Explore the Key Teachings of Old & New Testament Authors

Try this sometime: pick one Bible writer and read only them for a week. You’ll notice that each one has a few ideas they can’t stop talking about. Moses keeps coming back to covenant and obedience. Isaiah keeps coming back to a suffering servant who saves. Paul keeps coming back to resurrection. James keeps asking whether your faith actually does anything.

Reading the Bible author by author instead of verse by verse is one of the best ways to understand it. It also answers a question people sometimes ask Latter-day Saints: “Why do you need more scripture?” The answer is that scripture has always come through many prophets, each adding their witness. Here are some of the major voices and the themes they kept returning to.

A quick note on authorship. For several Old Testament books, the authors aren’t named in the text itself. Where I mention traditional authors below, I’m following the ancient Jewish tradition recorded in the Talmud (Bava Batra 14b–15a), which, for example, credits Samuel with Judges and Jeremiah with Kings. Scholars debate many of those attributions; the themes are there either way.

Moses: covenant and obedience

The five books of Moses are the foundation of everything after them. Creation, the patriarchs, the Exodus, the law, the tabernacle. The thread through all of it is covenant: God chooses a people, makes promises, and asks for loyalty in return. Moses sums up the whole relationship in one question:

¶ And now, Israel, what doth the Lord thy God require of thee, but to fear the Lord thy God, to walk in all his ways, and to love him, and to serve the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul,

Deuteronomy 10:12 (KJV)

Love, walk, serve, with all your heart. Jesus would later quote Moses when He named the greatest commandments.

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Joshua and Samuel: choose, then obey

Joshua’s book is about taking the promised land, but its emotional peak is a choice. At the end of his life, Joshua gathers Israel and puts the decision to them:

And if it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.

Joshua 24:15 (KJV)

The books associated with Samuel (Judges, Ruth, and 1 Samuel) show what happens when that choice isn’t renewed. Judges runs in a cycle: Israel forgets God, falls into trouble, cries out, is delivered, and forgets again. Samuel’s sharpest teaching came when King Saul offered sacrifices instead of doing what he had been told:

And Samuel said, Hath the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams.

1 Samuel 15:22 (KJV)

That line is a good summary of the whole Old Testament’s view of religion. Ritual matters, but it’s not a substitute for obedience.

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David and Solomon: the heart and wisdom

The Psalms attributed to David are the Bible’s prayer book. They praise, plead, complain, and repent, sometimes all in one psalm. Psalm 51, written after David’s sin with Bathsheba, is the model of honest repentance:

Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.

Psalm 51:10 (KJV)

Solomon’s writings, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon, are wisdom literature. Proverbs teaches practical godliness for everyday life, and starts from the premise that The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Ecclesiastes tests every human pursuit and finds it empty without God.

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The prophets: judgment, a new covenant, and a Messiah

Isaiah is the most quoted prophet in the New Testament, and it’s easy to see why. He describes a servant of God who suffers for others:

But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.

Isaiah 53:5 (KJV)

Jeremiah lived through the fall of Jerusalem, the same years when Lehi left the city. His book is full of warnings, but its high point is a promise of something new:

But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people.

Jeremiah 31:33 (KJV)

Micah, a contemporary of Isaiah, boiled the prophetic message down to a single sentence:

He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?

Micah 6:8 (KJV)

The other prophets, from Hosea’s broken-hearted love for Israel to Amos’s demand for justice to Malachi’s promise of Elijah, add their own notes. But the chord is the same: return to God, and look for the One He will send.

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The Gospel writers: who Jesus is

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John each tell the story of Jesus for a different audience. Matthew keeps showing how Jesus fulfills the Old Testament. Mark moves fast and focuses on what Jesus did. Luke, a careful historian, highlights Jesus’s compassion for outsiders. John slows down and asks who Jesus really is, and records His prayer defining eternal life:

And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.

John 17:3 (KJV)

Notice the wording: knowing the Father, and knowing the Son He sent. Two persons, one purpose.

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Paul, James, Peter, and John: living it

Paul’s letters return again and again to grace, faith, and the Resurrection. His clearest statement of what Christ’s victory means for everyone:

For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.

1 Corinthians 15:22 (KJV)

James, often read as Paul’s counterweight, insists that faith has to show up in how we live: Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone.

Peter, writing to scattered and persecuted Christians, tells them to be ready to explain their faith, and to do it with the right attitude:

But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear:

1 Peter 3:15 (KJV)

And John, the last living apostle, reduces it all to three words: God is love.

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The thread through all of them

Read the authors together and a single storyline appears. God makes covenants. People drift. Prophets call them back. A Messiah is promised, comes, suffers, rises, and sends apostles to carry the message. Jesus Himself read the Old Testament this way:

And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.

Luke 24:27 (KJV)

The Book of Mormon prophets say exactly the same thing about their own record. Jacob wrote that they knew of Christ, and so did all the holy prophets which were before us. And Nephi summed up why he wrote at all:

And we talk of Christ, we rejoice in Christ, we preach of Christ, we prophesy of Christ, and we write according to our prophecies, that our children may know to what source they may look for a remission of their sins.

2 Nephi 25:26

That’s the real lesson of reading the prophets one at a time. God never spoke through just one voice. He spoke through many, across centuries, each adding a witness. That pattern didn’t have to stop when the Bible was bound, and Latter-day Saints believe it didn’t.

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