CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FOUR
THE OLD TESTAMENT BECOMES A NEW BOOK
WITNESS TO CHRIST
At the beginning of its existence, then, the Christian church found itself equipped with a book, a collection of sacred scriptures which it inherited. It was not based on the book: it was based on a person, Jesus Christ, crucified under Pontius Pilate, raised from the dead by God and acknowledged by his followers as Lord of all. But the book bore witness to him; in this role they found it indispensable. At the same time they found the record of his life and teaching, his suffering and triumph, indispensable to their understanding of the book.
In this they were but following a precedent established by Jesus himself. Throughout his ministry he appealed to the scriptures. The insistence that ‘so it is written’ is too deeply embedded in all the gospel strata to be reasonably regarded as only the product of the church’s reflection on the events of his life and death in the light of Easter and its aftermath. If the main lines of Old Testament interpretation found in the various New Testament writers are traced back to their origin, that origin cannot be found elsewhere than in Jesus’ own teaching.
From the inauguration of his Galilaean ministry with the announcement that the appointed time had come for the kingdom of God to draw near (Mark 1:15), the appeal to what is written recurs throughout Jesus’ ministry until at the end he submits to his captors in Gethsemane with the words: ‘Let the scriptures be fulfilled’ (Mark 14:49).
According to the Acts of the Apostles, the early preaching of the gospel to Jews and God-fearing Gentiles was regularly marked by the appeal to the fulfilment of Old Testament scripture in the work of Jesus. It is to him, Peter assures Cornelius, that ‘all the prophets bear witness’ (Acts 10:43). When Philip is asked by the Ethiopian on his homeward journey from Jerusalem to whom the prophet is referring as he describes the suffering of the Isaianic Servant, Philip does not hesitate: ‘beginning with this scripture he told him the good news of Jesus’ (Acts 8:35). The impression given in Acts is confirmed by Paul: ‘the gospel of God … concerning his Son’, he says, was ‘promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures’ (Rom. 1:1–3), and throughout his exposition of the gospel in the letter to the Romans he shows in detail what he means by this. Thanks to the illumination thrown on them by their fulfilment in Christ, the ancient scriptures became a new and meaningful book to the early Christians. The prophets themselves, we are assured in 1 Pet 1:10–12, had to search hard to find out ‘what person or time was indicated by the Spirit of Christ within them when predicting the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glory’; they had to learn that their ministry was designed for the generation which witnessed the fulfilment of what they foretold.
Various figures of Old Testament expectation were now identified with Christ—the prophet like Moses (Deut. 18:15–19), the son of David (2 Sam. 7:12–16), the servant of Yahweh (Is. 42:1, etc.), the righteous sufferer (Ps. 22:1, etc.), the stricken shepherd (Zech. 13:7), and others. It is not simply that a number of texts out of context are given a Christian significance: the New Testament interpretation of a few Old Testament words or sentences actually quoted often implies the total context in which these words or sentences occur. Moreover, different New Testament writers will quote different words from the same context in a manner which suggests that the whole context had been given a Christian interpretation before those writers quoted from it. It has been pointed out, for example, that from Ps. 69:9 (‘zeal for thy house has consumed me, and the insults of those who insult thee have fallen on me’) the former part is applied to Jesus’ cleansing of the temple in John 2:17 and the latter part to his patient endurance of verbal abuse in Romans 15:3. While no one is likely to maintain that the one writer has influenced the other, ‘it would be too much of a coincidence if the two writers independently happened to cite the two halves of a single verse, unless they were both aware that at least this whole verse, if not any more of the Psalm, formed part of a scheme of scriptural passages generally held to be especially significant’. This implies something more substantial in the way of primitive Christian exegesis than a chain of isolated proof-texts or ‘testimonies’.
