Two Testaments, One Story
Top evangelical scholars team up for landmark commentary on New Testament use of Old Testament.
Interview by Collin Hansen
About a decade ago, Wheaton College Graduate School professor Greg Beale had the idea to develop a one-volume commentary that would address every instance a New Testament writer quotes or alludes to the Old Testament. He sought the help of D. A. Carson at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and together they began soliciting the contributions of an all-star cast of biblical experts. Finally, in late 2007, they published the hefty Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament (Baker, $54.99, 1,152 pp.). CT editor-at-large Collin Hansen spoke with Beale and Carson to learn how this new volume will help Christians understand the Bible as one progressively unfolding story of redemption.
What might surprise readers about how the New Testament writers used the Old Testament?
Beale: It's evident in our book that the New Testament writers use the Old Testament with the context of the Old Testament in mind. That's a real debate between evangelicals and non-evangelicals, but it's also an in-house debate. Some evangelicals would say Jesus and the apostles preached the right Old Testament doctrine but from the wrong Old Testament texts. They believe that what the New Testament writers wrote was inspired, but their interpretative method was not inspired, that it was just as wild and crazy as the Jewish method at the time. Our book proceeds on the presupposition that of course their conclusions are inspired. But we also show that Jesus was not a wild and crazy Jewish interpreter like those at Qumran or elsewhere, but he interpreted the Old Testament in a very viable way.
If you want a good example of someone who would disagree with our method, there's a recent book by Peter Enns called Inspiration and Incarnation. In one of the concluding chapters, he contends that Jesus and the apostles preached the right doctrine from the wrong texts and that we should do the same. I have written a lengthy review of that chapter in the periodical Themelios. Enns responded, and then I wrote a surrejoinder just on this very issue.
Where does the New Testament make things difficult for modern readers in its use of the Old Testament?
Beale: Matthew has a number of them. For example, in Matthew 2:15 it says, "And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: 'Out of Egypt I called my son.'" That's from Hosea 11:1. The problem is, when you go back to Hosea 11:1, it's not a prophecy. It's just a description of Israel coming out of Egypt hundreds of years earlier. If a student were asked on test, "Is Hosea 11:1 a prophetic statement?" many teachers would give them an F if they said yes. You can read Craig Blomberg's chapter on Matthew to learn more. Basically this falls into a category called typology, where the events of the Old Testament are seen as prefiguring events on a grander scale in the New Testament. For example, John 19 says Jesus is the greater Passover Lamb. Part of the presupposition of the Old Testament and New Testament writers is that there are two modes of prophecy, not just direct verbal prophecy but also what one might call "patterns of history" that point forward. All of a sudden it makes sense that the past exodus referenced in Hosea 11:1 is seen as an event prefiguring a greater exodus, Jesus coming out of Egypt.
I think a number of the contributors would say the more Hebrew exegesis you do in the Old Testament, the clearer the use is in the New Testament. The problem is, some New Testament scholars don't have much background in the Hebrew Old Testament. That's immediately a problem. There's such specialization in all fields today.
What is the most popular Old Testament passage or theme for New Testament writers?
Beale: Probably the Old Testament passage quoted and alluded to most is Psalm 110:1, where it says, "The Lord says to my Lord: 'Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.'" It's referring not only to a kingly figure but also to a divine kingly figure identified as Jesus in the New Testament. Another is Isaiah 6:9—10 where Isaiah is commanded to tell the people, "you have eyes that can't see and ears that can't hear." Intriguingly, that text is quoted fully in all four Gospels, at the end of the Book of Acts, and alluded to at the conclusion of the seven letters of Revelation and again in chapter 13.
You and Dr. Carson describe how this commentary's contributors adopted an "eclectic grammatical-historical literary method." Briefly describe this method, and tell us why it leads to better understanding of the New Testament's relation to the Old Testament.
Beale: Historical-grammatical exegesis traditionally has been used to exegete a Hebrew or Greek paragraph. You try to interpret it contextually in the book, using word studies, grammar, and syntax. You try to understand the logical development of thought within the paragraph, historical background, and theological or figurative problems. You check for parallel texts. It's a whole array of things you bring to bear on a particular paragraph.
Eclectic and literary [method] extends grammatical-historical exegesis from just looking atomistically at the paragraph in the context of its book. In my view, part of exegetical method has to do with how the passage fits into the corpus of the author, how it fits in the New Testament, and how we relate it to the Old Testament. One would especially want to pay attention to Old Testament allusions and quotations, going back to see what's happening in the Old Testament. You might call that a biblical-theological perspective that really goes beyond the traditional understanding of grammatical-historical.
I like to use the phrases "narrow-angle exegesis" and "wide-angle exegesis," letting Scripture interpret Scripture, or "canonical-biblical exegesis." This lets later texts in the Old Testament interpretatively develop the earlier texts, and traces how the trajectory finds further development with the New Testament writers. They tend to be sensitive, when quoting one text, to other developments of that text in the Old Testament. That's a wider consideration than just looking at your paragraph in the New Testament book. You have to do both.
