Alisa Childers I Blog

8 Things Jesus Believed About Scripture (Part 1)

4/3/2017

What on earth are we to make of the Bible? Is it God's Word? A human cultural product that simply reflects the beliefs and observations of ancient people? Something else? This is the question du jour in Christian circles. Typically, conservative theologians maintain that the Bible is the inerrant, infallible, authoritative, and inspired Word of God. Progressive theologians tend to define those words differently, or abandon them altogether.

Some affirm that they take the Bible seriously but argue that we need to re-interpret it. In their view, the Bible condones immoral practices and teachings when taken at face value.(1) A couple of years ago, Rob Bell told Oprah Winfrey that the Christian church is "irrelevant when it quotes letters from 2,000 ago" to defend its moral principles.(2) In an excerpt from his upcoming book, What is the Bible?, Bell calls it "a profoundly human book."(3)

How do we wade through this amalgam of views and understand what the Bible actually is? I suggest we look to Jesus. The New Testament wasn't yet written when Jesus walked the earth, but we can certainly take a cue from His understanding of the Old Testament. What did He think it was? Here are 8 things the Gospel accounts tell us that Jesus affirmed about Scripture. (This post will deal with the first 4):

1. It is the Word of God.

If there is one thing Jesus affirmed over and over again, it's that the Old Testament Scriptures are the "Word of God." In Matthew 15:4, He referenced several commands from Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy saying, "For God said: Honor your father and your mother; and, The one who speaks evil of father or mother must be put to death." In Mark 7:8-13, He criticized the Pharisees for leaving "the commandment of God," and adding their own traditions to Scripture. He told them that they "void the word of God by your tradition." In Matthew 22:31-32, just before quoting Exodus 3:6, He said, "Have you not read what God said to you..." (Emphasis mine)

To Jesus, Scripture wasn't "a profoundly human book." It was the very Word of God.

2. It is inspired by God.

One day, Jesus was teaching a large crowd in the temple courts, and some Pharisees were gathered there. In a brilliant exchange, Jesus appealed to the inspiration of Scripture to help them understand that the Messiah is more than just a descendant of David. He said, "How is it then that David, speaking by the Spirit, called him [the Messiah] 'Lord'?" It's here that we get our very definition of Divine Inspiration—from Jesus Himself.

The authority and inspiration of Scripture are closely connected. Whenever Jesus said, "It is written," He was also appealing to inspiration. John Wenham wrote, "It is clear that Jesus understood 'It is written' to be equivalent to 'God says.'"(4) In fact, Jesus and His apostles quote the Old Testament by using the phrase "it is written," (or it's equivalent) over 90 times in the New Testament. (5)

Jesus didn't see Scripture as simply a human cultural product—He saw it as the inspired Word of God.

3. It is authoritative.

The authority of the Word of God has been questioned ever since Eden's silver-tongued serpent spoke those four fateful words to Eve: "Did God really say?" (Genesis 3:1) When that same serpent tempted Him in the wilderness, Jesus turned the tables by appealing to the authority of Scripture. All three times Jesus fought temptation with these three words: "It is written."

In his book, Unbreakable, Andrew Wilson noted:

Consider the way Jesus fights. He has the resources of heaven available, yet he fights by
using the authority of the Scriptures....His position is unequivocal: "You're trying to tempt
me, but the Scriptures have spoken. That's the end of the conversation."

To Jesus, the Scriptures weren't just some kind of ancient travel journal or the spiritual conjecture of common men—He considered the Old Testament Scriptures to be the fully authoritative Word of God.

4. It is historically reliable.

Jesus continually referred to Old Testament events as authentic history. He spoke of Abel, Abraham, Lot, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, Solomon, Elijah, Elisha, and Zechariah as historical people.(6) He described events such as the institution of circumcision, the judgment of Sodom and Gommorrah, the miracle of manna, Moses lifting the snake in the wilderness, and David eating shewbread as real history.(7)

In addition to all of this, Jesus affirmed two of the most historically disputed Old Testament stories. It's common for skeptics to claim that the great flood, and the story of Jonah and the whale never actually happened—and yet, Jesus vouched for both. (Matthew 24:37-38; Matthew 12:40) In fact, He compared the historicity of the story of Jonah to the historicity of His own resurrection!

It's also common for skeptics to claim that Daniel couldn't have really been a prophet because some of his predictions were too accurate to have been written before the events they describe. Jesus affirmed that Daniel was an actual person and a real prophet (Matthew 24:15).

In Luke 11:50-51, Jesus even made a sweeping statement about the entire history of the world by relating it to Old Testament events. He described world history as being from "the foundation of the world" to "this generation," and then paralleled that to the first and last prophets in the Hebrew cannon: "From the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah."