Alongside this contextual element goes another, which has analogies elsewhere in Judaism: the bringing together and giving a unified exegesis to widely separated scriptures which have a significant term in common. For example: at a very early date the reference in Psalm 118:22 to the stone rejected by the builders which has become the ‘head of the corner’ (or capstone of the pediment) was seen to be specially applicable to Jesus, rejected by men but exalted by God. As Peter said to the chief priests and their colleagues, ‘this is the stone which was rejected by you builders, but which has become the head of the corner’ (Acts 4:11). But other ‘stone’ passages from the Hebrew Bible were attracted to this one and an integrated Christian interpretation was provided for all together: Jesus is also the tested corner stone of sure foundation in Isaiah 28:16, the rock of refuge amid the flood waters in Isaiah 8:14 which causes the downfall of those who stumble against it, the stone in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream which pulverizes the great image of pagan world-dominion (Dan. 2:34f.). Similarly (and especially in the light of Jesus’ preferred self-designation as the Son of Man) we find the ‘one like a son of man’ of Daniel 7:13 brought into close relation with the ‘son of man’ of Psalm 8:4 beneath whose feet all things have been placed and possibly also with the ‘son of man’ of Psalm 80:17 whom God makes strong for himself.
Something of the same order appears in the biblical exegesis of the Qumran community, where the prophets are found to foretell the circumstances of the community’s rise and progress, and especially the fortunes of its leader, the ‘Rightful Teacher’. If in Habakkuk 1:4 ‘the wicked circumvent the righteous’, or in Psalm 37:12 ‘the wicked plots against the righteous’, this is understood without more ado by the Qumran commentators as a prediction of the attacks made on the Teacher by his enemies. To a great degree the Hebrew scriptures thus became a new book to the community. Other Jews read the same scriptures, but lacked the key to their interpretation. This key had been given to the Teacher, and by him to his followers: God had shown the prophets what was going to take place, but the knowledge of when it would take place was withheld from them and revealed in the fulness of time to the Teacher.
If the early Christians recognized the righteous sufferer in the Psalms as Jesus, the persecutors of the righteous sufferer were readily identified with Jesus’ enemies, and with none more readily than Judas Iscariot. Here again the cue seems to have been given by Jesus himself: there is no good reason to doubt that at the Last Supper he used the words of Psalm 41:9, ‘he who ate of my bread has lifted his heel against me’, to indicate to his companions that he knew there was a traitor in the camp. It was no difficult matter to find other passages in the Psalter which could be similarly applied to Judas. Two such passages are applied to him by Peter in Acts 1:20 when he considers with his follow-apostles who should be co-opted to fill the vacancy left by Judas’s defection.
With such dominical and apostolic precedent the church was able so to read the Old Testament writings that they yielded not only an increasing store of ‘testimonies’ regarding the person and work of Christ but even additional details about New Testament events. (At some levels this interpretative method is still practised: I have heard a preacher argue from the / rendering of Isaiah 53:9, ‘he made his grave with the wicked’, that our Lord, before he was crucified, was compelled to dig his own grave.) This tendency we find in full vigour in Justin Martyr and in Cyprian’s Testimonies against the Jews (second and third centuries ad); it was carried to excess in the Middle Ages, when the passion narrative (for example) was lavishly embellished with Old Testament motifs divorced from their context as well as with elements from other sources.
THE MYSTERY DISCLOSED
That the Old Testament prophecies were ‘mysteries’ whose solution awaited their fulfilment in the New Testament age was axiomatic in the early church. Occasionally the word ‘mystery’ itself is used in this sense (as it was freely used in the Qumran commentaries), ‘To you’, says Jesus to his disciples, ‘the mystery of the kingdom of God has been given, but to outsiders all these things come as riddles, so that they see without perceiving, and hear without understanding; otherwise they would turn back and receive forgiveness’ (Mark 4:11f.).
