Topic 2 of 33 - Your Place in the Learning Journey
Old vs. New Testament
The word "testament" comes from the Latin testamentum, a translation of the Greek diatheke, which means covenant - a formal agreement or bond between parties. The division of the Christian Bible into Old and New Testaments reflects the Christian claim that God established a new covenant through Jesus Christ that fulfilled and, in some respects, superseded the covenant made with Israel. The very names carry a theological argument.
The Old Testament was not written as the "old" half of anything. It is the Hebrew Bible - the sacred scriptures of Judaism, produced over many centuries and treasured by Jewish communities long before Christianity existed. Christians inherited these texts from Judaism and reinterpreted them in light of Jesus. The term "Old Testament" itself is a Christian designation; Jews refer to the same collection as the Tanakh, an acronym for its three sections: Torah (Law), Nevi'im (Prophets), and Ketuvim (Writings). The books are arranged differently in the Jewish canon than in most Christian Bibles, and that arrangement reflects a different interpretive framework.
The relationship between the two testaments has been understood in several ways across Christian history. The dominant traditional view is promise and fulfillment: the Old Testament contains promises, types, and foreshadowings that find their completion in the New. The New Testament writers themselves make this argument repeatedly, citing Hebrew scripture to interpret Jesus. A different view, associated with the Marcionite heresy of the 2nd century and periodically recurring since, holds that the two testaments describe fundamentally different gods. Mainstream Christianity has consistently rejected this reading, insisting on the unity of God across both testaments.
What holds the two testaments together, for Christian readers, is not simply a shared God but a shared story - the story of a God who creates, enters into relationship with human beings, and works across centuries to restore what has been broken. The New Testament claims to be the climax of that story. Whether that claim is persuasive depends on how one reads the Old Testament texts being cited - which is precisely why the relationship between the two testaments remains one of the most important and most contested questions in biblical interpretation.