Scot McKnight (20th–21st century)
“Paul explicitly cites the Old Testament more than one hundred times, and the number of implicit allusions and echoes in his letters boggles the mind. . . . The Story of Jesus Christ is locked into one people, one history, and one Scripture: it makes sense only as it follows and completes the Story of Israel . . . the ’gospel’ is the Story of Jesus that fulfills, completes, and resolves Israel’s Story.”48
Richard Hays (1948–)
“For Paul, Scripture, rightly read, prefigures the formation of the eschatological community of the church.
“Christ’s death as Passover lamb marks the community’s deliverance from bondage and passage to freedom. The community, then, is metaphorically portrayed not only as the unleavened bread but also as the journey people of the exodus, called to celebrate the feast and to live in ways appropriate to their identity as people rescued by God from the power of evil and death.
“Abraham serves for Paul not just as an exemplar of Christian living but also as a typological foreshadowing of Christ, the ’one man’ (Rom. 5:19) through whose obedience ’the many were constituted righteous.’”49
G. K. Beale (1949–)
“There is unity to the Bible because it is all God’s word. Therefore, there is legitimacy in attempting to trace common themes between testaments.
“We may say that the authorial intentions of the Old Testament writers were not as comprehensive as the simultaneous divine intentions, which became progressively unpacked as the history of revelation progresses until they climax in Christ. The Old Testament writers prophesied events to occur not only distant in time from them but in another world, a new world, which Jesus inaugurated . . . our contention is that Christ not only fulfills the Old Testament temple and all that its prophecies represent, but that he is the unpacked meaning for which the temple existed all along. . . . Typology is not mere analogy of something in the New Testament with something in the Old. Typology indicates fulfillment of the Old Testament’s indirect prophetic foreshadowing of people, institutional and events in Christ, who is the ultimate climactic expression of everything God completely intended in the older revelation—whether it be the Law, temple and its rituals, various prophets, priests, and kings, and so on.”50
Christian Smith (20th–21st century)
“The purpose, center, and interpretive key to scripture is Jesus Christ. It is embarrassing to have to write this, for it should be obvious to all Christians. But I am afraid that this is not always so obvious in practice in biblicist circles. At least the profound implications of this fact for reading Scripture are not always obvious to many evangelicals. Truly believing that Jesus Christ is the real purpose, center, and interpretative key to scripture causes one to read the Bible in a way that is very different than believing the Bible to be an instruction manual containing universally applicable divine oracles concerning every possible subject it seems to address. . . . We do not read scripture as detached historians trying to judge its technical accuracy in recounting events. We do not read scripture as a vast collection of infallible propositions whose meanings and implications can be understood on their own particular terms. We only, always, and everywhere read scripture in view of its real subject matter: Jesus Christ. This means that we always read scripture Christocentrically, christologically, and christotelically, as those who really believe what the Nicene and Chalcedonian creeds say. That is, for Christians, Christ is the center, the inner reason, and the end of all Scripture.”51
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963)
“It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit, and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him.”52
Robert D. Brinsmead (1933–)
“The purpose of all Scripture is to bear witness to Christ (John 5:39; 20:31). The Bible in itself is not the Word of God. The Word of God is a person (John 1:1). Neither does the Bible have life, power or light in itself any more than did the Jewish Torah. These attributes may be ascribed to the Bible only by virtue of its relationship to Him who is Word, Life, Power and Light. Life is not in the book, as the Pharisees supposed, but only in the Man of the book (John 5:39).”53
Dallas Theological Seminary
“We believe all Scriptures center about the Lord Jesus Christ in His person and work in His first and second coming, and hence that no portion, even of the Old Testament, is properly read, or understood, until it leads to Him.”54
Notes
Introduction: The Jesus Story
1. References to “salvation history” to describe the Bible’s main theme did not arise until the seventeenth century. See H. W. Frei, “The ’Literal Reading’ of Biblical Narrative in the Christian Tradition: Does It Stretch or Will It Break?” in Frank McConnell, ed., The Bible and the Narrative Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 37–38. The Bible isn’t about salvation; it’s about Jesus Christ. Salvation is one of the things Christ does. But Jesus is far more than Savior. See our book Jesus Manifesto: Restoring the Supremacy and Sovereignty of Jesus Christ (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2010) for an unfolding of that statement.
