All of the Bible or Just the Red Letters?
From time to time I am asked the question, “Do we really need to consider the entire Bible as authoritative, or is it just the words of Jesus?” If you have a modern English translation you probably have sections of it that are printed in red. The red portions depict the words of Christ. From a merely human standpoint, one might understand that words coming from the sinless Son of God might carry more weight than the words of fallible men. But in reality, the red letters are not more important than any of the other words of the Bible. Here are a few reasons why:
1. All the Bible is a production of the Holy Spirit. Read passages like 2 Tim. 3:16-17 and 2 Pet. 1:21 and you will find that the Bible is not a human production. It claims and has been proven to be God’s revelation to man through the hands of inspired men. In other words, men may have held the pen, but no man held the plan. The Bible (all 66 books) is the mind of God communicated in human language. God chose for His will to be revealed in Scripture at the hands of fallible men. He has chosen fallible men to preach the saving message of the gospel to the ends of the world. Salvation is and always has been in the Word and not in those who communicate it.
2. Jesus never wrote one word of Scripture. The entire Bible was written by men other than the Savior. All of the gospels–which contain the majority of the words of Christ–were given to us by God-appointed men. Paul quoted Jesus on occasion in his epistles. In short, everything we have in the Bible from the mouth of Jesus came through the vehicle that God chose to reveal his complete will, the written word. The parts of the Bible containing the words of Jesus only account for a portion of God’s complete will.
3. All Bible scholars agree that even the words we do have of Christ are hard to determine as exact quotations. This does not mean Jesus did not say what the Bible claims he said. It just means that because the gospels were written in narrative form there is no way of knowing when the writers were summarizing Jesus’ words or if they were directly quoting him verbatim. There were no devices in the original texts in the first centuries such as quotation marks. Translators and publishers can only take the original texts and do their best to assign certain words as “red.”
4. When Jesus was talking or teaching he was often quoting the Old Testament. So some of the red letters in the New Testament are not red letters in the Old Testament even though they are the exact same words! Does this mean they only had significance when Jesus spoke them? Of course not! Jesus was claiming that God’s Word in the Old Testament was inspired and that God expected it to be understood and obeyed by the people of the Mosaic dispensation. While we are not expected to live according to the Jewish system, the people who lived in the days of Christ were, and Jesus bound the teachings of the Law of Moses on the people of God until He died on Calvary.
5. What we do know about Jesus only constitutes a few weeks of His 33+ years on earth. The apostle John wrote at the end of his gospel that even the world itself could not contain the books that could be written about the things Jesus did (John 21:25). John also said that the things that have been written have been delivered to us that we might believe, and that in believing we might have life in His name (John 20:31). We only have a small part of what Jesus actually said. If only His words spoke while on earth mattered wouldn’t we need the rest of everything He said while He was here?
6. To understand the words and actions of Jesus, one must also understand the reason why Jesus needed to come to earth in the first place. Jesus instructed in His leaving that the Holy Spirit was coming after Him to guide His followers into all the truth (John 16:13). He claimed in this same text that what the Holy Spirit was to teach would be the direct will of the Father. There was still more of God’s will to be revealed long after Jesus ascended to heaven. The remainder of the New Testament was written for Christians by the power of the Holy Spirit so that God’s people might know how to live a way that is pleasing to Him in the present age.
While it is true that not all the Bible is “red,” it is true that all of the Bible should be “read.” The Bible is the perfect and complete will of God. It is the anvil that breaks the hammers. It is the standard by which we will be judged when Jesus comes again.
“…I write so that you may know how you ought to conduct yourself in the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth.” – 1 Timothy 3:15
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AUTHOR: Jeremiah Tatum
Photo background credit: Kyle Evans on Creative Commons
