Edgework

While much more could be said about learning to read the Bible Jesus’ way, it is time to wrap up this series of essays and ask ourselves where this discussion leaves us.

We have demonstrated in earlier essays that both Jesus and Paul were selective in how they read the Old Testament.

We have already made the point that when Jesus read the Old Testament he tended to leave the images of violence behind and draw forward those images that portray God as nonviolent.

Once we have been exposed to multivocality in the New Testament you might say we have lost our innocence.

We have spent considerable time by now making the argument that, based on the example of Jesus and Paul, we too need to read the Old Testament through a nonviolent grid.

To this point in our discourse, we have focused on how Jesus read his Bible – which is basically our Old Testament – and noted that Paul tends to follow in the footsteps of Jesus.

We have made the argument thus far that when Jesus read his Bible he did so through a nonviolent grid.

In his book, The Jesus Driven Life: Reconnecting Humanity with Jesus, Michael Hardin also contends that Jesus is interpreting the Old Testament in such a way as to make his Father out to be nonviolent.

While we have noted that there is a nonviolent narrative woven into the Old Testament text, J. Denny Weaver says in, The Nonviolent God, that Jesus was faced with a biblical text that frequently would…

We have, by now, made a number of claims about the Bible Jesus read. For one, we have noted the presence of multivocality, that is; the same events are sometimes told from different perspectives, with varying details and for differing purposes.