Does interpreting the Bible this way require a certain level of trust in the inspiration of the New Testament writers?
Beale: In the introduction we say that even if one does not believe in the inspiration of the Bible, one should at least grant the privilege to the biblical authors and respect that they did. If you're going to try to understand the New Testament as a historical document, you need to try and see what their presuppositions were. I don't think among evangelicals it's a matter of trust. You've got to show inductively through exegesis that in fact, what they're saying really does make sense of the Old Testament text. It depends on the inductive evidence.
Why does this commentary deserve a spot on bookshelves?
Carson: There is no other one-volume work that treats every instance where the New Testament quotes or clearly alludes to the Old Testament. At least for the quotations, we aim to understand the New Testament context, the Old Testament context, how Judaism uses the same Old Testament passage, any text-critical challenges (remembering that the Old Testament was written in Hebrew and Aramaic while the New Testament was written in Greek), the interpretive assumptions on display when the New Testament writer uses the Old Testament passage, and the theological significance of the quotation. Through the indexes, one can start at the other end: e.g., if you are preaching from, say, a passage in Job, you might be wise to use the index to see if anything in that passage has been picked up in quotation or allusion anywhere in the New Testament.
So while this is not the sort of book that all readers will read right through, it is the sort of book that most expositors and other serious readers of the Bible might find themselves referring to repeatedly. And some people, of course, will study this reference work more assiduously because they themselves are working on the broad subject of the use of the Old Testament in the New Testament.
What gaps and opportunities in theological study make a project like this necessary and possible?
Carson: First, although there have been many specialist studies on particular Old Testament texts (e.g., the use of Ps. 110 in the New Testament) or on individual corpora (e.g., the use of the Psalms in Hebrews, or John's use of the Old Testament), no previous work has tried to put the fruit of these labors into one useful volume. Moreover, scholarship on this question has operated out of the assumption that the New Testament writers frankly abused the Old Testament texts — ripping them out of their context, failing to understand what the Old Testament authors are saying, and so forth. We think that more attentive study unpacks deeper connections that are quite wonderful to understand, connections that prove helpful to our own reading of Scripture as we try to see how the Word of God hangs together.
What are some of the basic hermeneutical problems we must address when we see a New Testament writer quoting or alluding to the Old Testament?
Occasionally a New Testament writer is simply picking up Old Testament words without bringing the Old Testament context with those words — in exactly the same way that a Christian who has been brought up reading the Bible constantly may incorporate biblical phrases into his or her speech without claiming that the context of those phrases is in mind. Sometimes the notion of the "fulfillment" of an Old Testament passage is not cast as an event that "fulfills" a verbal prediction, but as an event or person that "fulfills" a trajectory of earlier, similar events or persons — this is one form of what is today called "typology."
Occasionally the New Testament quotes the Old Testament in a form of the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament) or some other rendering whose words are sufficiently different from the Hebrew that difficult choices must be made. One of the most complex hermeneutical issues is the way that the gospel itself, or some part of it, is, on the one hand, sometimes said to fulfill that which has been prophesied, and, on the other, said to disclose that which has been hidden. Glory resides in these complexities, of course, but it sometimes takes a bit of unpacking to begin to see them as something rich and wonderful, and not simply as a "problem." One could easily add other challenges. Yet it must be said that the really "hard cases" are relatively few in number compared with the large number of fairly straightforward uses that nevertheless open our eyes to the way God in his mercy has graciously given us his Word.
You and Dr. Beale write, "This tension between what [the New Testament writers] insist is actually there in the Scriptures and what they are forced to admit they did not see until fairly late in their experience forces them to think about the concept of 'mystery' — revelation that is in some sense 'there' in the Scriptures but hidden until the time of God-appointed disclosure." How are Christian readers apt to misunderstand this notion of progressive revelation?
Carson: Sometimes Christians understand progressive revelation in a fairly mechanistic or linear fashion: More truth simply gets added to the pile, to make a bigger pile of truth. But this "mystery/revelation" tension shows that often something is actually there in the Old Testament text (according to Jesus and his apostles) that was not seen until the coming of Jesus made it clear. The most obvious example is the fact that interpreters of Scripture before the coming of Jesus did not happily put together the Old Testament promises of a Davidic king with Old Testament suffering-servant passages to anticipate a king who suffers, a king who would reign from a cross.
Collin Hansen is a CT editor-at-large and author of Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journalist's Journey with the New Calvinists.
Copyright © 2008 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
Top evangelical scholars team up for landmark commentary on New Testament use of Old Testament.
Interview by Collin Hansen
About a decade ago, Wheaton College Graduate School professor Greg Beale had the idea to develop a one-volume commentary that would address every instance a New Testament writer quotes or alludes to the Old Testament. He sought the help of D. A. Carson at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and together they began soliciting the contributions of an all-star cast of biblical experts. Finally, in late 2007, they published the hefty Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament (Baker, $54.99, 1,152 pp.). CT editor-at-large Collin Hansen spoke with Beale and Carson to learn how this new volume will help Christians understand the Bible as one progressively unfolding story of redemption.
