Scripture in History

The resurrection showed that the one resurrected has power over life and death and helped substantiate the revelation that Christ was God and hence that what was said about him by eye witnesses was revelation.  More specifically, the written account of his life, was destined to be scripture because his life was the life of God incarnate.  Is a qualification needed here? Of course there is.  Anyone can write a so-called account of the life of Christ and that wouldn't be scripture much less revelatory (not all scripture is revelatory).  So what made the gospels scripture?  Do we say, "Well, the gospels were all written by Christ's apostles?" 

 We could say that; but what about Luke?  Luke's work had the stamp of approval from the apostles.  So, yeah, apostolic authority still factors in.  But this essay isn't about how canonicity is established, though a very worthy topic.  This is about the three related events--the incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection.  Altogether, the three events address issues of who, what and why respectively. The incarnation=who we should believe; the crucification=what we should believe, and the resurrection= why we should believe.  The incarnation allowed the world to know who God is.  The crucifixion, of course, was the atonement.  And the resurrection provided epistemic justification for belief about who God was and what he did.  Scripture was not particularly relevant in the world outside of Israel until after these three events.  But after they occurred, ...well, then...WOW!  What could be more globally relevant, even today, than these scriptures which attest to their own authenticity as divine revelation by virtue of prophetically connecting ancient history with the time of Christ and the resurrection?

Of course, we're getting ahead of ourselves.  Before the resurrection, there was the incarnation and crucifixion and they are all connected in necessary ways with each other and scripture.  When and where, within history, the atonement occurred was affected by the fact the atonement had to occur sometime after the incarnation which, in turn, could not occur at any arbitrary place and time.   God’s identity as a person who fulfilled prophetic scriptures dictated that scriptures foretelling his coming first be written. The intricacy of this design simply boggles the mind so much so as to suggest the existence of Israel or God's having created the Israelites at all or in the first place was to make possible one special event on one specific day in the life of the Word become flesh.