If you take “the law” to mean “the Bible” - something it did not mean and could not have meant in that passage - and you stop reading and shut the book at the end of that verse, then this sounds like it could support what Keller is saying. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. That’s from Matthew 5:17-18, which is Jesus talking about the authority of “the law.” Again, it’s immensely important to keep in mind - as Keller does not - that what Jesus speaks about here as “the law” isn’t identical or even analogous to what white evangelical 21st-century Americans like Keller speak about as “the Bible.” But here’s what Jesus said:ĭo not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. “He regarded it as absolutely true and authoritative, in every word.” Or - as per the classic clobber-text for the argument Keller is making - in every “jot and tittle” or “every stroke of a letter.” The latter half of Keller’s tweet, I’m afraid, is also misleading. He is asking us to view the Bible in a way that neither Jesus nor any of his original disciples could have ever understood or imagined. Thus in the very moment Keller is instructing other Christians to “accept and adopt Jesus’ view of the Bible,” he is doing nothing of the sort himself. Invoking Jesus, then, as the authoritative source for the idea of the Bible as an authoritative reference handbook is wrong in a way that is several large steps removed from the possibility of being right. He did not live in a world of books or in a world that treated or thought of or related to books the way we have learned to do. So let’s start with that very basic reminder: Jesus did not have a single book collecting a canon of 66 scriptures. That may seem obvious, but it’s actually very important if we want to come anywhere close to understanding - let alone adopting - “Jesus’ view of the Bible.” None of the New Testament had yet been written during Jesus’ lifetime, and the Hebrew scriptures he cited weren’t identical to the Hebrew scriptures we Christians refer to as the “Old Testament.”Īnd, of course, Jesus also didn’t have a nicely bound paper book with the whole thing in one package, neatly divided into chapters and verses to facilitate their quotation out of context. That’s why there is no Bible in The Bible.