I thought I knew the Old Testament fairly well. Having been in school more than most and having been interested in Scripture since I was a child, I thought that I had a good grasp of both the Old and New Testament. And then I took a class on the Old Testament in the New Testament.
That the New Testament writers quoted the Old Testament should not be a shock to anyone that has read the first three chapters of Matthew. In fact, the Old Testament is quoted numerous times throughout the New Testament. Just below that surface, however, lies an ocean of interconnected references and echoes of the Old Testament which the writers wove into their narrative, preaching, and teaching. I do not think I can do justice to how deep and fascinating these connections are, I would greatly encourage anyone who has any interest in it to read Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels by Richard B. Hays, or Reading Backwards, the shorter version of Echoes which was put together from Hays’s Cambridge University lecture series. For the more advanced reader, Hays has also completed a study of Paul’s use of the Old Testament, but that book is more technical and less accessible to the public, so perhaps it is a project best left to summer vacation. For now, however, I want to draw two important implications of the work that Hays and others have done in exploring the interconnection between the two Testaments.
First, Marcionism was an early Christian heresy which asserted that the God of the Old Testament was a lesser and evil deity and that Jesus became incarnate to point everyone to the true God. Marcion, the eponymous founder of the heresy, even went so far as producing his own version of the Scriptures, which features selections from Luke and some of the letters of Paul.
This heresy was opposed and rejected univocally and vociferously by the Early Church, but like a weed that will not go away no matter how many times it is pulled out of the field, it sadly has yet to become merely an artifact of history. It is not uncommon to hear among Christians––even in institutes of higher learning––about how different the God of the Old Testament is from Jesus and how gentle and merciful Jesus is preferable to the angry and jealous God of the Old Testament. There is no way to categorize this statement other than that it is the result of biblical illiteracy. The God who rages against His people corrupting themselves by going after other gods is none other than Jesus, Who is just as emphatic on this point in the New Testament as He is in the Old Testament (cf. Rev 2:14-16).
Marcion’s rather truncated version of the Scriptures was the result of his attempt to excise all references from the Old Testament in the New Testament. If, however, his principles had been carefully and consistently applied, the true Marcionite New Testament would barely be the size of a pamphlet, hopelessly incoherent and confused. The New Testament is so inextricably tied to the Old that trying to pry them apart results in nothing less than the complete destruction of the Scripture. It is of crucial importance that educated Christians be adequately familiar with this fact.
Along the same line, I want to briefly point out something about the original recipients of the Scriptures of the New Testament. After almost two millennia of Christian reflection on Scripture, the task of understanding the connections between the two Testaments is still ongoing. But the writers of the New Testament, who under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit wove this complex tapestry of echoes and references, expected at least some of their recipients to be able to understand what they were doing. This highlights what the expected level of competency regarding the Old Testament was in the New Testament Church. Across the centuries, the Apostles, Evangelists, and writers of Scripture have left the same expectation of us. In our day, when professing the same faith as these is an entirely comfortable assertion, it is time we meet it. By doing so, we will be able to better understand and draw closer to the God whose teaching they were and are expounding. So, let us dive in and read deeply and, in so doing, let us get to know better the God Who loves us and the genius of the writers who have testified to His love.
Gjergji Evangjeli served as the Editor-In-Chief of The Torch. He had previously served as the Executive Editor and the World News section editor. He is currently pursuing a ThM at the BC School of Theology and Ministry. Gjergji is interested in the patristic period, specifically in the apologists of the second century. He is an ardent defender of the Oxford comma.
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