What might surprise readers about how the New Testament writers used the Old Testament?
Beale: It's evident in our book that the New Testament writers use the Old Testament with the context of the Old Testament in mind. That's a real debate between evangelicals and non-evangelicals, but it's also an in-house debate. Some evangelicals would say Jesus and the apostles preached the right Old Testament doctrine but from the wrong Old Testament texts. They believe that what the New Testament writers wrote was inspired, but their interpretative method was not inspired, that it was just as wild and crazy as the Jewish method at the time. Our book proceeds on the presupposition that of course their conclusions are inspired. But we also show that Jesus was not a wild and crazy Jewish interpreter like those at Qumran or elsewhere, but he interpreted the Old Testament in a very viable way.
If you want a good example of someone who would disagree with our method, there's a recent book by Peter Enns called Inspiration and Incarnation. In one of the concluding chapters, he contends that Jesus and the apostles preached the right doctrine from the wrong texts and that we should do the same. I have written a lengthy review of that chapter in the periodical Themelios. Enns responded, and then I wrote a surrejoinder just on this very issue.
Where does the New Testament make things difficult for modern readers in its use of the Old Testament?
Beale: Matthew has a number of them. For example, in Matthew 2:15 it says, "And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: 'Out of Egypt I called my son.'" That's from Hosea 11:1. The problem is, when you go back to Hosea 11:1, it's not a prophecy. It's just a description of Israel coming out of Egypt hundreds of years earlier. If a student were asked on test, "Is Hosea 11:1 a prophetic statement?" many teachers would give them an F if they said yes. You can read Craig Blomberg's chapter on Matthew to learn more. Basically this falls into a category called typology, where the events of the Old Testament are seen as prefiguring events on a grander scale in the New Testament. For example, John 19 says Jesus is the greater Passover Lamb. Part of the presupposition of the Old Testament and New Testament writers is that there are two modes of prophecy, not just direct verbal prophecy but also what one might call "patterns of history" that point forward. All of a sudden it makes sense that the past exodus referenced in Hosea 11:1 is seen as an event prefiguring a greater exodus, Jesus coming out of Egypt.
I think a number of the contributors would say the more Hebrew exegesis you do in the Old Testament, the clearer the use is in the New Testament. The problem is, some New Testament scholars don't have much background in the Hebrew Old Testament. That's immediately a problem. There's such specialization in all fields today.
What is the most popular Old Testament passage or theme for New Testament writers?
Beale: Probably the Old Testament passage quoted and alluded to most is Psalm 110:1, where it says, "The Lord says to my Lord: 'Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.'" It's referring not only to a kingly figure but also to a divine kingly figure identified as Jesus in the New Testament. Another is Isaiah 6:9—10 where Isaiah is commanded to tell the people, "you have eyes that can't see and ears that can't hear." Intriguingly, that text is quoted fully in all four Gospels, at the end of the Book of Acts, and alluded to at the conclusion of the seven letters of Revelation and again in chapter 13.
You and Dr. Carson describe how this commentary's contributors adopted an "eclectic grammatical-historical literary method." Briefly describe this method, and tell us why it leads to better understanding of the New Testament's relation to the Old Testament.
Beale: Historical-grammatical exegesis traditionally has been used to exegete a Hebrew or Greek paragraph. You try to interpret it contextually in the book, using word studies, grammar, and syntax. You try to understand the logical development of thought within the paragraph, historical background, and theological or figurative problems. You check for parallel texts. It's a whole array of things you bring to bear on a particular paragraph.
Eclectic and literary [method] extends grammatical-historical exegesis from just looking atomistically at the paragraph in the context of its book. In my view, part of exegetical method has to do with how the passage fits into the corpus of the author, how it fits in the New Testament, and how we relate it to the Old Testament. One would especially want to pay attention to Old Testament allusions and quotations, going back to see what's happening in the Old Testament. You might call that a biblical-theological perspective that really goes beyond the traditional understanding of grammatical-historical.
I like to use the phrases "narrow-angle exegesis" and "wide-angle exegesis," letting Scripture interpret Scripture, or "canonical-biblical exegesis." This lets later texts in the Old Testament interpretatively develop the earlier texts, and traces how the trajectory finds further development with the New Testament writers. They tend to be sensitive, when quoting one text, to other developments of that text in the Old Testament. That's a wider consideration than just looking at your paragraph in the New Testament book. You have to do both.
Does interpreting the Bible this way require a certain level of trust in the inspiration of the New Testament writers?
Beale: In the introduction we say that even if one does not believe in the inspiration of the Bible, one should at least grant the privilege to the biblical authors and respect that they did. If you're going to try to understand the New Testament as a historical document, you need to try and see what their presuppositions were. I don't think among evangelicals it's a matter of trust. You've got to show inductively through exegesis that in fact, what they're saying really does make sense of the Old Testament text. It depends on the inductive evidence.
Why does this commentary deserve a spot on bookshelves?