In the Pauline writings one aspect of the gospel—the manner and purpose of its communication to the Gentile world—is treated as a ‘mystery … which was not made known to the sons of men in other generations as it has now been revealed to Christ’s holy apostles and prophets in the Spirit’ (Eph. 3:4f.). That the Gentiles would place their hope on the Son of David and rejoice in the God of Israel was affirmed in the Old Testament, as Paul emphasizes in a series of quotations in Romans 15:9–12, but how this prospect would be realized and what its implications would be could not be appreciated until the Gentile mission was launched in the apostolic age.
The individual New Testament writers have their distinctive interpretative methods. Matthew records how this or that incident in the life of Jesus took place ‘in order that it might be fulfilled which was spoken through the prophet’ (Matt. 1:23, etc.). Paul sees the partial and temporary setting aside of Israel as clearly stated in the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms as he finds the ingathering of the Gentiles adumbrated there. The writer to the Hebrews sees the priestly and sacrificial order of Israel as an earthly ‘copy’ (ineffective in itself) of the heavenly reality which was perfected by the work of Christ. John the evangelist portrays Jesus as giving substance to a number of Old Testament motifs—the word, the glory, the tabernacle; the bread of life, the water of life, the light of life. In the Apocalypse may be seen what has been called ‘a rebirth of images’ from the Old Testament and other ancient lore, some of which might have been thought unadaptable to a Christian purpose, yet all pressed into service to depict the triumph of Christ. However differently the interpretative tradition is developed by those writers, the core of the tradition is common to all: Jesus is the central subject of the Old Testament revelation; it is to him that witness is borne throughout.
One important phase of this interpretative tradition is the tracing of a recurrent pattern in the story of God’s dealing with his people. Something of this sort is already discernible in the Old Testament itself, where the bringing of the people of God back from the Babylonian exile is presented as a repetition of his delivering power manifested earlier in the exodus from Egypt. New Testament writers in their turn appear to view the history of Israel from Egypt to Canaan as recapitulated either in the personal experience of the Messiah or in the corporate experience of the messianic people.
Recapitulation in the Messiah’s personal experience (perhaps by way of applying Isaiah 63:9, ‘In all their affliction he was afflicted’) appears especially in the Old Testament quotations of Matthew’s nativity narrative where, for example, the reference to the exodus in Hosea 11:1 (‘out of Egypt I called my son’) is said to have been fulfilled in the holy family’s flight into Egypt and return thence to the land of Israel. Something similar may be implicit in the parallel between Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness and Israel’s forty years of wilderness wandering, both periods of testing coming as the sequel to a, ‘baptismal’ experience.
As for the recapitulation of the Egypt-to-Canaan sequence in the life of the church, this pervades the New Testament epistles, Pauline and non-Pauline alike, and must reflect an extremely primitive Christian tradition.
Israel had the paschal lamb; ‘Christ our passover has been sacrificed for us’, says Paul (1 Cor. 5:7)—‘a lamb without blemish and without spot’, says Peter (1 Pet. 1:19). Israel passed through the Red Sea, being thus ‘baptized into Moses’, says Paul (baptized without being immersed, as a Scots divine once pointed out, whereas the Egyptians were immersed without being baptized); Christians for their part are ‘baptized into Christ’ (1 Cor. 10:2; Gal. 3:27). Israel had manna from heaven and water from the rock to sustain and refresh them in the wilderness; Christians too have their supernatural food and drink (1 Cor. 10:3f., 16). But for all these privileges, the generation that left Egypt died in the wilderness because of rebellion against the God who brought them out; Christians should take due warning lest disobedience on their part brings them into comparable disaster (1 Cor. 10:6–12). And here the writer to the Hebrews takes over: Israel in the wilderness had a promised ‘rest’ to look forward to, but failed to enter into it on account of unbelief; so Christians may miss the rest that remains for the people of God if they in their turn cherish ‘an evil heart of unbelief, in falling away from the living God’ (Heb. 3:12; 4:11).
