The instinct is right: if Jesus is who Christians say he is, his words are the center, and every other voice gets measured against them. The question is whether 'Jesus only' is what the Gospels actually give you, and it is not.

1. The red letters come through black ones. Matthew and John were apostles; Mark worked with Peter; Luke was a companion of Paul who says he 'followed all things closely for some time past' (Luke 1:1-4). There is no manuscript of Jesus' sayings floating free of the apostolic church. The red letters reach you through the channel the objection wants to discard, so distrusting the channel costs you the sayings too.

2. Jesus submitted to the Scriptures. 'Scripture cannot be broken,' he says (John 10:35), and 'until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished' (Matthew 5:17-18). A Jesus-only Bible cannot be consistently Jesus-only, because the Jesus of the Gospels quotes, honors, and submits to the rest of the Bible constantly.

3. Jesus promised more teaching. 'I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth' (John 16:12-13), and 'he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you' (John 14:26). On Jesus' own account, more revelation was coming. The apostolic writings claim to be that fulfillment.

4. Jesus authorized the messengers. 'The one who hears you hears me, and the one who rejects you rejects me' (Luke 10:16), and he commissioned them to teach 'all that I have commanded you' (Matthew 28:20). Rejecting the apostles is, on Jesus' own terms, rejecting the one who sent them. That is not a church invention layered on top of him.

5. The New Testament calls Paul Scripture. Peter writes of 'our beloved brother Paul' and says some things in his letters are hard to understand, 'which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures' (2 Peter 3:15-16). And 1 Timothy 5:18 quotes Deuteronomy 25:4 and Luke 10:7 side by side and calls both 'Scripture.' That is the first generation, not a fourth-century council.

6. The Jerusalem apostles ratified Paul. Paul reports that James, Peter, and John, 'who seemed to be pillars,' gave him and Barnabas 'the right hand of fellowship' (Galatians 2:9), and Acts 15 records the council where his gospel was examined and upheld. He was not a freelancer with a private religion. The men who had walked with Jesus put their names behind him.

7. The method eats its own evidence. You know Jesus' words only because the same apostolic circle wrote them down. A canon within the canon, where you keep the parts that sound right and drop the rest, has no principle behind it except taste, and taste is not a historical method. That is why the 'red-letter only' move keeps collapsing into 'the parts I already agreed with.'

8. The red letters contain Paul's gospel. 'The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel' (Mark 1:15). 'The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many' (Mark 10:45). And 'thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance for the forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations' (Luke 24:46-47). That is 1 Corinthians 15 in Jesus' own mouth.

9. Differences of emphasis are real. Jesus proclaims the kingdom in short, confrontational sayings; Paul explains the cross at length to Gentile congregations. The genres differ, and Christians have genuinely argued about how to fit them together, including the recent debates over the New Perspective on Paul. Difference in emphasis is not contradiction, but the disagreement is real and should not be smoothed over.

10. The move is usually a preference. In practice, 'I only trust Jesus' often means 'I keep the Sermon on the Mount and drop the theology,' which is a modern moral taste wearing the costume of a historical judgment. Gregory Koukl puts the point sharply: since all Scripture is God-breathed, 'Jesus' words have no more authority than Jude's, and Paul's words have no less authority than Christ's.'

You do not have to accept Paul because a church told you to. You should accept him because Jesus said the Spirit would teach the apostles, sent them with his own authority, and the men who knew Jesus personally endorsed the man who wrote most of the letters. The red letters and the rest stand or fall together, which is exactly what the New Testament claims.

Sources: Gregory Koukl; Stand to Reason; Jesus, the Only Way: 100 Verses; Michael J. Kruger; Canon Revisited; D. A. Carson; David Wenham; Paul: Follower of Jesus or Founder of Christianity?; N. T. Wright.

Related challenges:
• How can you take the gospels as inspired when they don't even make that claim for themselves?
• Miracle stories were crafted AFTER Jesus died, and then included just to make Jesus look like a Jewish wonder working messianic figure. It’s called messianic fiction.
• There’s no evidence outside of the Bible that indicates the miracle stories about Jesus are authentic!