Carson: There is no other one-volume work that treats every instance where the New Testament quotes or clearly alludes to the Old Testament. At least for the quotations, we aim to understand the New Testament context, the Old Testament context, how Judaism uses the same Old Testament passage, any text-critical challenges (remembering that the Old Testament was written in Hebrew and Aramaic while the New Testament was written in Greek), the interpretive assumptions on display when the New Testament writer uses the Old Testament passage, and the theological significance of the quotation. Through the indexes, one can start at the other end: e.g., if you are preaching from, say, a passage in Job, you might be wise to use the index to see if anything in that passage has been picked up in quotation or allusion anywhere in the New Testament.
So while this is not the sort of book that all readers will read right through, it is the sort of book that most expositors and other serious readers of the Bible might find themselves referring to repeatedly. And some people, of course, will study this reference work more assiduously because they themselves are working on the broad subject of the use of the Old Testament in the New Testament.
What gaps and opportunities in theological study make a project like this necessary and possible?
Carson: First, although there have been many specialist studies on particular Old Testament texts (e.g., the use of Ps. 110 in the New Testament) or on individual corpora (e.g., the use of the Psalms in Hebrews, or John's use of the Old Testament), no previous work has tried to put the fruit of these labors into one useful volume. Moreover, scholarship on this question has operated out of the assumption that the New Testament writers frankly abused the Old Testament texts — ripping them out of their context, failing to understand what the Old Testament authors are saying, and so forth. We think that more attentive study unpacks deeper connections that are quite wonderful to understand, connections that prove helpful to our own reading of Scripture as we try to see how the Word of God hangs together.
What are some of the basic hermeneutical problems we must address when we see a New Testament writer quoting or alluding to the Old Testament?
Occasionally a New Testament writer is simply picking up Old Testament words without bringing the Old Testament context with those words — in exactly the same way that a Christian who has been brought up reading the Bible constantly may incorporate biblical phrases into his or her speech without claiming that the context of those phrases is in mind. Sometimes the notion of the "fulfillment" of an Old Testament passage is not cast as an event that "fulfills" a verbal prediction, but as an event or person that "fulfills" a trajectory of earlier, similar events or persons — this is one form of what is today called "typology."
Occasionally the New Testament quotes the Old Testament in a form of the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament) or some other rendering whose words are sufficiently different from the Hebrew that difficult choices must be made. One of the most complex hermeneutical issues is the way that the gospel itself, or some part of it, is, on the one hand, sometimes said to fulfill that which has been prophesied, and, on the other, said to disclose that which has been hidden. Glory resides in these complexities, of course, but it sometimes takes a bit of unpacking to begin to see them as something rich and wonderful, and not simply as a "problem." One could easily add other challenges. Yet it must be said that the really "hard cases" are relatively few in number compared with the large number of fairly straightforward uses that nevertheless open our eyes to the way God in his mercy has graciously given us his Word.
You and Dr. Beale write, "This tension between what [the New Testament writers] insist is actually there in the Scriptures and what they are forced to admit they did not see until fairly late in their experience forces them to think about the concept of 'mystery' — revelation that is in some sense 'there' in the Scriptures but hidden until the time of God-appointed disclosure." How are Christian readers apt to misunderstand this notion of progressive revelation?
Carson: Sometimes Christians understand progressive revelation in a fairly mechanistic or linear fashion: More truth simply gets added to the pile, to make a bigger pile of truth. But this "mystery/revelation" tension shows that often something is actually there in the Old Testament text (according to Jesus and his apostles) that was not seen until the coming of Jesus made it clear. The most obvious example is the fact that interpreters of Scripture before the coming of Jesus did not happily put together the Old Testament promises of a Davidic king with Old Testament suffering-servant passages to anticipate a king who suffers, a king who would reign from a cross.
Collin Hansen is a CT editor-at-large and author of Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journalist's Journey with the New Calvinists.
Copyright © 2008 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
Comments
"Do the NT writers misunderstand the OT?"
The fact that we ask a question like this - and who can deny that this question has been asked with urgency over the past 200 years? - is indicative of the theological problems that have shaken Western theology in the post-Enlightenment age.
The question has arisen because post-enlightenment students felt that it was necessary to “free” Biblical studies from the confines of dogmatics and study the OT “in its own right”. When this was done, according to the new dogmatic canons of authority of the modern age, the OT no longer read like it had done for the previous generations of Christians. This is not to say that previous generations of Christians emulated the way in which the NT writers handled the OT, but that they all recognised that however the NT writers were handling the OT was the correct way. Since the modern approach to the OT very few scholars would even dream of saying anything like this.
We won’t waste our time in tracing the various movements that have arisen within this new paradigm that have tried to recapture a theological reading of the OT. Instead, we will examine some of the NT passages that interpret the OT and then we will attempt to uncover the theological facts that show that the NT way of handling the OT is the only possible way of doing so if we are to avoid some form of Marcionism.
Learning from the Masters.
John 8:54-59; Luke 20:41; Romans 10:5-19; 1 Corinthians 10:1-10; Hebrews 1; 2:10-14; 3:1-6; 11:26; 1 Peter 1:10-12.
