Did you know a person can actually know too much about the Bible to understand it properly. I know that may sound absurd, but allow me to give you an example.
In the Sermon on the Mount as recounted in Matthew 7, Jesus tells his audience that they will know true from false disciples “by their fruits” as if they are trees. Since this statement isn’t clarified, one naturally wonders what the “fruit” would be. Well, anyone familiar with the New Testament immediately thinks of Galatians 5, where Paul talks about the Fruit of the Spirit, which shows up as things like love, joy, and peace.
But here’s the problem. Reading the Bible this way treats it as a mystery scavenger hunt that can only be solved by people like us who happen to have the whole thing. When Jesus preached on that mountain, He meant His audience to understand Him even without the decoder ring of Paul’s writings twenty years later.
Although Paul was probably building on Jesus’s theme, the real question is whether the message Jesus delivered would have had this meaning in itself or not. Perhaps so, but we can be too eager to make that leap because, ironically, we know too much.
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Very interesting! I recently read a section from the book "The Reign of the Servant Kings", by Joseph Dillow, that talked about the same idea in a different context. Basically the question was asked, "Can a person know all he needs to know to get saved just by reading the book of John, rather than by reading John, plus Romans, plus...". In other words, does the message Jesus is speaking through the book of John also need to be qualified by other books? If an idea needs proof in other places, who would have understood it in the first place?
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