Then there is an interpretative principle which has been called the ‘real presence’ of Christ in the Old Testament. In a Pauline passage already referred to, the rock which accompanied the Israelites in the wilderness is said to have been ‘Christ’ (1 Cor. 10:4)—it was from Christ, that is to say, that they drew their spiritual refreshment then, just as Christians do today. Another instance is found in what is probably the original reading of Jude 5, ‘Jesus, who delivered a people from the land of Egypt, later destroyed those who did not believe.’ In place of ‘Jesus’ various authorities for the text have ‘the Lord’ or ‘God’ or the Greek definite article (to be translated ‘he who delivered …’). But these various readings have arisen because of the difficulty felt to inhere in the reading ‘Jesus’; no scribe would have substituted ‘Jesus’ for any one of them. What could ‘Jesus’ mean in this context? The reference is not to Moses’ servant and successor Joshua, as it is in Acts 7:45 and Hebrews 4:8. Joshua led Israel into the promised land (thus providing the material for a rich Joshua-Jesus typology), but he did not deliver them from the land of Egypt. Jude’s point seems to be that the one who led Israel out of Egypt was the Son of God before his incarnation (the Son of God who in incarnation was called Jesus). The fact that Yahweh, the personal name of the God of Israel, was commonly read as ‘Lord’ (Gk. kyrios) in the Septuagint, and that Jesus was called ‘Lord’ (Gk. kyrios) in the church, made in the easier to identify Jesus with ‘the Lord’ who went before Israel in a pillar of cloud and fire, who rescued them from the power of the Egyptians, who healed them in the wilderness (Exod. 13:21; 14:30; 15:26). It was even easier to identify Jesus with the covenant-messenger, the angel of Yahweh’s presence, who led them under Moses towards the land of rest (Exod. 14:19; 23:20–23; 32:34; 33:2, 14; Is. 63:9).
The Hebrew scriptures, especially in their Greek dress, thus became for the early church a new book, a Christian book, a book primarily designed to bear witness to Jesus. Not only so, but others who were introduced to those writings through Christians were evidently predisposed to read them from a Christian perspective.
‘One of the extraordinary features of the early Church’, it has been said, ‘is the number of men who were converted by reading the Old Testament’—converted, that is to say, from paganism to Christianity. It does not appear that those men had any antecedent conviction of the authority of the Old Testament, but as they read it, it ‘found’ them (in Coleridge’s sense of the word). One wonders, however, if they were completely ignorant of an interpretative tradition which helped them to read the Christian gospel there.
A good example is provided by Tatian in an autobiographical section of his Address to the Greeks (c ad 170). After unsatisfying experiences of Greek philosophical and legal literature and of mystery religions, he says:
I withdrew myself and sought best how to discover the truth. While I was earnestly employed in this matter, I happened to light upon certain ‘barbaric’ [i.e. non-Greek] writings, too old to be compared with the opinions of the Greeks and too divine to be compared with their error. I found myself convinced by these writings, because of the unpretentious cast of the language, the unstudied character of the writers, the ready comprehension of the making of the universe, the foreknowledge of things to come, the excellence of the precepts and the placing of all things under the rule of one principle. My soul being thus taught by God, I understood that the pagan writings led to condemnation, whereas these put an end to the slavery that is in the world, rescuing us from many rulers (archons), yes, from ten thousand tyrants. These writings do not indeed give us something which we had not received before but rather something which we had indeed received but were prevented by error from making our own.
These last words suggest that Tatian’s reading of the Old Testament was preceded or accompanied by some awareness of the line of interpretation which enabled him to understand it in a Christian sense.
A SHARED HERITAGE
But this Christian book, as it was to the church, comprised the holy scriptures of the Jewish people. Even the Septuagint version, which the Gentile church took to its heart, was in origin a Jewish translation. When the law and the prophets were read week by week in the synagogue, whether in the Hebrew original or in the Greek translation, they were understood in a Jewish sense, according to the ‘tradition of the elders’. Jews and Christians had the same sacred book, but that did not serve as a bond of unity between them.