Even with these 9 passages we are barely scratching the surface, but they are enough to indicate how Jesus and the NT writers regarded the OT. The 9 we have chosen focus on the Christological character of the NT interpretation of the OT. We could have picked the topics of Law or Prophecy or Israel etc., but given that the centre-piece of all theology is Christology, then this must be where we focus our attention.
John 8:54-58: This is perhaps the most scandalous utterance in the ministry of Jesus. Throughout this conversation with interested fellow Jews Jesus has been expounding the fact that they are not true descendants of Abraham because they do not act as Abraham did. This comes to the climax of verse 54 when Jesus says, “Abraham was really looking forward to meeting me and when he did meet me he was thrilled.” Some commentators take verse 54 to mean nothing more than Abraham looked forward to the incarnation of Jesus - either in “types” or through some extraordinary insight. However, the response of the crowd in verse 57 makes it clear what Jesus means - “Jesus, how can you have met Abraham when you are not even 50 years old?!” So, when did Abraham meet Jesus? Well, the classical answer to that would be, whenever the LORD appeared to Abraham, especially in Genesis 18 when Yahweh has an alfresco meal with Abraham.
When Justin Martyr was discussing Genesis 19 with Trypho, it is fascinating to see the theological assumptions of both men rise to the surface. For Justin Martyr the Living God is Three Persons who have separate roles, such that the Son mediates the Father by the power of the Spirit. This theological truth informs all of Justin’s exegesis and therefore frees him up to take Genesis 18 completely seriously as the Eternal Son sharing a meal with Abraham. Trypho’s doctrine of God is locked into a monotone of transcendence, such that he cannot conceive how Yahweh could possibly actually eat some food or possess a tangible body. Justin doesn’t attempt to explain away the many passages where Old Testament characters see or meet Yahweh, because he knows full well that all knowledge of God has always been mediated through the Eternal Son.
Jesus’ reply to the crowd’s concern over His age is even more remarkable still. Verse 58 - “I tell you the truth, before Abraham was born I AM.” The only possible response to this for an unbelieving Jew is to regard the speaker as blasphemous. Jesus rubs in His point to make it clearer. He is Yahweh, who stands as the source of the entire life of Israel. When Moses was commissioned by the Angel of the LORD at the burning bush in Exodus 3, according to Jesus, that was Jesus Himself. For Jesus to identify Himself with the Angel of the LORD, with the One who brings Israel out of Egypt through His minister Moses, obviously implies a very particular understanding of the Old Testament.
We need to appreciate this for a moment. Since the divorce of Old Testament study from Christian dogmatics, much Old Testament theology has become a form of Yahweh Unitarianism - that is, Yahweh is portrayed as a single Person, and Old Testament Christology - if it exists at all - is reduced to nothing more than a progressive expectation of a great king descended from David. Obviously, against this kind of an understanding of the Old Testament Jesus interpretation of the Old Testament is utterly fanciful.
This is brought out sharply in the way Jesus handles Psalm 110 in Luke 20:41. Jesus has been taking many questions from the teachers of the law, and now He decides to turn the tables. They thought that the Messiah would be simply a great king descended from David. So, Jesus asks them to explain this Psalm of David. “The LORD said to my Lord - ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.’” How can David call the Messiah Lord if he is just a descendant of David? Jesus doesn’t spell out what the full significance of this is, but the writer to the Hebrews does. In Hebrews 1:13 we see that Psalm 110 is quite unashamedly taken to be a conversation between the Father and the Son reported by David.
But what kind of assumptions are being made about the Old Testament here? Romans 10:6-13 certainly helps us to see how all-encompassing this exegesis of the Old Testament is. Whether Paul is contrasting two statements of Moses (verse 5 and verse 6 and following) or showing the consistency of Moses’ thought is too big a debate for us to enter now, so we will begin from verse 6 of Romans 10. Paul simply exegetes Deuteronomy 30:11-14.
We should note that Paul thinks that he is able to prove the veracity of his theology from the Old Testament. This very important, because Paul sees the Hebrew Scriptures as an authority that can be appealed to adjudicate the nature of Jesus. He thinks that his readers will be persuaded to agree with Paul because we see that he is saying nothing more than the Scriptures teach.
Some commentators on Romans 10 miss this completely when they describe Paul as trying to find illustrations of his theology in the Hebrew Scriptures. But if Paul is doing this then he could just as easily pick illustrations from the Greek poets or Roman mythology, because the actual meaning of the quotation would be discarded in favour of Paul’s theology. This does not take Paul sufficiently seriously. Paul seems to believe that Moses preached the same gospel that he preaches.
Paul explains that the subject of Moses commandments in Deut 30:6 is not legal instructions as such, but Christ Himself. Christ doesn’t need to be reached through our own efforts, but “the word is near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart." So, what was this word which Israel had such easy access to under Moses? Paul explains “that is, the word of faith we are proclaiming: That if you confess with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”
So, Moses preached a sermon at the close of his ministry telling Israel to believe that “Jesus is LORD” and that He would be raised from the dead. Or, at least, that is the way Paul understands Moses ------ whether this is a misunderstanding of the Old Testament or not is a matter of judgement.
