Topic 6 of 33 - Your Place in the Learning Journey
How New Testament Authors Used the Old Testament
New Testament authors quote, paraphrase, and allude to the Old Testament constantly - by some counts, there are over 300 direct quotations and many more allusions. But they do not always use the Old Testament in ways that modern readers expect. Understanding their methods prevents two common errors: reading the New Testament as if it perfectly fulfills clear Old Testament predictions, and dismissing the New Testament's use of the Old as irresponsible proof-texting.
Several distinct interpretive methods are visible in the New Testament. The most straightforward is direct citation - quoting an Old Testament text and claiming it is fulfilled in Jesus. Matthew does this repeatedly with the formula "this was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet." But even here, careful reading reveals that Matthew sometimes quotes from the Septuagint rather than the Hebrew, sometimes quotes loosely, and sometimes applies texts to Jesus that in their original context referred to the prophet's own situation or to the Israelite community. The famous Emmanuel prophecy of Isaiah 7:14, applied to the virgin birth in Matthew 1:23, referred in its original context to a sign for King Ahaz in the 8th century BCE.
A second method is typology - reading Old Testament persons or events as prefigurations of Jesus and the church. A third is what scholars call pesher interpretation, a method found also in the Dead Sea Scrolls, in which a text is read as encoded prophecy about the interpreter's own community and time. The book of Revelation is dense with this kind of interpretation, weaving together images from Daniel, Ezekiel, Isaiah, and Zechariah into a new vision that claims to reveal their true meaning for the present crisis.
What the New Testament authors were not doing was approaching the Old Testament with the kind of grammatical-historical exegesis that modern evangelical scholarship values. They were Jewish interpreters using Jewish methods of their time - methods that were creative, community-oriented, and shaped by the conviction that they were living in the last days in which all the scriptures were coming to fulfillment. Reading their work with that understanding produces a richer appreciation of what they were doing and why - and prevents the false impression that the relationship between the two Testaments is simpler than it is.