2. In this regard, this book is really an expansion of chapter 1 of Jesus Manifesto. In that chapter, we point out that Jesus is the occupation of the entire biblical canon, both First and Second Testaments. Jesus blows that point up into an entire volume.
3. For the history of the First, Second, and Third “Jesus Quests” as well as some of the most influential works in historical Jesus studies, see Craig Evans’s Life of Jesus Research: An Annotated Bibliography (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1989) and Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2006); Martin Hengel’s The Charismatic Leader and His Followers (New York: Crossword, 1981) and Studies in Early Christology (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1995); Dale Allison’s The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009); Ben Witherington’s The Jesus Quest: The Third Search for the Jew of Nazareth (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1995), The Christology of Jesus (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1990), and Jesus the Sage: The Pilgrimage of Wisdom (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1994); Scot McKnight’s Jesus and His Death: Historiography, the Historical Jesus, and Atonement Theory (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2005); Craig Keener’s The Historical Jesus of the Gospels (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009); N. T. Wright’s The Original Jesus: The Life and Vision of a Revolutionary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), Who Was Jesus? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999), The New Testament and the People of God, vol. 1 of Christian Origins and the Question of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), and Jesus and the Victory of God, vol. 2 of Christian Origins and the Question of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996); Darrell Bock and Robert Webb’s Key Events in the Life of the Historical Jesus: A Collaborative Exploration of Context and Coherence (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010); Darrell Bock’s Studying the Historical Jesus: A Guide to Sources and Methods (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2002); Gregory Boyd and Paul Eddy’s Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Tradition (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007); Beverly Roberts Goventa and Richard Hays’s Seeking the Identity of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007); James Beilby and Robert Price’s The Historical Jesus: Five Views (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Press, 2009); H. J. Cadbury’s The Peril of Modernizing Jesus (New York: Macmillan, 1937); Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies on the New Testament’s Christology of Divine Identity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009); Nicholas Perrin and Richard Hays’s Jesus, Paul, and the People of God: A Theological Dialogue with N. T. Wright (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academia, 2011); John Meier’s A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus (New York: Doubleday, 2001); Stephen Barton’s The Spirituality of the Gospels (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1992); Otto Betz’s What Do We Know About Jesus? (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1968); Raymond Brown
’s The Death of the Messiah: From Gethsemane to the Grave: A Commentary on the Passion Narratives in the Four Gospels (New York: Doubleday, 1994); G. B. Caird’s Jesus and the Jewish Nation (London: Athlone Press, 1965); James D. G. Dunn’s A New Perspective on Jesus: What the Quest for the Historical Jesus Missed (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), Christology in the Making: A New Testament Inquiry into the Origins of the Doctrine of the Incarnation, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), Evidence for Jesus (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1985), and “Faith and the Historical Jesus,” in Jesus Remembered (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003); Bruce Chilton’s The Temple of Jesus: His Sacrificial Program Within a Cultural History of Sacrifice (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992); Stephen Davis’s Risen Indeed: Making Sense of the Resurrection (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993); W. R. Farmer’s Jesus and the Gospel: Tradition, Scripture, and Canon (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982); C. F. D. Moule’s The Origin of Christology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977); E. P. Sanders’s Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985) and The Historical Figure of Jesus (New York: Penguin, 1995); Craig Blomberg’s Jesus and the Gospels: An Introduction and Survey (Nashville: Broadman and Holman, 1997); Gerd Theissen’s The Shadow of the Galilean: The Quest of the Historical Jesus in Narrative Form (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987); Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest of the Historical Jesus (first published London: A. and C. Black, 1911); and Luke T. Johnson’s The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996).