1 Corinthians 10:1-10 is one of the most famous examples of the NT identifying the continuity between the experience of the OT Church and the NT Church. Paul wants to make the Corinthians fully aware that the Church in the wilderness had everything that the Corinthians had. They had baptism through the mediation of Moses, and they ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink as the NT Christian does. The spiritual drink was provided by a spiritual rock and that rock was Christ. The water was real and the rock was real, tangible and solid, so we cannot imagine that Paul is “spiritualising” the events of the Exodus in the sense of “allegorizing” what happened. Rather Paul wants us to know that the way the LORD chastised the Church in the wilderness is no different to how He will treat us if we are similarly disobedient. In order to make this point Paul has to establish a continuity of Christian life between us and them. What does Paul mean when he says that the Rock was Christ? Well, he obviously doesn’t mean that the Rock symbolizes Christ or is a type of Christ, because in verse 9 we discover that we are in danger of putting the same LORD to the test.
What we need to note from 1 Corinthians 10 is that Paul doesn’t think that there is any historical disjunction between the NT Church and the Church under Moses. Again, he does this for definite theological reasons, and any tendency to emphasize historical discontinuity is also for definite theological reasons, though they are rarely explicitly stated.
We need to spend a few moments with the book of Hebrews because it spends such a lot of time handling the OT.
Chapter 1 is full of OT quotations but what is going on in the chapter can easily be missed. The opening verses can be interpreted in at least two very different ways according to one’s theological assumptions. If one believes that history is progressive, that is, it moves forward, getting better or more developed as more time elapses, then Hebrews 1:1-2 is taken to mean that previously God had made uncertain or partial revelations of Himself, but now has fully revealed Himself in the Eternal Son. However, as we go through Hebrews we discover that the author constantly asserts the continuity between the experience of the faithful in the Old Testament and those that live after the Incarnation. Under these assumptions Hebrews 1:1-2 is taken to mean that previously God had revealed the gospel of Christ in many ways through various mediators, but now finally He speaks the gospel through Christ Himself.
So, under one approach the message and the messengers are different, but under the other approach the message is the same but the mode of mediation is different
The reason I have flagged that up is that too often the significance of what the writer to the Hebrews is saying is missed. For example, notice how the quotations are introduced in chapter 1. They are matter-of-factly described as statements made from God the Father to God the Son. In order to escape the possible consequences of this understanding of the OT, many commentators say things like “the writer applies this piece of the OT to Jesus”. However, the writer doesn’t appear to be doing that - they seem rather to be assuming that their handling of the OT will be recognised as normal among their readers. There is no easy way of accommodating this within the patterns of OT interpretation that are dominant today. Whereas the apostolic church of the 1st and 2nd century finds nothing at all strange or even noteworthy about this approach to the OT, except amongst the Marcions who wish to reject the OT outright, yet there is something quite bewildering about this way of interpreting the OT today.
Hebrews 2:10-14 displays the same kind of method. In order to explain the full humanity of Jesus Psalm 22 and Isaiah 8:17 & 18 are quoted. However, each is attributed to the mouth of Jesus. Is this a justified use of these passages? Did the Eternal Son really utter them? If the writer of Hebrews places them in the mouth of Jesus even if their original meaning is quite different, then in what sense is this an interpretation of the OT at all? Perhaps it is a use of the Old Testament, but can it really be called the true meaning of the Old Testament?
I would want to argue that the book of Hebrews is not interested in merely commandeering OT passages for its own theology about Christ. Rather, the book provides a wide-ranging exposition of how the OT is to be understood. This comes out most clearly in 3:1-6. Here we have a comprehensive scheme that explains how Moses was a minister of Christ. Let’s go through the passage.
We must fix our eyes upon Jesus who is the boss over all of us. Why? Because He has done everything that He needed to do in His appointed role as apostle and high priest. What was His job? Well, verse 6, Christ is in charge over God’s house. Like a son, he is faithful in this job. Moses, as great as he was, was a servant of Jesus, because Moses ministered in God’s house - verse 2. Well, who built this house? Who built God’s house in which Moses ministered? Verse 3 - Jesus has been found worthy of greater honor than Moses, just as the builder of a house has greater honor than the house itself. So, the Church in which Moses exercised such an amazing ministry was built by Jesus. Moses worked for Jesus. Of course, we have seen Jesus Himself make exactly the same claim in John 8. We are noticing a definite pattern here. The NT thinks that whenever Yahweh is directly involved with the creation, whether it be in salvation or judgement, then we should name that Yahweh person Jesus. We will come back to this shortly.
Our last passage from Hebrews must, of course be Hebrews 11. This is such a remarkable handling of the OT that we cannot by-pass it. In Hebrews 11 we find the lives of the patriarchs analyzed as if they were Christians acting for the same reasons, with the same faith, as any faithful member of the apostolic church. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob lived in tents. So what? Well, according to Hebrews 11 they did this because they were looking forward to a spot in the New Creation after the final resurrection.
