke 16:9, 16:11, 16:13). The word is Aramaic — transliterated, never translated — and Jesus deploys it as though it requires no introduction. He says 'Ye cannot serve God and mammon' (Matthew 6:24, Luke 16:13) with no gloss, no definition, no parenthetical explanation. He tells his audience to 'make friends of the mammon of unrighteousness' (Luke 16:9) and asks whether they have been 'faithful in the unrighteous mammon' (Luke 16:11) — each time treating the term as shared vocabulary. This is linguistically notable: Jesus regularly pauses to interpret his own parables (Mark 4, Matthew 13), clarifies figures of speech when disciples misunderstand (John 16:29), and unpacks metaphors in the Farewell Discourse. But mammon receives no such treatment. Across four uses in two different speeches — one to a crowd, one apparently to disciples — he assumes the word lands. The result is that 'mammon' remains one of the few untranslated Aramaic terms in his speech that he himself never decodes, left for readers to reconstruct from context alone.