Jesus Changed the Bible

Eye for eye, tooth for tooth; the one who has inflicted the injury must suffer the same injury. - Leviticus 24:20

You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek. - Matthew 5:38-39

It’s jarring to hear Jesus literally change the scripture. He adapts (another word for change) ‘Eye for eye and tooth for tooth’ into this idea about turning the other cheek. He’s messing with the bible!

In my (Bill White here) understanding of the Bible earlier in my faith, it was not okay to talk back to the bible, to question it, to reinterpret it. But here’s Jesus doing it. What am are we supposed to do with that?

There’s a question here about inerrancy - a term new to some, not to others. Inerrancy is a cultural artifact from the 1970s with far reaching impact on many today. For those of us who grew up with it, we learned that there was just one way to read the bible - each passage held one truth, one interpretation, which was readily available to everyone. We literally thought this was the only way to read the bible - you had to go searching for the one true interpretation of each passage (of course, that interpretation was always given by a White male theologian).

The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy and Biblical Hermeneutics states things like these:

1. WE AFFIRM that the Bible expresses God's truth in propositional statements. 

2. WE AFFIRM that the meaning expressed in each biblical text is single, definite and fixed. 

3. WE AFFIRM that Genesis 1-11 is factual. 

And yet Jesus shows up telling stories, which in case you didn’t know, are not propositional statements and do not lend themselves to single, definite meanings. And just to make sure we got the point that God was not going for clarity, we were given four (4!) different gospel accounts, each bringing their own flavor and interpretation to what Jesus said and did. Multiple interpretations is built into the Bible itself!

So the question for us today is this: what does it mean for our faith that Jesus came into conflict with scripture? What does it mean for us that Jesus pushed back on things in the Bible? How do we follow Jesus faithfully and humbly in this endeavor?