[Paul] was not suggesting that a part of Timothy’s childhood instruction involved the New Testament. The aim of the content of the sacred writings is to relate God’s saving purpose in Christ. Timothy’s study of the Scriptures had grounded him in that wisdom and enlightenment that leads to faith in Jesus Christ. The Scriptures lead to salvation but only as they point to Christ. The Scriptures themselves do not provide salvation, but they do point to the Savior who can provide it. The phrase “through faith in Jesus Christ” shows how the Scriptures make individuals wise. They enlighten them to the necessity for faith in Jesus Christ.1
My past experience with the OT was one of practical neglect: it had no authoritative value for the life and function of the church. The OT was part of inspired Scripture, to be sure, but I was taught that the OT was not written primarily for Christians. In fact, we often used the moniker “New Testament church” to describe our adherence and allegiance to the NT, the “constitution” of the church.2 Granted, we studied the OT in Sunday school, seeking earnestly to digest its facts, figures, and predictive prophecies of the Messiah, but in no way was the Lordship of Christ the driving assumption of what the OT was really about. It was about Israel, not the church. We could count the number of messianic proof texts (i.e., various verses scattered throughout the OT), memorize them to support apologetic aims (i.e., prove that Jesus was the Messiah), and then forget about the rest of the OT for all intents and purposes. The OT did not play a major role in establishing our Christology beyond a few messianic prophecies. My colleague even told me that his mother literally cried when he told her he planned to get his doctorate in OT! While her emotional reaction may not be the norm, it reflects the practical neglect of the OT in many Christian traditions historically. Take my own Restoration Movement tradition as but one example that has attempted to more or less follow the NT church in its external forms and organization, but has largely neglected the inner workings of the Bible of the apostles, as well as its proper interpretation as a scriptural tradition that is primarily about Jesus Christ.
This book is an attempt to resurrect the OT to the place of authority it had for the “New Testament church,” and to read it like the NT does—as a witness to Christ. The OT was, after all, the Bible of the early church.3 It seems now to be a matter of common sense for Christian movements that seek to more or less pattern themselves after the NT church (to the extent that that is even possible 2,000 years later, or even theologically necessary to begin with), that it would also follow the apostles’ hermeneutical procedure of how to read the Jewish Scriptures.
I anticipate an objection to applying apostolic hermeneutics today: “That was okay for them but not for us; they were inspired and we are not.”4 Let’s trace that logic for a moment. We are expected to follow their lead at church planting, church government, church discipline, church doctrine, worship forms, etc., but not their interpretive approach to Scripture? So much for being “a people of the book.” If not the NT itself, where do we as “New Testament Christians” go to learn how to interpret the OT as Jesus and the NT writers interpreted it? Moisés Silva states it provocatively, “If we refuse to pattern our exegesis after that of the apostles, we are in practice denying the authoritative character of their scriptural interpretation—and to do so is to strike at the very heart of the Christian faith.”5 Andreas Köstenberger and Richard Patterson state similarly, “One important guiding principle for the way in which we today ought to read the Old Testament is the study of how the New Testament writers themselves read the Hebrew Scriptures. If we want to be biblical in our hermeneutical practice, there is no better place to look than the hermeneutical approach of the biblical writers themselves.”6
If we do not get our interpretive practice from the NT, where do we get it? Again, a common response is, “We follow the NT approach to the OT only in the specific passages laid out for us in the NT, but we cannot extend it to other passages because they are not explicit examples.” In other words, because the NT does not interpret a passage christologically, for us to do so “goes beyond what is written.” As Klyne Snodgrass describes it, we should not expect to find “new instances”—beyond those explicitly laid out in the NT—of verses applied to Jesus by using the exegetical methods of the apostles, presumably because we do not share their authoritative revelatory role.7 Yet, are we really only to read the OT christologically in the few places where the NT does so? So much for Jesus’s words that the “all the Scriptures” are about him (Luke 24:25–27; cf. John 5:39). Should we apply a “canon within the canon” approach where we read only certain OT passages christologically and practically ignore the rest; or at most, memorize facts and figures and moralize OT stories? According to this logic, if the NT does not expressly exegete an OT passage, it is “hands on” from a grammatical-historical perspective, but presumably “hands off” from a christological one.8 So much for Ps 23! So much for Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones! So much for the book of Esther—its main point is the salvation of God’s people! We can also ignore the so-called protoevangelium of Gen 3:15. The NT does not interpret any of these passages christologically; so, according to the traditional logic, we should not either. Again, what is one to make of Jesus’s claim that “all the Scriptures” witness to him, when several OT books are not quoted in the NT messianically or otherwise (e.g., Judges, Ruth, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Lamentations, Obadiah)?9 Do these not witness to Jesus Christ?
Given the traditional reasoning, none of these texts or myriad of others carries any christological import simply because the NT is silent about them. This reduces the Christian approach to the OT to a catalog of messianic proof texts at the expense of the rest of the OT. As Dan McCartney confirms:
If our perception of the larger divine intent in the Old Testament is limited to solely those passages for which the apostles inspiredly spelled it out for us, it seriously limits a Christian use of the Old Testament. Further, the christocentric interpretation by the apostles is itself derived from the teaching of Jesus, who appears to be the fountainhead of this whole messianic way of reading the Old Testament.10
I am convicted, therefore, that the NT writers have given us examples of how to read the OT christologically, and they expect us to apply their post-resurrection hermeneutical perspective in our own reading of the OT, and not restrict ourselves to their examples as the only “approved” ones. In short, they have given the church an inspired interpretive trajectory for understanding the OT rightly (i.e., christologically). To use a common—albeit imperfect—analogy, they have taught us how to fish, not given us a fish. As for the NT writers being authoritative interpreters of OT Scripture, I agree that they are foundational for the church as bearers of unique divine authority, commission, and revelation; yet, is this not even more reason to adopt their overall interpretive approach to the OT? It is precisely because of their inspired authority that our interpretations should be rooted in their use of the OT. In short, when we implement their interpretive strategy today, we are not relaying the foundations of scriptural interpretation, but are moving about freely in the house God has built for us in Christ.
I believe we have in the NT a “go and do likewise” scenario where Jesus and the NT writers give the interpretive map for christological readings of the OT, even “non-messianic” passages. Yes, they give methods of exegesis too, but these are subservient to the larger goal of interpreting the OT christologically. Put differently, there is nothing inherently “Christian” about grammatical-historical exegesis, typology, intertextuality, allegory, or predictive prophecy; these are all evident in the OT itself. But what is distinctly Christian is the hermeneutical
