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Jesus’s Estimate of the Old Testament 113
He taught that everything in it must be fulfilled; that the Psalm writers
spoke by the Holy Spirit; that Moses’s words in Scripture were the
very words of God; that not one part of the Scriptures can be broken;
that faithfulness to the Scriptures will keep us from error; that it can
defeat the most powerful adversaries; that it is a litmus test to show if
the eyes of our hearts are open to know Jesus; and that it is a virtual
script being acted out in the triumph of Jesus through his sufferings,
death, and resurrection.
And if the skeptic should object, How can we know that all these
reports about what Jesus taught about the Old Testament are historical?
there are two kinds of answers. One is from the nature of the history,
and the other is from the work of the Spirit.
From the standpoint of history, the most skeptical scholars who
think that much of the New Testament did not really happen nonetheless
concede that the Jesus of history was an ardent believer in the
Old Testament. They may think he was wrong. But the denial that he
embraced the divine authority of the Old Testament is not seriously
defended. There is simply no historical layer of evidence to support it,
they say.
From the standpoint of the Holy Spirit, there are good reasons to
believe that the Jesus we meet in the New Testament Gospels is the
real divine-human Jesus of history, and that his estimate of the Old
Testament and his plan for the New Testament are trustworthy. This is
what we will turn to later in chapters 8–17. But before we do, there is
one more group of witnesses we should hear concerning what the Bible
claims for itself—namely, the apostles.