Jesus didn't view the Old Testament Scriptures as some kind of mythology or ancient folklore—He took the historical narratives literally.

Next week's post will address 4 more attributes of Scripture that Jesus believed and affirmed. Please subscribe to have it delivered straight to your inbox!

References:

(1) Marcus Borg, "Does the Bible Matter? Progressive Christians and Scripture," www.patheos.com, June 18, 2014, accessed March 20, 2017.
(2) Carol Kuruvilla, "Former Megachurch Pastor Rob Bell: A Church That Doesn't Support Gay Marriage Is 'Irrelevant,'" www.huffingtonpost.com, February 20, 2015, accessed March 17, 2017
(3) Rob Bell, "Where Did the Bible Come From?, www.facebook.com/realrobbell, March 17, 2017, accessed March 17, 2017.
(4) John Wenham, Christ and the Bible, (Wipf & Stock; 3rd ed, August 1, 2009) p.28
(5) Norman Geisler, Frank Turek, I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist, (Crossway books, 2004) p. 357
(6) Luke 11:51; Matthew 24:37-39; Luke 17:26-27; John 8:56; Luke 17:28-29; Matthew 8:11; Luke 13:28; John 7:22; Matthew 12:3-4; Matthew 22:43; Mark 12:36; Luke 20:42; Matthew 6:29; Matthew 12:42; Luke 11:31; Luke 12:27; Luke 4:25-26; Luke 4:27; Matthew 12:39-42; Luke 11:29-30, 32; Luke 11:51.
(7) John 7:22; Matthew 10:15; John 6:31; John 3:14; Matthew 12:3-4; Mark 2:25-26; Luke 6:3-4.

6 Comments

BEVERLY POWELL

4/3/2017 03:53:05 pm

Superb teaching!

Khethomthandayo

4/3/2017 05:28:30 pm

Great stuff

Debra Seiling link

4/4/2017 01:13:10 pm

You pointed out many points in this article I hadn't specifically thought of before. Thanks!

barry

4/24/2017 05:17:25 pm

Christians themselves have authored books denying that Jesus was God. See "A Man Attested by God: The Human Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels", by: J.R. Daniel Kirk. James White refused, several times, to answer a Greg Stafford's question whether theos in clause c of John 1:1 was definite or indefinite. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-L3IoUq-fk
and cue up to 2:05:25 ff.

It would not matter if Jesus was God, that doesn't place his views beyond criticism. God once repented of his prior creation of man. Genesis 6:6-7, and the non-literal "anthropomorphism" interpretation cannot be sustained from the grammar or context or genre, that interpretation is set forth solely in the interest of helping that passage avoid contradicting other statements about God in the bible.

If Jesus was not God, then what he thought about biblical matters is far more subject to review and criticism than most conservatives think.

For Trinitarians, Jesus spoke in ways that makes impossible the Trinitarian requirement that the will of Jesus and the Father are perfectly aligned.

In Matthew 26:39, Jesus asks the Father to remove the cup of suffering. Was he asking for something he knew to be impossible? If so, why? Had he lost his senses? Or did he seriously believe the Father's will could be changed by request?

In the same verse, Jesus says "not my will, but yours be done", but again, if Jesus' will was in harmony with the Father's at all times, there would be no logical reason to submit his own will to the will of the Father. You don't say "not my will, but yours be done" to anybody unless you have manifested some evidence that you had desired something that was contrary to their will.

Christians will say Jesus was speaking here "as a man", not as God. But "nature" is the most fundamental component that makes something what it is. So if Jesus had two "natures", then BOTH of them must by logical necessity be present in anything he said. He could no more suppress his divine nature than you can suppress your human nature. In that case, his request to avoid his cup of suffering also originated from his divine side and not merely his human side.

...in which case, it is the divine nature of Jesus too, not just his human nature, that manifested this sign of disagreement with the Father's will...and at that point the perfection of the Trinity is irreparably disrupted.

For these reasons, Jesus' authority can be objectively disputed sufficiently that Christians cannot rationally expect atheists to think Jesus' viewpoint on some matter is beyond criticism.

And the bible is not inerrant anyway. The Roman Catholic church would hardly have persecuted Galileo if they felt his suggestion that they interpret scientific statements in the bible as being phenomenological language, were the least bit consistent with the intent of the biblical authors.

Sure is funny that the entire Christian church for it's first 1500 years or so never felt biblical statements about an immovable earth and a moving sun were anything other than literal, until Galileo came along. Seems to me that the only reason Christians of today interpret those parts of the bible as language of appearance (i.e., movement of the sun in Joshua 10), is not for any objective reason such as grammar, immediate context, larger context or genre, but solely because "language of appearance" is the only way to harmonize the bible with science and thus uphold biblical inerrancy.

