Twelve themes about the Bible itself — its origin, permanence, purpose, and use — compared across the four Gospels and the letters, showing where the New Testament writers agree and where they part company.
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.” — 2 Timothy 3:16
Start with The Grid — twelve themes down the side, ten voices across the top. The shading shows how much each writer says about each theme, so agreement and silence are both visible at a glance. Click any cell to read that writer's actual position with references.
By Theme opens each row into a full comparison with a stated agreement and a stated difference. By Book reads the grid vertically — one writer's whole profile at once. Tensions gathers the five places where the differences are sharp enough to have shaped centuries of debate.
Click any cell in the grid to read what that writer says about that theme.
Scope: what the four Gospels and the New Testament letters say about Scripture — where it comes from, whether it can fail, what it is for, how it is misread, and how it should be used. This is a study of the New Testament's teaching about the Bible, not a catalog of Old Testament quotations (a separate and much larger project). The Epistles are grouped by author — Paul, Hebrews, James, Peter, John's letters, Jude — because grouping them as one voice hides real differences, while separating all twenty-one obscures the pattern.
The four shading levels are an editorial judgment about emphasis, not a measurement: central means the writer states the theme directly and it carries weight in the book; present means clearly taught; brief means touched once or implied; quiet means the theme is not addressed, which is itself worth noticing. Reasonable readers would shade some cells differently. Where a book is silent, the cell says so plainly rather than manufacturing a position.
Two things kept deliberately separate: what a writer says about Scripture, and what later Christian tradition built from it. Hebrews 8:13 and Matthew 5:18 are quoted here as they stand; the frameworks Christians have used to hold them together are noted in the Tensions section without endorsing one. Authorship and dating of several books — the Pastoral Epistles, 2 Peter, Hebrews — are debated among scholars; this study uses the traditional groupings for organization without treating that as a settled verdict.
Quotations follow the NIV. Verse references have been checked, but read every passage in its own context before building on it — several of these texts say something different when the surrounding argument is in view.