Word of God and Scripture in the Apostolic Church

“Word of God” and Scripture in the Apostolic Church

Apostolic Preaching of ‘the Word’:
the Jesus-Story Fulfils the (OT) Scripture-Story

The earliest apostolic preaching was neither a standard Jewish message with Jesus added on at the end, nor a free-standing announcement of a new religion cut off from its Jewish roots, but rather the story of Jesus understood as the fulfilment of the OT covenant narrative, and thus as the euangelion, the good news or ‘gospel’, and thus as the creative force which called the church into being and shaped its mission and life. It was this biblical story, rather than some other (that of human empire, say, or of individual spiritual self-discovery) that provided the interpretative matrix within which the accomplishment of Jesus made the sense it did. The complex and multiple genres and themes of the Old Testament, shaping the life and thought of Israel, had raised in practical as well as theoretical terms the questions of good and evil, of Israel and the nations, of empire and resistance, and above all of the sovereignty, justice and saving purposes of the creator and covenant God. It was these questions, raised in this scripturally shaped way, to which Jesus’ kingdom-movement, climaxing in his death and resurrection, offered the God-given answer. When Paul says, quoting an earlier and widely used summary of the Christian message, ‘The Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures . . . and was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures’ (1 Corinthians 15.3–4), he does not mean that he and his friends can find one or two proof-texts to back up their claim, but rather that these events have come as the climax to the long and winding narrative of Israel’s scriptures. ‘The authority of the Old Testament’ in the early church, at its heart, meant that what God had done in Jesus Christ was to be seen in terms of a character within a particular story, a portrait in a particular landscape, where everything in the story, or the landscape, points us to a key facet of who this central character is and what he has accomplished..