now be applied to the concrete issue of the extent of biblical authority—beginning with the Old Testament.
4.21 We shall first ask: What was Jesus’ view of the Old Testament?
4.22 It cannot be stressed too strongly that, following from Jesus’ di-vine status, his view will be normative—whether it accords with that of “the assured results of modern biblical criticism”—
or not.
4.23 Jesus regarded the Old Testament as entirely the Word of God, quoted it as fully authoritative, never contradicted it, and took its historical narratives as historical fact.
4.24 Jesus’ high view of Scripture is evident from his specific dec-larations to that effect. Said he:
4.241 “Not a jot [the yod, the smallest letter of the Hebrew alphabet]
or a tittle [the calligraphic shading of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet] shall pass from the Law until all is fulfilled” (Mat-thew 5).
4.2411 True, among the Jews of the time (and today), the “Law” could mean either the Ten Commandments, or the Pentateuch, or the entire Old Testament; that Jesus used it in the sense of the whole Old Testament is clear from his assertion elsewhere: “Is it not written in your Law, I said, Ye are gods?” (John 10:34)—
the passage referred to being in the Psalms (Psalm 82:6), which is in neither the Ten Commandments nor the Pentateuch.
4.242 “Search the Scriptures: . . . they testify of me” (John 5:39).
4.243 “Beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27).
4.25 Jesus’ belief in the revelational character of the entire Old Tes-tament is also clear by implication from his teachings.
4.251 He quotes authoritatively from a wide variety of books of the Old Testament, early and late, and in doing so employs the for-mula, gegraptai: “it is written.”
4.2511 This passive construction requires a “personal agent” (“it is written by someone”), which here Jesus takes to be God the Fa-ther.
4.2512 At no time does Jesus, like the modern-day biblical critic, focus on the human writers of the Old Testament books or attempt to explain their teachings in terms of the peculiar cultural condi-tions of the time.
4.25121 Jesus’ approach gains modern support from G. Ernest Wright (The Old Testament Against Its Environment).
4.2513 It cannot seriously be doubted that Jesus views the Old Testa-ment as a unitary work by a single, divine Author.
4.252 In his encounter with the devil in the wilderness (Matthew 4, Mark 1, Luke 4), Jesus counters the devil’s quotations of Scrip-ture out of context with a text from Deuteronomy 8:3: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God”—the clear implication being that the whole of the Old Testament must be treated as the Word of God.
4.2521 Had Jesus not believed in the full authority of the Old Testa-ment, this would have been the ideal opportunity to say so; he could have declared: “Come, come! We are cosmic beings, not naïve, culturally-bound humans. There is no need to act as if the Bible were an inerrant source of information. Let us deal with general principles, not engage in literalistic, fundamental-istic “proof-texting.”
4.25211 By making this clear, Jesus could have saved Bible societies the immense amounts of money they have spent in disseminat-ing the whole Bible throughout the world, as well as in
trans-lating the Scriptures in their entirety into a variety of minor tongues.
4.26 Jesus never criticised the Old Testament; he accepted its teach-ings in every respect.
4.261 He frequently criticised the religious leaders of his day for al-lowing their settled traditions to overwhelm the original scrip-tural message; but that is hardly the same thing as criticising the Bible itself—quite to the contrary.
4.262 When Jesus uses the formula, “It was said of old time ‘x’ (‘do not murder,’ ‘do not commit adultery’), but I say to you ‘y’ (‘do not be angry without cause,’ ‘do not lust in your heart’),” he is not contradicting Old Testament teaching; he is saying “Not only ‘x,’ but also ‘y.’”
4.2621 Otherwise, one would have to conclude that Jesus was really saying, “Don’t be irrationally angry and don’t lust—but go ahead and kill and commit adultery if you like”!
4.27 Unlike the higher critics, Jesus considered the most difficult Old Testament passages for modern readers to be history--not metaphor, myth, or poetry.
4.271 Jesus believed the Adam and Eve narrative (Genesis 2) to re-count an historical event which had occurred “at the beginning”
of human history (Matthew 19:4-6; Mark 10:6-9).
4.272 He considered the Noahic flood to have been an actual, histor-ical occurrence, and paralleled it with his own Second Coming (Matthew 24:37 ff).
4.273 He held that the “Jonah and the whale” incident was factual, and used it as the “only sign” of his own, forthcoming resurrec-tion (Matthew 12:38 ff).
4.2731 The beast in question was not necessarily a whale; the Hebrew and Greek words signify a “great fish” or a “sea monster.” The translators of the Authorised Version identified it with the larg-est aquatic beast they knew. In any case, even a whale could swallow a man and the man survive, as has happened in other cases (72 Bibliotheca Sacra 334 [1915]; 25 Princeton Theolog-ical Rev. 636 [1941]).
4.28 As to the list of books comprising the Old Testament validated by Jesus, we know which they were, for the Jewish historian Josephus (Contra Apionem, ca. A.D. 100) specifies the number as 22.
4.281 “The five of Moses were of course the Pentateuch; the thirteen of the prophets probably included the eight regular nebî’îm plus Daniel, Job, Chronicles, Ezra-Nehemiah, and Esther; the ‘four hymns and maxims’ would most naturally consist of Psalms, Proverbs, Canticles, and Ecclesiastes. There is little doubt that his twenty-two books are those of our present Hebrew canon”
(G. L. Robinson and R. K. Harrison).
4.282 This collection (identical to what is today found in Protestant Bibles) does not include the so-called Old Testament Apocry-pha, for they were never part of the Hebrew Scriptures (they originated for the most part in Hellenistic Judaism during the intertestamental period).
4.2821 These books have therefore not received Jesus’ divine stamp-of-approval as revelatory, though they are useful for historical and religious purposes (and were translated and placed in a sep-arate category by Luther and by the translators of the Author-ised Version).
4.2822 They are included in Roman Catholic editions of the Bible be-cause the Council of Trent (1546), in opposing the Reformers, made their acceptance a de fide matter, and this was confirmed by the first Vatican Council in 1870.
4.29 It will be observed that, in the case of the Old Testament, the authority and reliability of the material is established by Jesus’
own (divine) stamp of approval on it, not on textual investiga-tions of the kind we entered into in reference to the New Testa-ment docuTesta-ments.
4.291 This is not to say that there is not good archaeological support for many events of Old Testament history, e.g., the details of patriarchal history as recounted in the earliest biblical books (K. Kitchen; E. Yamauchi; G, Archer; W. Kaiser).
4.2911 Indeed, the critics of Old Testament history have been contin-ually forced to revise their negative judgments on the basis of
not possibly have written the Pentateuch because there was no writing system available to him, the critics were confronted by archaelogical evidence of no less than three writings systems in use in the Egypt of his day).
4.292 But such external confirmations touch only a portion of the en-tire content of the Old Testament books; and thus, without a transcendent Word establishing their revelational authority, one cannot make definitive revelational claims in their behalf.
4.3 As for the New Testament, Jesus proleptically established its