Reading the Old Testament in the New: The Gospel of Matthew
Lesson One:
Learning to Listen for Echoes: A New Approach to the New Testament
Lesson Objectives:
1.
To understand how important the Old Testament is to reading and interpreting the New Testament.
2. To learn what "typology" is and to appreciate its significance for reading the New Testament.
3. To understand the relationship between the writers of the New Testament and other first-century Jewish interpreters of Scripture.
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Lesson Outline:
I. Course Introduction and Overview
a. The Power of Allusion
II. Giving the New Testament a New Hearinga. Testimonies and Proof-Texts: What Scholars Used to Thinkb. New Testament in a New Light
III. The New Testament and Jewish Interpretation
a. Common Assumptions About Scripture
b. Methods of Interpretation in the Bible
c. Typology and the Biblical Worldview
IV. How the New Testament Uses the Old
a. C.H. Dodd's According to the Scriptures
b. Subtexts and New Contexts
V. Study Questions for Lesson One
I. Course Introduction and Overview
a. The Power of Allusion
This past August marked the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King's famous "I Have A Dream" speech, surely one of the most important in our nation's history.
It's a beautiful speech. It's powerful, it's evocative. It stirred thoughts and emotions in the hearts and minds of the people who heard it then and it still makes for stirring reading and listening today (read it here, listen to it here).
What makes King's speech so powerful and evocative is the way it's written, the way it weaves a subtle skein of literary and historical allusions and echoes.
Without ever quoting directly from anybody, King brings together references to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, Shakespeare's Richard III, the biblical prophets Amos and Isaiah, The Declaration of Independence, and the old hymn, "America." It wasn't a case of plagiarism or King flexing his intellectual muscles or showing off his knowledge.
As the Protestant Scripture scholar, Dale Allison, observes in his book, Scriptural Allusions in the New Testament: Light from the Dead Sea Scrolls:
"King's borrowing from and allusions to traditional texts constitute more than simple ornamentation. The use of Lincoln implies that King's cause is the continuation or completion of the freeing of the slaves. The allusion to Shakespeare is a way of asserting that King cannot be easily dismissed - he is intimately familiar with the educational tradition of his white opponents. the lines from the Bible make appeal to a sacred text with authority for both the white and African American communities and, more than that, imply that God is on King's side. The use of The Declaration of Independence and 'America' announce that King is a patriot - some had slandered him for not being such - whose dream for his people in particular is the fulfillment of the American dream in general."
Allison, who is one the very best New Testament scholars in the world today, sees the same kind of evocative artistry at work in the Bible. This is the artistry that we're going to study in this course.
II. Giving the New Testament a New Hearing
a. Testimonies and Proof-Texts: What Scholars Used to Think
But before we start our close reading of Matthew, which we'll begin in our next lesson, we're going to spend some time looking at what is a relatively recent advance in New Testament scholarship - this whole business of reading the Old Testament in the New.
Actually, in many ways, it's a rediscovery of the way the Catholic Church has always read and interpreted the Bible in its liturgy and in its early dogmas and creeds. We'll come back to that later on.
For now, it's important to remember that the way we're going to be approaching Matthew is not the way the Bible has been read by scholars for most of the modern period.
We're going to over-simplify here: But the scholarly consensus for many years was that when New Testament writers were quoting the Old Testament, they were wrenching the texts totally out of context and giving them new meaning just to make their point.
Scholars had decided the New Testament writers didn't even have complete copies of the Old Testament to work from. They were presumed to be working from so-called testimonia - anthologies of "messianic proof-texts," quotes they pulled out of the Old Testament to convince or "prove" to the Jews that Jesus was the Messiah.
This, the scholars said, explained why so often the Old Testament quotes in the New Testament don't seem to make any sense. Or, if they do make sense, they seem to distort the original meaning of the Old Testament passage.
b. New Testament in a New Light
In the mid-20th century, this scholarly consensus was turned upside down.
Up until then, we didn't have a lot to compare the New Testament to. If we wanted to see how it stacked up next to other religious writings from the same time-frame and culture, we didn't have much to go on. We had some texts written by the rabbis from a bit later than the period of Jesus and the apostolic writers. We also had some "inter-testamental" writings - texts written in the period between the Old Testament and the New Testament. (For more, see "Introduction to Intertestamental Judaism" in the SalvationHistory.com Resource Library.)
This all changed in the 1950s when archeologists began uncovering and translating the Dead Sea Scrolls. These were religious writings by a radical Jewish community known as the Essenes. Many, written between 200 and 50 years before Christ, were in effect detailed commentaries and elaborate interpretations of Old Testament texts. (For more, see Links on the Dead Sea Scrolls in the SalvationHistory.com Resource Library.)
Suddenly, a whole new world had opened up for us. We could see that the New Testament writers were a part of a larger tradition of interpretation in first-century Judaism.
To Continue Studying Lesson One, Click 2