Indeed, Catholic apologist Robert Sugenis boldly claims Galileo was wrong, despite his church admitting in recent times that Galileo was right. Sugenis advocates geocentrism at galileowaswrong.com, and holds that the bible verses about the immobile earth and moving sun are literal. He would hardly take such a position if something in the grammar of context of those bible passages made it "clear" that they are only using language of appearance.

Alisa Childers

4/24/2017 09:46:48 pm

Hi Barry, this is one of those posts that is mostly written for Christians. I certainly wouldn't expect an atheist to value what Jesus thought about Scripture—you are right about that!

Regarding Galileo, he was first opposed by secular philosophers, not the church—his theory challenged the reigning philosophy of the day—Aristotelianism. This all happened during the Reformation, and the church definitely tried to silence him (not denying that), but the church's interpretation of those verses largely had to do with the influence of Aristotle on culture. Galileo was a Bible believing Christian.

I believe that the Bible and science will never contradict each other. Christians have nuanced views about using science to help interpret the Bible, and yes, there are implications for inerrancy—but your characterization is oversimplified, I believe.

Daniel Hawkins

8/2/2017 03:14:30 pm

While I can largely agree with the first three points, I would submit that the last point is inherently flawed. The problem is not whether the bible is "historically reliable" or not, but rather why modern evangelicals and non-Christians alike insist on making "historical reliability" the determining factor of the value of scripture. This requirement is judging scripture by the post-enlightenment thinking that truth is solely that which is empirically verifiable (i.e. in the case of historical events something actually had to happen for it to contain truth). However, this mindset was not a concern for both the readers and writers of scripture as it is now in a post-enlightenment empirical worldview.

Yes, as a first century Jew, Jesus (the creeds affirm that Jesus was not only fully God, but also fully man, something that is often overlooked in many evangelical circles) probably would have held the common Jewish perspective that a flood occurred, or that Daniel was indeed a prophet (which is also probably true; however, what scholars are fairly certain about is that the book of Daniel as it exists now came into existence much later than the person of Daniel was said to exist. The issue is not, "oh the prophecies are too accurate, therefore they must not be real," but rather that the prophecies are only accurate up to a certain point. They accurately describe the emergence of empires up until the Selucid empire, and then the prophesies start to go awry. This, among other things, has led scholars to the conclusion that the prophecies contained in the latter chapters of Daniel were written during the Selucid rule as "ex eventu prophesies" or "prophesies after the fact" in order to provide legitimacy for what the author was trying to say, which, though it seems strange and even fraudulent in the modern era, was a common practice among ancient writers. An example of this is found in the "Book of Enoch" and ancient book purported to be written by Enoch, but actually written much later. [Despite this the book of Enoch was very influential in Jewish and Christian circles, with traces of it in much of the NT including the Pauline letters and even a quote from it in Jude 1:14-15].)

All that is to say that as an ancient Jew, Jesus was not concerned in the same way as we are with historical reliability. Sure, he likely considered the events described as history, but the value of the text is not in its historical reliability, but for precisely for the reason that you point out earlier: it is the word of God. More specifically it is God's word in human words.

To me this is the mystery and the beauty of inspiration. That God can use flawed humans and their language to communicate his truth in a way that we can understand. He gets down on our level so to speak.

This is one of the reasons I love the Genesis narratives (Gen 1-3). When they are read in light of their ancient Near Eastern (ANE) contexts and other creation stories that would have been circulating at the time Genesis was composed. When read against this backdrop, the intention of the author of these creation stories (and I would submit the intention of God working through this author) in Genesis becomes clear. He (or she) is making statements about who God is and his relationship to humanity. For example, when Genesis 2 is read against an ANE background we see that it is using temple imagery. Ancient temples contained gardens that were used to grow food to "feed" the gods. This was the reason for humanity's existence: to sustain the gods. However, in Genesis 2 we see that the garden (and the accompanying presence of the deity) was not made to provide food for the gods, but for God to provide for the humans. This is but a glimpse of the rich message the author is trying to convey about who God is by working in his own ancient cultural context. His main goal was not to describe, as a scientific text book how the universe came to being, but to describe who God is in relation to his creation a message that is often drowned out in the battle to prove the "historical reliability" of the bible. These stories contain immense truth, but not in the way we are conditioned to think in a post-enlightenment worldview. Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote, "To be sure Genesis 1-3 is legend. But it is true legend." (Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 3: Creation and Fall) By this he was making a statement that the truth of texts like Genesis 1-3 often transcend the mere question of historical reliability.

I am aware that was quite long winded, and forgive me if it does not make as much sense as I would like. Please do not mistake me, I love the Bible and the God it points to, but fundamentalist evangelicalism (among other things) chokes the life out of scripture by imposing restrictions on the text such as innerancy and historical reliability.

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8 Things Jesus Believed About Scripture (Part 1)

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