It is true, technically, to say that we have no written words from Jesus (we haven’t a plaster cast of that which He wrote upon the ground that convicted the hearts of those taking up stones to kill a woman accused of adultery). But to assert that He has not left us written words for our edification is inaccurate, brother.
If the Apostolic Succession means what we believe it means, then ‘holy men of God spake as they were moved’ and men such as Mark, Luke, and others accompanying the Apostles wrote down what was dictated. That is how we have what we firmly believe to be the words of our Savior written and collected for our edification ... not for our Salvation, for that is the work of the Holy Spirit upon our faithful yielding, but for our building up in the Spirit; ‘Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind’.
When I read the Pope's weekly homilies, thanks to the work of freeper ELS sharing them here at FR, I am reading what a man of God's choosing has written for my edification. Except for the Internet, I would have no contact with a Catholic each day, much less an audience with the Pope on any occasion. Yet his written messages are an enlightenment to my mind and soul because of the written word. His most recent message is on Origen, a most interesting homily.
“How would you or anyone else know what Jesus said had God not left the written testimony of the Apostles and their scribes, as a means to pass the Words of Our Lord to us without the misspeak of oral traditions?”
God did not write the Bible. The men who wrote the words wrote the Bible. The extent to which those words in fact are the words of God is a matter taken on faith. Reading the Bible, we see that Jesus left a Church, and some of the first clergy of the Church wrote things down. Many things were written down, but only some of those written things were ultimately accepted as the canon of the Bible, and it was the Church that selected what was in the Bible, and what was left out of the Bible. To the extent the Bible is a faithful compilation of the inspired works of men, it is only so because God inspired to Church to make the right choice, after many years of disagreement.
And this places the problem of there being 9 books fewer in the Protestant Bible than the Catholic Bible in alarmingly sharp relief. The Church settled the canon of Scripture in 400 AD. Martin Luther said that 9 books were not Scripture. On what authority did he do that?
So it is not SIMPLY the case, as you suggest, that the Apostles and the Prophets wrote things down. (Actually, the only Apostles who met Jesus who ever wrote a word were Peter, John, James and Jude; perhaps Matthew. Mark, Luke, and Paul never saw Jesus do anything, and everything they wrote was based on oral tradition: hearing it from other apostles. Or, probably more correctly, Mark wrote down what Peter told him, Matthew and Luke used Mark as their source, and John, writing as an old man with a lifetime of reflection on events, wrote his Gospel reflecting back on the circumstances. Maybe.
Other men wrote things down. We have the Didache, from the apostles. We have the letters of Clement. We have the proto-evangelium of James. We have other letters. There is even a letter of greeting which may very well have been written by Jesus himself. But none of THAT is in the Bible at all. Why? Because someone made a cut of what was and was not canonical Scripture. It wasn’t God directly. It was the Bishops and Pope of the Catholic Church, hundreds of years after the fact. So, God was either with the Church, and that’s why you have the Bible. Or God was not with the Church, which is why the Church erred in including the 9 books that Luther and Protestants have deleted from the Bible. If the Church could err about those 9 books, then the Church could err on the Gospels and the Epistles as well.
One cannot simply assert the authority of the Bible, standing alone, because the Bible is a collection of Books, drawn from a wider corpus of books that were left out, some of which are still read as being inspired by God (such as the Letters of Clement). Nowhere in the Bible does it say that the ONLY texts ever inspired by God appear in the Bible. Actually, nowhere in the Bible does the word “Bible” appear, and at no time during the existence of Jesus or any of the Apostles was there such a thing as the specific collection of books WE call the Bible in existence. There were Scriptures, but there was no canon of them. The Catholics settled on their canon in the late 300s. The Jews settled on theirs about the same time. The Protestants settled on their canon in the 1500s. The three sets of texts cannot ALL be the inspired word of God. Either the Jews err badly by excluding the Deuterocanica and the New Testament, or the Protestants have mangled the word of God by editing it and deleting whole books of it, or the Catholics have violated the word of God by adding uninspired works to the Canon. Which is it?
The Bible cannot tell you, and does not tell you.
Only the human institutions of Church or Synagogue can answer that question, and whether its particular answer to the question is right or not is wholly dependent on whether or not the institution itself has the authority of God to make that call. Jesus didn’t leave a bible. He left a Church, and the Church handed on his traditions. Part of the tradition, assembled later, is included in the Bible. But only part of it. If that’s not true, then on what basis is there a Bible at all? Where did it come from? Why are 1 and 2 Clement not in the Bible?