Home » Academics » Lecture Hall

WWJD: Jesus and the Bible, Part 1 - What Did Jesus Believe About Scripture?

As a part of our discipleship, we who seek to follow the Lord Jesus desire to believe what He believed. It would be odd for one to claim, on the one hand, to be devoted to Jesus as Lord and, on the other hand, to simply set aside as false or irrelevant a view that, arguably, Jesus believed and taught. Even if we fall short of actually believing what Jesus did with the assurance He believed it, it is surely our aim to grow in conforming our beliefs to His.

Nowhere is this more important than Jesus' belief about Holy Scripture. If we can ascertain Jesus' bibliology, we should do all we can to make it our own. With that in mind, I want to do two things in this two-part series:

• Clarify Jesus' view of Scripture
• Show how I would defend it as true in the broader, secular context

I cannot do justice to this topic in the space I have, but bear with me as I try to offer a simple but, hopefully, not simplistic summary of a massive topic.

Jesus' View of Scripture

It is no accident that for nearly 2,000 years the church has believed and taught what is called a verbal, plenary view of the Bible's inspiration. Most of us are familiar with the more recent term, "inerrancy," but the concept is quite old.

The church has taught that verbal, plenary inspiration is what one discovers upon close inspection of Jesus' own teachings about Scripture. When we say the Bible is verbally inspired, we mean that the inspiration of God does not reside in the general ideas of Scripture. Rather, it goes so deep that the very choice of words (in the original Greek and Hebrew text) is inspired. When we say the Bible is plenarily inspired, we mean that every part of the Bible is equally authoritative. Thus, for example, the books of Moses or the Gospels are not more inspired and authoritative than Nehemiah or the book of James. Here is a definition of this view:

The inspiration of Scripture is God's superintending of human authors so that by using their own individual personalities, they wrote without error in the original text His revelation — His inspired truth.
Inspiration implies inerrancy (that is, included in what the Bible teaches about its own inspiration is the idea that the Bible is inerrant — inerrancy is part of what it means to say the Bible is inspired). To claim that the Bible is inerrant is to claim that, when properly interpreted, everything the Bible teaches to be true is true. The Bible contains no errors, including errors of fact, ethics or doctrine.

This definition comports well with three aspects of Jesus' implicit and explicit view of Scripture. First, Jesus held that Scripture's assertions are true. This is nicely illustrated in two texts. John 10:35, NIV says "the Scripture cannot be broken." In context this means that it cannot be found to assert a falsehood.

Jesus is arguing that if people in Old Testament times were called gods (in the sense of judges who stood in God's place), then the people should not react if Jesus (who is greater than people who served as judges in Old Testament times) calls himself the Son of God. He should be given the chance to clarify and demonstrate His claim. Now His argument depends on the fact that in ancient days people were really called gods in the limited sense just mentioned. He is confident of this because Scripture says so (cf. Psalm 82:6) and "Scripture cannot be broken;" if it says something happened, it happened.

Similarly, Jesus taught that all (each and every) things taught about Him had to happen (Luke 18:31; 24:44). Why all of them and why did they have to happen? The underlying assumption is that everything Scripture asserts is true. Thus, Jesus can simply claim, "Your word is truth" (John 17:17).

Jesus did not believe the Bible is completely exhaustive — that it contains all the truth we can know about God, the creation, morals, the family and so forth. For example, He thought we could learn about God by observing the sun and rain (Matthew 5:44-45). Nor did Jesus believe all commands of Scripture were equally weighty; there are, He said, lesser and weightier matters of the Law (Matthew 23:23). But Jesus did believe all teachings of Scripture were equally true.

To the Last Letter

Second, Jesus held that inspiration characterizes Scripture down to its morphemes — the smallest units of language that convey meaning. For example, the 'a' in 'atheism' is a morpheme — it's a prefix that conveys a specific meaning. Thus, inspiration is not a mere feature of paragraphs, sentences or the general drift of a passage. Within the proper framework of interpretation, the very words themselves (in the original Hebrew and Greek texts) were inspired.

In the heat of theological debate, Jesus defended views in which His entire case turned on an implicit tense of a verb. For example, see Matthew 22:32 where Jesus emphasizes that God is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, so they must still be alive in the afterlife. He was arguing against the Saducees who did not believe in the resurrection from the dead. This is why Jesus did not say that God was the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, which would allow for the fact that God is no longer their God since, according to the view of the Saducees, they are now extinct.

The choice of a single word is also crucial. In Matthew 22:43-45 Jesus focuses on David's use of the word "Lord" to refer to the Messiah, the Son of David, implying that the Messiah would be greater than David himself because the Messiah was the Lord God Himself.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said that even the smallest letter or stroke of God's Word would be fulfilled (found to be true). The smallest letter of the Hebrew alphabet is a yodh, roughly equivalent to the size of a comma when compared to ordinary letters in English. A stroke was tiny little dash mark that distinguished a Hebrew "r" from a "d." These are morphemes in Hebrew.

Equally Inspired

Finally, Jesus held a plenary view of inspiration (that is, that all the components of the Old Testament were equally inspired). This set Him apart from some (for example, the Sadducees) who accepted only the inspiration of the Books of Moses and others who held that the Law was more inspired than, say, the prophets. Not so for Jesus.

In Luke 24:44 Jesus uses a widely employed threefold division to refer to the inspired canon of Scripture — "the Law and the Prophets and the Psalms" — a canon that includes the 39 books of the Protestant Bible and excludes Intertestamental writings. However, in Matthew 5:17-19 Jesus uses an odd, lesser-used phrase to refer to the same canon — "the Law or (not and) the Prophets." In so doing, Jesus means to place the "Prophets" (the rest of the Old Testament) on an equal footing with the Books of Moses.

Yet to Come

C O F F E E  S H O P

---

Do you agree that Jesus held Scripture to be completely true?

Join the discussion!

As we can see, Jesus taught Scripture and believed it to be true. But how can we respond to and argue this viewpoint in a way that is effective and non-circular? I'll address that next week.