Any idea that the patriarchs were at some low level of revelation where the gospel is understood in purely earthly terms isn’t even addressed in order to be denied! It doesn’t enter the writer’s mind that any of these faithful saints thought any differently than an apostolic Christian - except the patriarchs were much more faithful. One of the more noteworthy verses in the chapter is verse 26 in which we learn that Moses “regarded disgrace for the sake of Christ as of greater value than the treasures of Egypt.” This doesn’t seem odd if we remember that in John 8, 1 Corinthians 10 and Hebrews 3 the NT argues that Moses and Christ were on personal terms.
The last part of the NT we will look at is 1 Peter 1:10-12. We must look at this because it has been used for such widely divergent purposes. For some it is taken to mean that the OT saints didn’t really know what they were talking about. This is sometimes used as a spring-board for the “they spoke better than they knew” approach to the OT where the commentator explains what the OT writers really meant. Usually the OT writers are presented as people whose faith and hopes were mostly of a very temporal and parochial nature, whereas now it is possible to see the real deeper meaning hiding behind the surface intent of their words.
However, it is interesting to note what Peter actually says. “Concerning this salvation, the prophets, who spoke of the grace that was to come to you, searched intently and with the greatest care, trying to find out the time and circumstances to which the Spirit of Christ in them was pointing when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the glories that would follow.”
The prophets were not at all ignorant of what they said concerning Christ - they knew all about the sufferings of Christ and the glories that would follow. However, they did search intently with the greatest care to try to find out just when it was all going to happen. Would it happen in their own lifetime?
What we need to take from this passage is that Peter believes that the prophets knew about the sufferings of the Christ. That is what the Spirit of Christ in them was pointing to all the time. They were excited about what they were prophesying. This explains why Peter feels so able to quote from OT passages and see them as speaking directly about the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Okay, so where are we? We have looked at a selection of NT passages that handle the OT. What we have discovered is that their assumptions are widely separated from us in our post-Enlightenment world-view. We do not read the OT the way that they did and therefore we struggle to follow them.
However, I want to argue that they are not mishandling the OT at all. They deal with the actual character of the OT faithfully precisely because they see Christ acting in all those events. An attempt to handle the OT “in its own right” – which in practice usually means in a way that is carefully and deliberately non-Christological and non-Trinitarian --- is a mishandling of the Old Testament if only because it prejudges what the OT can and can’t say.
In conclusion, I would like to try to uncover the theological assumptions that underlie the way in which the NT handles the OT in order to at least point towards the possibility of our recovering that same level of insight into the meaning of the OT.
The NT writers believe that “nobody knows the Father except the Son and He to whom He will reveal Him.” Or as John puts it, “Nobody has seen God at any time, but the Only-Begotten God, from the side of the Father, He has explained Him.”
A Marcionite can take such theology and apply it only to NT. As far as a Marcionite is concerned what occurs in the OT is all before the advent of the mediator of the true and supreme God. As clearly heretical as Marcionism is when stated in such terms, yet today we are much more nervous of venturing into the OT with the kind of Christological convictions that we have just stated. If nobody has ever seen the form of the Father – a point which Deuteronomy makes it clear terms – and nobody knows the Father except through the mediation of the Son, then how does this inform our reading of the OT? How does such theology manifest itself in our OT exegesis? If the ancient Hebrews also believed that the transcendent LORD must be mediated by the sent LORD, then how does this affect our exegesis?
The basic conviction of the NT writers is simple – the God of the NT is the God of the OT. On the basis of this they get on with treating the OT as if it were entirely Christian and they treat the NT Church as if it were in the same basic position as the Church in the OT. They name the LORD who walks, talks, wrestles, eats, fights, etc. in the OT “JESUS” – and they understand Jesus as the One who still acts as He did throughout the OT.
We need to face some very basic questions concerning the OT if we are to decide whether we agree with the way the NT interprets it. Does the OT present an account of three Persons called Yahweh, one who is impossible to see face to face and another who meets people directly and yet another who enables the OT saints to live as the people of Yahweh? But even if we decide that this is going on in the OT, do we think that the OT writers understood things this way?
Obviously, this kind of approach to the OT means that it is not so useful to compare the theology of Israel with the surrounding Semitic people. Why? Because we are not dealing with a general human enquiry into ancient ideas about god/gods. Rather we are dealing with the Living God who reveals Himself through His Divine Mediator.. Only insofar as the other groups are impacted by Israel may we talk of a knowledge of God in Gentile culture.
Again, that sounds a scandalous suggestion, yet it is the assumption that we find amongst Bible scholars of the first centuries in the post-apostolic Church. Let me give one classic example from the patristic period. First, Melito, when preaching a sermon on Christ’s Passion, addresses ancient Israel:
It was Christ who led you down into Egypt, and guarded and nourished you there. It was Christ who gave you a guiding light in the pillar and sheltered you in the cloud, who cut the Red Sea in two and led you through and destroyed your enemy. It was Christ who gave you manna from heaven, who gave you the land for your inheritance, who sent prophets to you and who raised up kings for you.
