One reason this argument matters is that Jesus is the one ancient figure no honest skeptic can easily dismiss. C. S. Lewis put it in his famous trilemma: given the things Jesus said about himself, he is either a liar, a lunatic, or Lord. Almost nobody calls him a liar. Almost nobody in serious conversation calls him insane. Most critics settle for some version of "great moral teacher." What is embarrassing for that position is that the teacher in question had an extremely high view of Scripture — and if he was right about who he was, he is certainly right about what Scripture is.
He Treated Scripture as Unbreakable
John 10:35 — in the middle of a tense theological argument in the Temple, Jesus makes a casual parenthetical assertion: "Scripture cannot be broken." The word is lythenai — it cannot be dissolved, annulled, set aside. He is leaning his whole argument on a single Hebrew verb in Psalm 82. That is the posture of a man who believes the sacred text is reliable down to the grammar.
The Smallest Letter
Matthew 5:17–18 — "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. Truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished." The iota is the smallest Greek letter. The "dot" is the small serif stroke that distinguishes one Hebrew letter from another. Jesus' view of the Old Testament was granular — right down to the individual letter.
He Treated Old Testament History as Real
Jesus did not treat Genesis as myth or Jonah as parable. When he addressed first-century questions, he repeatedly grounded his teaching in Old Testament historical figures as historical.
- Adam and Eve — "He who created them from the beginning made them male and female" (Matt 19:4, citing Gen 1–2 as the basis of marriage).
- Noah and the flood — "As were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking... and the flood came and swept them all away" (Matt 24:37–39).
- Sodom and Gomorrah — "As it was in the days of Lot — they were eating and drinking, buying and selling... but on the day when Lot went out from Sodom, fire and sulfur rained from heaven and destroyed them all" (Luke 17:28–29).
- Jonah — "As Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth" (Matt 12:40).
- Elijah and Elisha — Luke 4:25–27, ministering to Gentile widows and lepers.
- David — "Have you not read what David did when he was in need?" (Matt 12:3).
- Daniel — "When you see the abomination of desolation spoken of by the prophet Daniel..." (Matt 24:15).
You may reject Jesus' view of the Old Testament. You may not reasonably pretend he held a modern liberal view of it. He treated the whole thing as historical, authoritative, and grounding.
He Treated the Old Testament as About Him
John 5:39–40, to the religious experts: "You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life."
Luke 24:44: "Everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled."
That is an astonishing claim. The scriptures of his people — a national literature spanning fifteen centuries — he treats as converging on himself.
He Staked His Authority on Scripture
When the devil tempted him in the wilderness, Jesus did not argue. He quoted Deuteronomy three times (Matt 4:1–11). The battle in Jesus' own testing ground was settled by appeal to a book.
When the Sadducees tried to trap him on resurrection, he appealed to a single tense in Exodus: "Have you not read what was said to you by God: 'I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob'? He is not God of the dead but of the living" (Matt 22:31–32). The argument rests on the present tense of a single verb spoken to Moses at the burning bush. Jesus' reverence for the text was not vague. It was exegetical.
He Authorized the New Testament in Advance
The Old Testament was already in place. But how did the New Testament come to carry the same authority? Jesus laid the groundwork directly. He appointed twelve apostles as authorized witnesses (Matt 10). He promised them the Spirit would remind them of everything he had said (John 14:26) and guide them into all truth (John 16:13). He gave them commissioned authority to teach in his name (Matt 28:18–20). The apostles' writings — and those of their close associates — were understood from the earliest period as carrying Jesus' own authority by delegation.
Paul makes this explicit in 1 Corinthians 14:37: "If anyone thinks that he is a prophet, or spiritual, he should acknowledge that the things I am writing to you are a command of the Lord." Peter, near the end of his life, refers to Paul's letters alongside "the other Scriptures" (2 Peter 3:16). The New Testament's authority was not an ecclesial add-on; it was apostolic, and the apostles were acting on a mandate from Jesus.
If Jesus was who he claimed to be, then his attitude to Scripture is the attitude of God to Scripture. To know what God thinks of the Bible, read what Jesus thought. — John Wenham, Christ and the Bible
This concedes the case. If Jesus was merely a product of his time, no one should regard him as a reliable spiritual authority, and the "great moral teacher" concession collapses. If he was what he claimed to be — the Son of God, the Logos through whom the world was made — he was exactly qualified to know whether the Scriptures he quoted were reliable.
There is no middle option. Either Jesus' view of Scripture is inflated legend (in which case we have no access to his real views at all), or it reflects the view of a man who repeatedly predicted his own death and resurrection and then walked out of his tomb. Either the Gospels are unreliable — in which case you cannot quote Jesus' moral teaching either — or they are reliable, and Jesus' view of Scripture is the view of one who could foresee his own resurrection.
Accommodation theology suggests Jesus knew Jonah was fiction but played along because his audience believed it. But Jesus stakes his own death and resurrection — arguably the most important historical claim he ever makes — on the sign of Jonah being a real three-day ordeal (Matt 12:40). You cannot accommodate a falsehood while making your own credibility turn on it.
The same is true of Noah (tied to the second coming), Adam (tied to the theology of marriage), and Moses ("if you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote of me" — John 5:46). Jesus did not treat these as polite cultural fictions. He treated them as the ground under his own feet.