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The Bible according to Jesus
In light of the resurrection, the apostle Paul rightly makes a bold claim that Jesus really is who He says He is. Further, Paul writes to the Romans that He “was declared the Son of God in power according to the spirit of holiness by the resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord (Rom 1:4). Considering Jesus’s divine nature, one might naturally ask; “what exactly did Jesus think about the Bible?” because if Jesus is who He says that He is, then it matters a great deal what He thought about the Bible. In fact, it is said that “to trust in the resurrected Jesus is to trust not only Jesus Himself but also the texts He trusted and the writings of the witnesses He commissioned to tell the world about Him.”
The resurrection affirms Jesus as coming from God, that He was returning to God, and that He was God. If Jesus is God, it is straightforward, as demonstrated by the resurrection, that He possesses unlimited divine authority. New Testament scholar Timothy Paul Jones explains, quite simply, that what can be “believed about the Bible is grounded in the words of a man who died and rose again.”
Jesus frequently quoted from the Old Testament and often alluded to Old Testament passages in His teaching and preaching. It is estimated that about 10% of Jesus’s words in the New Testament are taken from the Old. That means that within the 1,800 verses in the four Gospels that report the words of Jesus, some 180 of those verses are either Old Testament quotations or allusions. For example, Jesus quotes from all the Torah; He quotes from 1, and 2 Kings, 1 Samuel, and 2 Chronicles; He quotes from the prophets, Jonah, Isaiah, Daniel, Hosea, and Malachi; and He quotes extensively from the Psalms.
In light of this, it becomes very important to understand exactly what Jesus thought and taught about Scripture. We can gain some understanding by reading Luke 11:51. In this passage, Jesus talks to the Pharisees about their stubbornness. He warns them: “So that the blood of all the prophets, shed from the foundation of the world, may be charged against this generation, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who perished between the altar and the sanctuary.” The key phrase is this: “From the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah.” According to the Bible, Abel was killed by Cain in Genesis 4:8. And, if we look at Zechariah being killed between the altar and the sanctuary, we see that this occurs in 2 Chronicles 24:20-22. That is from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah. In light of this, we can say that Jesus affirms the authority of the Old Testament Scriptures from Genesis to the end of the book of Second Chronicles. That is about halfway through our Old Testament. But there is still more.
There are some interesting things about the Jewish Bible, the Tanakh. Thumbing through the Tanakh, one of the first observations is that Hebrew is read from right to left instead of left to right, like English is read. Because of that, the front of the book is considered the back, and you work your way through the book reading from right to left, and from what we would say is back to front. But there is something else about the Tanakh that is interesting. The Hebrews, of course, have always broken the Bible into three sections: First, the Law of Moses, or what is often called the Pentateuch, or the Torah, which consists of the first five books. The second section is called “The Prophets,” and it consists of Joshua, Judges, Samuel (1 & 2), Kings (1 & 2), Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Isaiah, and Book of the Twelve Prophets: Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. The third section is called “The Writings,” and it consists of Ruth, Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Lamentations, Daniel, Esther, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Chronicles (1 & 2). That is where the name Tanakh comes from: Ta = Torah (Instruction, or Law, also called the Pentateuch), na = Nevi_im (Prophets), kh = Ketuvim (Writings).
If you were a first-century Jew reading the Jewish Tanakh, the first scroll of the book is Genesis. Turning to the end of the Tanakh, we find the book of Second Chronicles. Malachi, the last book of the modern-day Bible, is found in the middle of the Jewish Old Testament. In the end, there is simply a difference in the arrangement of the books within the Old Testament. Nothing is missing, and nothing is added. We have the exact same Old Testament that Jesus would have known. But more importantly, based upon the Tanakh, from Abel to Zachariah includes the entire Old Testament as we know it. Jesus affirms our entire Old Testament as authoritative. Not only that, Jesus “saw Himself as the fulfillment of all that the Old Testament had to say (Matt. 4:4, 7, 10; 5:17; 21:13; Mark 7:6; 11:17; Luke 4:4, 8, 12, 21; 14:46; John 6:31; 10:34).”
Ok, fine, says the Bible skeptic, Michael. But how can we know that the Old Testament in our Christian hands is the same Old Testament that Jesus is referring to? How do we know our copies today are accurate? That is a legitimate question, right? After all, Jesus confirmed the first-century Old Testament, not necessarily the Old Testament we have today. Join us next week as we continue to look at the Bible according to Jesus.
Gloria in excelsis Deo!
Ty B. Kerley, DMin., is an ordained minister who teaches Christian apologetics and relief preaches in Southern Oklahoma. Dr. Kerley and his wife, Vicki, are members of the Waurika church of Christ, and live in Ardmore, OK. You can contact him at dr.kerley@ isGoddead.com.