4. Paul Johnson’s Jesus: A Biography from a Believer (New York: Viking, 2010), 1–2.
5. Some scholars, like Scot McKnight, believe that writing a biography of Jesus is not possible because we do not have enough information about His early life. Ben Witherington, on the other hand, discusses the difference between a modern biography and an ancient biography in his book The Gospel of Mark (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 3–9. Mark’s gospel, Witherington argues, possesses all the marks of ancient biography. In like manner, Craig Keener argues that the four Gospels are ancient biographies in contrast with the genre of modern biography (The Historical Jesus of the Gospels, 78–83). See also Richard Burridge’s What Are the Gospels? and Four Gospels, One Jesus? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), as well as N. T. Wright’s Who Was Jesus? A Comparison with Greco-Roman Biography (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004, 73–74) and How God Became King (New York: HarperOne, 2012), 62–64; and James D. G. Dunn’s Jesus Remembered, 184–86. We believe that The First Quest for the Historical Jesus went wrong in trying to write a full-fledged modern biography of Jesus of Nazareth. History simply doesn’t furnish us with enough material about Jesus’ early life (from birth to age twelve, and age twelve to thirty). In addition, The First Quest was based on looking at Jesus purely as a human being with a human biography. We believe with the council of Chalcedon that a purely human Jesus never existed. The Jesus that existed was the One who was God’s self-knowledge in-fleshed. Thus His Deity cannot be ignored. For this reason, we will begin the Lord’s life before time in His preincarnate state as the eternal Son (see chapter 2).
6. Some of the most helpful books in this genre are James D. G. Dunn’s Jesus Remembered; Darrell Bock’s Jesus According to the Scripture: Restoring the Portrait from the Gospels (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2002); Joseph Ratzinger’s Jesus of Nazareth (two vol.) (New York: Doubleday, 2007; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011); John Meier’s A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus (New York: Doubleday, 1991); Ben Meyer’s The Aims of Jesus (San Jose, CA: Pickwick Publications, 2002); N. T. Wright’s Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters (New York: HarperCollins, 2011); Jesus and the Victory of God, vol. 2 of Christian Origins and the Question of God; and Who Was Jesus? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993); Ethelbert Stauffer’s Jesus and His Story (London: SCM, 1960); C. H. Dodd’s The Founder of Christianity (London: Macmillan, 1970); Dale Allison’s Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2010) and Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998); F. F. Bruce’s Jesus, Lord and Savior (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1986) and Jesus Past, Present, and Future: The Work of Christ (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1998); Craig Keener’s The Historical Jesus of the Gospels; G. B. Caird’s New Testament Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); A. F. Kirkpatrick’s “Christ the Goal of History,” lecture 18 in his The Doctrine of the Prophets: The Warburtonian Lectures for 1886–1890 (London: Macmillan, 1901); Joachim Jeremias’s New Testament Theology (New York: Scribner, 1971); William Willimon’s Why Jesus? (Nashville: Abingdon, 2010); Scot McKnight’s The Story of the Christ (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006); and Arnold Fruchtenbaum’s Jesus Was a Jew (Nashville: Broadman, 1974).
7. Gen. 1:1; John 1:1.
8. John 1:1.
9. At least what Scripture tells us will happen after Jesus returns.
10. Some people believe that the main subject of the biblical narrative is God. But reading the Bible as a book about God misses the point. It is a book about God-in-Christ. The biblical understanding of God is the God we know in Christ. The biblical understanding of humanity is the humanity we know in Christ. Christ is the true humanity, and Christ is the true God. Jesus reveals the very nature and character of God. Therefore, the theological interpretation of Scripture must be a christological interpretation of Scripture. As we point out in Jesus Manifesto, the Father and the Spirit both continually point to the Son. We cannot contemplate God apart from Jesus. So all theology is christology, and the Scriptures are a book about Christ—God’s revelation of Himself in and through Jesus. This point will be made abundantly clear throughout this book. For further reading on how Jesus is the content of the biblical narrative, see Hans Frei, The Identity of Jesus Christ.