A. T. Hanson is one of the few 20th century writers to face up to the way in which we have been cut off from the way the NT writers see Christ active within the OT. He explains the problem well:
Our debt to the Victorian commentators on the Bible is immense….The access of new knowledge about the physical universe, and the rise of disciplines of literary and historical criticism, had compelled Christians to revise the traditional approach to the Bible. But these great scholars succeeded in convincing the great majority of Christians in the West that… the Christian faith could be in the 20th century essentially the same as it was in the first. In one sphere, however, the Victorians failed to carry through that rehabilitation of the gospel which they so courageously undertook. The NT writers’ method of interpreting the OT was something with which they never completely came to terms.
Hanson feels that this failure was simply because the Victorians assumed that the NT writers were using the OT as a book of colourful illustrations. However, as we survey the past 150 years of OT scholarship we, at the very end of the 20th century, cannot help being amazed at the concepts of religious evolution, the 19th century myth of progress applied to the Bible, that still exercises a baneful effect on the discipline.
To conclude, if we wish to hold to the unity of the OT and the NT, or to put it more sharply, if we want to avoid the Marcionite heresy of dividing the God of the OT from the God of the NT, I don’t see that we have any option but to start from the assumption that the NT writers handle the OT correctly.
Their whole approach to the OT is so theologically loaded that we are driven to either attempt to follow their handling of the OT or we must in some way decline from the NT theological vision of the OT.
(Taken from www.soluschristus.co.uk)
for the christthetruth blog, equally theological-biased.
Thanks for reading all that! Just to clarify your position. Would you say that the OT is not inherently and explicitly christological i.e. about Jesus Christ the Son of God? If so, what would you say the OT is primarily about?
i don't think the jews who wrote the OT were thinking explicitly about jesus or about the messiah. the messianic concept is not central in the OT. of course, this depends on the interpreters of the OT. a christian would read a lot of messianic passages into the OT whereas a jewish reader would not. e.g. Isa 52:13-53:12 - almost all christians read this passage as referring to jesus. the jews don't. they will interpret this passage as referring to the exilic prophet i.e. the one who wrote this portion of isa 40-55. i take the latter view as the first line of interpretation. only as a 2nd line of interpretation will i take it as also referring to jesus in a 'larger' sense (using multiple fulfillment of OT prophecies).
if the OT is largely not messianic, what is it? it is in most jew's view God's torah. torah is not so much 'laws' but instructions or teachings. it is the deposit of truth from God for the jews to learn how to live their lives properly (e.g. Ps 1). in some passages like the royal psalms, christians have taken them to be messianic e.g. pss. 2, 110. but the jews would say these are psalms about the israelite king.
was peter then wrong to take those messianic psalms and interpret them as referring to jesus in Acts? 'wrong' in one way as the first line of interpretation is not the messiah. 'right' in a 2nd way if you allow for multiple fulfillment.
i will always take the view that we must interpret the OT first on its own right instead of allowing our christian presuppositions to control us. then, the next step is to see the larger fulfillment since as christians we have 2 covenants (OT and NT).
First, the NT writers seem to attribute this passage without reference to any post-exilic prophet in a matter-of-fact way which assumes understanding on the part of readers. eg Matt 8:17, Lk. 22:37, Acts 8:32-35 (particularly relevant), 1 Pet. 2:24. Furthermore, in John 12:37-41, it is even asserted that Isaiah knew that he was writing about Jesus because he saw Jesus' glory and spoke about Him. Thus there are Jewish writers of the NT who interpret passages such as this Servant Song christologically, contrary to what is normally assumed to be a Jewish interpretation. Furthermore, it challenges the assumption that Jews in Isaiah's would not have understood the passage as Christians now do.
Secondly, in 2 Cor. 3:12-16, reading the OT un-Christologically is explicitly discouraged, to say the least. Granted that in Moses time, there were Jews who interpreted the Law un-Christologically, as symbolised by the veil Moses wore, which is tantamount to unbelief. Since only in Christ is the veil over an unbelieving heart removed, then it follows that Moses in entering the tent unveiled, enters it with a believing heart in Christ.
Thirdly, from John 5: 31-47, Jesus asserts that those who study the Scriptures diligently should put their trust in Him for the Scriptures (Moses and the rest of the OT) are without qualification about Jesus. Again, there is no hint that Jesus embraced a two-tier non-Christian and Christian interpreatation, but speaks quite plainly that the OT are inherently and explicitly about Him.
From what's been said so far, I'm just wondering why we are not simply reading and interpreting the OT the way Jesus and the NT writers seem to. I mean, why take non-Christian Jewish interpretation seriously when Jesus doesn't give it any credit? Why not follow the Jewish Jesus' way of interpretation alone? What are the assumptions and attractions behind taking unbelieving Jewish interpretation so seriously in the scholarly world?
Sorry for bombarding you with these questions Reb...