One of the unforseen drawbacks to the Reformation, with its otherwise-laudable call for the laity to study Scripture on their own, is that a lot of Christians then and thereafter have approached the Bible with no real training in hermenutic (guidelines for interpretation). As a result, a lot of assumptions based on "first impressions" get made, and one of the biggest, and most unconscious, is that the "truth" or importance of something can be picked up by how often you find it in Scripture. Now, the largest part of the Christian Bible by far is the Hebrew Scriptures (commonly called the "Old Testament"
, and the primary author of the remaining parts of the Bible, of course, is Paul. By comparison to these, the Gospels only take up a small slice of the copy of the Bible on believers' shelves. Is it any surprise, then, that those who trumpet their devotion to "Bible truth" tend to focus on Paul and the Hebrew Scriptures, and seem to rarely know much about Jesus except for a few proof-text quotes, and what Paul wrote on the subject (which generally falls along the lines of "Christ died so that your sins might be forgiven, so repent before the wrath of God strikes you" ?
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