Reason Three: Jesus and the Apostles Read It
They had obviously treasured this word deep in their own hearts (Psalm 119:11). Although Paul encouraged Timothy to devote himself to the public reading of Scripture (1 Timothy 4:13), this raises a very important question: did he or the other apostles expect Christians to read the Scriptures for themselves? We are not sure how many people in ancient Palestine or Asia Minor could read; literacy was certainly not universal. Even if people could read and write, the Scriptures had to be copied by hand, which made them extremely rare and very expensive. This is why ancient sacred writings were written to be heard orally when the people gathered as a community.
In Deuteronomy 31:9–13, Moses charged the Levitical priests to read “this book of the Torah” (the speeches of Moses in Deuteronomy) before all the Israelites assembled for the Festival of Booths (Tabernacles) at the central sanctuary. One of the functions of the Levitical priests was to teach the people the Torah (Deuteronomy 33:8–10), which presumably meant helping them memorize it. So when the psalmist called on people to meditate on the Torah “day and night” (Psalm 1:2), he did not mean “read it day and night,” but “think deeply about what you have memorized.” This was the only access to the Scriptures most people would have had.
But it’s even more obvious that Jesus and the apostles were steeped in the Scriptures from the way they constantly quoted and alluded to them. Expressions like “It is written,” “Moses wrote,” and “Moses said,” occur more than eighty times in the New Testament, always referring to Old Testament texts. This observation is reinforced by the hundreds of unmarked quotations from and allusions to the Old Testament that we find in the New Testament.
In the Gospels, Jesus’s teaching was steeped in the Scriptures. Indeed, he declared explicitly that he did not come “to abolish” the Law or the Prophets, but “to fulfill them” (Matthew 5:17).
But we can be even more specific. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus’s teaching is laced with references and quotations to the Old Testament, especially to the Torah of Moses. In this sermon, Jesus did not intend to replace the teaching of Moses, but to explain to his disciples how they were to live out the spiritual truths and ethical values of the Torah. In Matthew 6:9–15, he taught his disciples how to pray using the words of the Lord’s Prayer. Almost every phrase in the Lord’s Prayer echoes phrases or alludes to ideas that we find in the Old Testament, especially Deuteronomy. In Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount of Olives (Matthew 24), we hear many echoes from the prophets. And when he quoted from the book of Daniel (Matthew 24:15), he let his hearers know this.
As Jesus was dying in agony on the cross, he burst out with a quotation from Psalm 22:1: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” (Matthew 27:46 NLT). While many interpret Psalm 22 as a messianic prediction, Jesus’s quotation of it actually demonstrates how deeply immersed he was in the Scriptures, and how deeply the Scriptures were embedded in his heart and mind. In a moment of intense crisis, he spontaneously cried out to God in the words of the psalmist.
We could make similar comments about Paul and the rest of the authors of the New Testament epistles. Paul’s training in the Pharisees’ highest institutions of learning is obvious on every page of his writings. Even when he didn’t explicitly quote from the Old Testament, it’s obvious that the entire Jewish Scriptures were embedded in his mind. Whether he wrote of significant theological subjects like the Messiah, sin, atonement, and redemption, applied specific expressions like “servant” (Romans 1:1) or “apostle” (Galatians 1:1) to himself, or spoke of “circumcision” of the heart (Romans 2:25–29), his writings demonstrate a mastery of the Jewish Scriptures.
Similarly, the author of Hebrews was thoroughly versed in Israel’s priestly writings, the psalms, and the prophets. And it appears that Peter had been having his devotions in Exodus 19:4–6, when he wrote, “But you [Christians] are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light” (1 Peter 2:9). I mention all these texts to argue that since Jesus and his disciples obviously read the Old Testament and had probably memorized vast portions of it, especially of the Torah (Pentateuch), they have set good examples for us.
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