11. Col. 1:16.
12. For those who would argue that we shouldn’t call the Savior “Jesus” but “Yeshua,” we are following the example of the Second Testament writers themselves, who called Him Iesous, not Yahshua. In fact, God is never called YHWH in the Second Testament. In this connection, the Judaism of Jesus’ day and locale was Hellenized. For this reason, many of the apostles (who were Jewish) took Greek names (as did most of their Hasmonean rulers). And many of them spoke at least some Greek. Simon, Philip, and John, among others, were not exactly Hebrew names.
13. This touches on the debate between grammatical-historical criticism and canonical criticism, which we will discuss later in the endnotes. We are not against historical Jesus research. We are against historical Jesus research that somehow thinks it has a privileged theological status over canonical criticism and biblical theology. Historical Jesus studies, while helpful, are limited. And they should never control biblical theology.
14. One of the things we will be demonstrating in this book is how to interpret the Old Testament within the context of the entire biblical canon. We will be interpreting the Old Testament with Jesus, Paul, Peter, John, Mark, Luke, and Matthew at our side. When we read about Adam, for instance, we will be reading how Jesus and Paul understood Adam. So in essence, this book is a canonical approach to the life of Jesus. In it, we are asking and answering the question, what does the entire canon teach us about the life of Jesus?
15. We’ve observed that many Christians find little relevance or application for their lives in the Old Testament. They approach it as if they are reading someone else’s mail. We trust that after you read this book, you will no longer see the Old Testament as a mere historical document, but rather as a living, breathing account of your Lord.
16. In the year 170, Melito, bishop of Sardis, called the First Testament (Hebrew canon) the palaia diatheke (old covenant) and the Second Testament the kaine diatheke (new covenant). Tertullian in the West rendered diatheke to be testmentum in Latin, thereby calling each section of the Bible “the Old Testament” and “the New Testament.” This coinage survived despite the fact that neither part of the Bible i
s a “testament” in the common sense of the word. See J. D. Douglas and H. Hillyer, et al., eds., The New Bible Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1986), 138, and “What Is the New Testament?” http://www.catholicapologetics.info/scripture/newtestament/ntestament.htm.
17. John 5:39 NLT.
18. In 1 Corinthians 15:2–4, Paul described the gospel in three verses. And twice he said that it was “according to the Scriptures.” See also Acts 26:22–23, where Paul tells King Agrippa that Moses and the prophets spoke of Christ’s suffering and resurrection from the dead.
19. “When Luke says that Jesus interpreted to them all the things about himself, throughout the Bible, he doesn’t mean that Jesus collected a few, or even a half dozen, isolated texts, verses chosen at random. He means that the whole story, from Genesis to Chronicles (the last book of the Hebrew Bible; the prophets came earlier), pointed forwards to a fulfillment which could only be found when God’s anointed took Israel’s suffering, and hence the world’s suffering, to himself, died under its weight, and rose again as the beginning of God’s new creation, God’s new people. This is what had to happen; and now it just had” (Tom Wright, Luke for Everyone [Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2004], 294–95). James D. G. Dunn agrees that the Second Testament authors did not use random proof-texting to make their points (Dunn, Unity and Diversity in the New Testament: An Inquiry into the Character of Earliest Christianity [London: SCM, 2006], 94ff.). In another place, N. T. Wright states, “’Beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.’ This could never be a matter of so-called ’messianic’ proof-texts alone. It was the entire narrative, the complete story-line” (The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is [Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2011], 162). In short, the Second Testament authors never use the First Testament out of context. The context is always in mind. But they understood the context as being fulfilled in Christ.
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