In a previous post I quipped that the Bible was written by Jesus, to Jesus, and about Jesus. It’s a neat bit of rhetoric but needs some unpacking to communicate clearly.
It’s possible to get the wrong end of this.
The Bible is written by Jesus
Let’s start with what I’m not saying. I am not claiming that the incarnate second person of the Trinity sat with a pen and wrote the New Testament. That is ludicrous, and I am making the same claim about the New as the Old so would need the Old Testament to be much younger than it in fact is.
The Bible was written by human authors, all of it ‘breathed out’ by God (2 Timothy 3). I gladly affirm verbal plenary inspiration as an evangelical: meaning that the actual words (verbal) rather than the ideas and the entirety of them (plenary) rather than just some of them, were inspired by God. The Bible is exactly as it is intended to be by the Lord; it is the very word of God.
What I am trying to say by saying the Bible was ‘written by Jesus’ is that this inspiration, as per the doctrine of inseparable operations, involved all three persons of the Godhead, rather than just the Spirit. I also am using Jesus as meaning the same as ‘God the Son,’ which I appreciate has a potential imprecision to it (depending on exactly what you think time is, anyway!). Jesus is the divine word, spoken by the Father (Genesis 1, John 1), where the breath the speaker speaks with is the Spirit. Yahweh speaks the Bible to its human authors.
Perhaps ‘Jesus wrote the Bible’ requires too many qualifications to be rhetorically useful. I initially formed it that way to push back on the claim that we should pay particular attention to the ‘red letters’ as these are the ones spoken by Jesus. Jesus spoke the black letters too. Assuming that the words he said on earth are privileged above his revelation either requires too low a view of Jesus, because he isn’t the divine word who made the world (Colossians 1), or too low a view of the Bible, because the scriptures aren’t verbally, plenary inspired by God.
The Bible is written to Jesus
Here is where I’m slightly out on a limb. Usually, we’re told that the contemporary reader is the secondary recipient of the scriptures, because the primary recipient is its original audience. The Bible can’t have meant anything that it didn’t mean to its original audience. There’s a helpful principle here, and original context is important in interpreting the text: particularly the context that the text provides for us. I want to nuance that in two ways.
Firstly, the Bible is addressed to the Church, by which I mean the Lord when inspiring the Bible was well aware that this would be read across many cultures across centuries, so while it is definitely written within particular languages with particular idioms and patterns of thought, to particular peoples in particular cultures, we can interpret the Bible using the Bible. While it can be helpful to come to understand ancient near eastern and Roman-era Judean cultures to read the Bible, if that changes the meaning to something we could not have fathomed using the Bible itself, I am initially suspect.
Secondly, I am not convinced that the original readers are the primary recipients of the Old Testament. I wonder if the primary recipient is the one about who they write. I say this because when we meet the incarnate Jesus, we first meet him as a child who has to learn, studies the scriptures, and grows in wisdom and stature (Luke 2). I wonder whether its reasonable to infer that as he studied the scriptures, he learned deeply who he was and what he would have to do. I wonder whether, therefore, the Old Testament’s primary purpose—from the perspective of the Lord inspiring its writers—was to testify to the incarnate God the Son who he was and what he mission consisted of.
If that’s the case, it establishes my first point in this section. If the Bible is written first to Jesus, then the church as Jesus’ body, in union with him, receives it as written to us. That doesn’t suddenly mean we bypass the rules of sensible reading or that the text can mean anything we like, but it does mean not only should the text make sense to its original readers (an important assumption to make in interpreting the book of Revelation) but also that it should make sense to the church. This can be layers of meaning, if constructed properly on top of one another.
This is an argument that one needs Christian assumptions and theology to properly understand the Old Testament. I’m not embarrassed to make that argument.
The Bible is written about Jesus
Probably the least controversial of the three statements. The Old Testament is about Jesus. Of course, if written by Yahweh addressed to God the Son, of course it will be.
We should not be ashamed of making this claim. We should not be ashamed of seeing the cosmos centred on the Son. The continued witness of the scriptures is that while the Son points to the Father (e.g. John 14), the Father and Spirit direct our worship towards the Son: he is everywhere in the scriptures. Jesus is the cosmic emperor (vice-regent), enthroned at his ascension, who will rule all things for all time. The book he has placed in our hands to learn his way is about him, his Father, and their Spirit.
Again, we need to make this claim within a proper Trinitarian framework without messing with the doctrine of God. It is the case that rhetoric like mine can be wrongly interpreted and you’ll end up sounding like a oneness Pentecostal. I don’t think that should stop us from exalting Jesus.
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash
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nuakh 