Jesus was (and is?) a Jew. As Christopher Wright points out in Knowing Jesus Through the Old Testament, that’s the first thing we learn about him in the New Testament. Therefore the first thing to note about Jesus as interpreter of Scripture is that he interpreted it as a Jew, and a Jew (though certainly a controversial one) he remained throughout his life.
As much as we’d like a timeless, generic, non-Jewish Jesus, we simply don’t get him if we take the gospels seriously. Instead, we have a Jesus who had his foreskin removed eight days after being born and was brought up in accordance with the Law of the Lord. And despite popular presentations of him resembling a 70’s progressive rock band member, he quite possibly looked something not altogether unlike this:
A first-century Palestinian man's mugshot
As much as we’d like a timeless, generic, non-Jewish Jesus, we simply don’t get him if we take the gospels seriously. Instead, we have a Jesus who had his foreskin removed eight days after being born and was brought up in accordance with the Law of the Lord. And despite popular presentations of him resembling a 70’s progressive rock band member, he quite possibly looked something not altogether unlike this:
A first-century Palestinian man's mugshot A Jew through and through. I think that’s worth keeping in mind during the course of this journey into unknown territory.
The second thing to keep in mind comes immediately before we get our first Old Testament quotation from the lips of Jesus. Luke tells us in chapter 4 of his gospel that Jesus was “full of the Holy Spirit” as he was led into the wilderness to be tempted. It is therefore vitally important to highlight that the gospels (especially Luke) don’t present Jesus as a lone interpreter, gaining insight through his own ingenuity. According to the gospels, the spirit of god was powerfully present with him, authorising him at every turn and making that connection between him and god.
If nothing else, for Jesus, reading and interpreting Scripture was a triune experience. Even as son, he fully relied on the words of the father made alive by the spirit. Therefore in order to read, interpret and apply Scripture the way Jesus did, being “filled with the spirit” is a prerequisite. But is it a realistic one?
I think so. The Book of Acts mentions the phrase “filled with the Spirit” numerous times, and never does it seem like less of a filling than that which Jesus enjoyed. The same connection between Jesus and the father was available to the early church, and is available to us too.
To drag Paul into the equation, it is the spirit of god that knows the mind of god. Implicit in this statement is the reality that an un-spiritual (or un-spirit-filled) reading of Scripture does not reveal the mind of god. Word and spirit must be conjoined if the text is to come to life and god is to be known.
Merely quoting Scripture was not what Jesus was doing during his dialogue with the satan at the end of his wilderness wanderings. Undergirding his use of Scripture was a present experience of god’s empowering presence.
What might such a spirit-filled reading of Scripture look like? How do we know we’re on the right track? The answers to these questions is what I hope we'll stumble across along this quest.
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