I find it interesting that Jesus never actually wrote any of the New Testament, not a single letter nor any of the Gospels.  He left the entire task up to his Disciples.  After his resurrection, he taught them many things.  I’m sure they had a lot of questions, but the fact that he rose from the dead made a lot of his previous statements click.  Some assume that the promise of the Holy Spirit “leading them into all wisdom” was a promise of some special instance of the Holy Spirit that would help them write the New Testament.  But don’t we all have the Holy Spirit too?  It is generally assumed that the Disciples had some sort of super power that enabled them to write as they did.  I think this is partly to obfuscate the fact that we have a lot of what was available to them, at our disposal.   I don’t mean to denigrate the sovereignty of scripture, but to make us realize what it is not.  There is one thing we don’t have, and that is the experience of walking and talking, and trusting, Jesus.  But it took wisdom and effort for them to record those events.  It took wisdom and effort for them to work out the events in Acts.  It took wisdom and effort for them to write letters to the churches, to address issues that had arisen.    That was their work, given their experience.  But we can do the same.  We can tell people of the good things we have seen God do in our lives.  Answered prayer, last minute financial salvation, comfort in difficult times, life changing transformation in ourselves or others.  So we, as Christians,  have the Holy Spirit, and our experience, we also have the Old Testament.  The New Testament writers make many illusions to Old Testament texts in light of what Jesus did on this earth, what they had seen him do.  But there are many more waiting to be made.  We can learn their method of seeing the old, and do it ourselves.  

Did the writers of the Old Testament have the Holy Spirit?  Were those writers specially empowered as disciples?  Like the New Testament the Old was written by human men.  Deuteronomy 9:10 tells us that God wrote the two tables of the law on stone with his own finger, but Moses broke those.  So God rewrote them.  But other than that it was up to agents appointed by God.  Most of these men held the special office of Priest.  They received a word from the Lord and wrote it down.  Others were kings like David and Solomon.  We have no idea who wrote Job.  Parts of the Proverbs were written by wise men of the day and merely compiled by Solomon.  God appointed special men to put his words into writing, or record the history of what had happened.  His law he gave directly and it was passed down by diligent Israel.  These works were included in the Bible based on the credentials of the authors or the fruit they bore in the faithful community.  I think this is a good standard, and I don’t mean to speak ill of the Bible.  But we need to remember that they were men, and God used them based on their humility and wisdom, they were not just robots.  We can imitate them in these ways, and we shouldn’t write these tasks off because they were special and we are not.   Of course if we find ourselves coming up with stuff that is contradictory to the established Word we have a problem.  But if we learn from them and read previous revelation as they did, it will do us much good.

We too must exercise wisdom and humility, the text doesn’t just come to us.  First of all we need to learn to read.  I know it might sound strange, but being able to pronounce the words on the page is not the same thing as sucking the meaning from the pages.  C. S. Lewis is often accused of being light on the sanctity of scripture, but really he just knew how language was constructed, he knew how to write, so he understood the process these men went through.  Lots of work trying to communicate by writing can make you a better reader.  You see what is and what is not available to you and how thoughts and ideas are arranged and conveyed.  In addition you begin to appreciate some of the art in it.  We are not robots, attractive efficacious language is poetic, it has meter and rhythm and uses images that connect to that which we know.    We have an added disadvantage by being moderns.  Modern language is not exactly that poetic, when was the last time you read poetry, that wasn’t for school?  We want everything to be terse and functional, like a scientific diagram.  This was not how Hebrew worked.  It wasn’t a precise detailed language, it was poetic.  Limited vocabulary required the creation of images by connecting things together.  But this makes for very interesting overlapping terms.

This all occurs to me as I read through the book of Mark.  He wrote(or dictated) in Greek which was more precise than Hebrew but it was still a pre-Modern language.  His episodes are each packed with so much meaning as they draw illusions from the Old Testament.  As his words are meant to be keys connecting to the past.

 “Have faith in God. Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. And whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone, so that your Father also who is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses.” – Mark 11:22-26

At the time they were on a mountain.  Mark has just detailed Jesus comings and goings into Jerusalem, the mountain of God.  At this time they were returning to the city, after the previous assault, the cleansing of the temple.  This mountain would soon be cast into the sea, like Jesus’ other prediction that no stone would be left on another.  Jerusalem was destroyed in 70A.D. at the hands of General Titus under Emperor Nero.  If we take into account that the ‘sea’ was a term associated with the Gentiles, we see some more of what Jesus is doing here.  The Jews were not a seafaring people, they were the Land.  The chosen people in the promised land.  Surrounding them was the sea of the world.  The Jews were supposed to use their position to spread God’s grace to the world, in a sense they did through Jesus, but not these stiff necked people.  So God cast the mountain into the sea, he cut off the branch of Jesse, and grafted in the Gentiles.  His disciples were to be fishers of men, fishers of Gentiles.  We see, that Jesus was here not making a generic statement which we can turn into a maxim.  He was telling them what was on his heart.  He was praying for this city to be cast into the sea.  And he was forgiving the people, even the religious leaders who kept attacking him.

Mark brings out this meaning by his simple arrangement, hoping his audience would make the connections.  It’s so odd that we try to sweep away the work of these authors and get to some event behind the text.  Even people who hold the scripture in such high esteem, and view the authors as superempowered.  Yet we want to ignore their rich arrangement which brings out the only meaning we can know, and search for something else, search for some historic event.  Historic facts are nice, but meaning is more important.  Who cares what the world is made of, if we don’t know what it’s for.  Who cares what day this happened.  What does it mean?

Further Reading:  Through New Eyes, James B. Jordan