As Jews heard the scriptures read, they learned that every male child had to be circumcised when he was eight days old if he was to be reckoned a member of the people of God. They learned that every seventh day was to be observed as a rest day, and that certain other days throughout the year were to be specially set aside for sacred purposes. They learned, moreover, that the flesh of certain animals was not to be eaten, because they were ‘unclean’, and that the flesh even of ‘clean’ animals might be eaten only under certain stringent conditions—for example, both their fat and their blood were forbidden for food. These restrictions were so binding that any infringement of them imperilled one’s membership in the chosen people.
Christians—even, to an increasing degree, Christians who had been brought up to observe these regulations—soon came to adopt a relaxed attitude to them. In the new order inaugurated by Christ circumcision was irrelevant. The keeping of the sabbath and other sacred days was not obligatory but voluntary. As for food-restrictions, Jesus was recorded as having once given a ruling which meant, in effect, that all kinds of food were ‘clean’.
Yet the text of scripture had not changed: what had changed was the Christians’ understanding of it in the light of their Master’s teaching and achievement. It is easy to appreciate how Jews, who did not share the Christians’ estimate of the person and work of Jesus, found this playing fast and loose with the divine commandments an incomprehensible and totally deplorable proceeding.
Christians, on the other hand, who found such luminous testimony to Christ and the gospel in the same scriptures, wondered how Jews could read them with such lack of comprehension. One explanation was that a ‘judicial blinding’ prevented Jews from seeing what was so plain to Christians. Paul uses the story of Moses’ face, which shone with reflected glory after he had been in the presence of God, so that he had to put a veil or mask on it (Exod. 34:29–35); in Paul’s application of the story, the veil is somehow transferred from Moses’ face to the minds of the synagogue congregation ‘whenever Moses is read’, so that they cannot see ‘the glory of God in the face of Christ’ (2 Cor. 3:7–4:6).
Justin Martyr in his First Apology criticizes the Jewish belief that the one who introduced himself to Moses in the burning bush as ‘the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob’ was ‘the Father and Creator of the universe’. The Jews are wrong, says Justin (as the spirit of prophecy says, ‘Israel does not know me, my people have not understood me’); it was the Son of God who spoke to Moses from the bush. He bases his argument on the statement that ‘the angel of the Lord appeared’ to Moses in the bush (Exod. 3:2), and it is the Son of God, says Justin, ‘who is called both angel and apostle’. But Justin is wrong: he is contradicted by Jesus himself. When Jesus, in his dispute with some Sadducees, based the truth of the resurrection on the affirmation of Exodus 3:6, ‘I am the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob’, he certainly identified the speaker with ‘the Father and Creator of the universe’. But even the plain sense of Jesus’ words (which were not unknown to Justin) could not dislodge from his mind the force of the interpretative principle that, where ‘the angel of the Lord’ is mentioned in the Old Testament narrative (especially if the phrase alternates, as it does in the narrative of the burning bush, with ‘God’ or ‘the Lord’), it is Christ before his incarnation that is meant.
The inability of Jews and Gentiles to comprehend one another, despite their common Bible, is well illustrated in Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho. Trypho is a Jew who has escaped from the disaster which befell the Jews of Palestine with the suppression of the second Jewish revolt against Rome (ad 135); he and Justin meet in Ephesus and fall into conversation. Justin tells Trypho how he was converted to Christian faith from Greek philosophy; Trypho smilingly suggests that it would have been better to stick to Plato than to desert him for the opinons of men of no repute. This leads them to discuss the issues between Christianity and Judaism: the two men are unprejudiced, friendly and courteous in their language, but they achieve no meeting of minds. Both appeal to the Old Testament, but they cannot agree on its meaning, because they argue from incompatible principles of interpretation. Quite often, indeed, the modern Christian reader is bound to agree with Trypho’s interpretation against Justin’s.
For example, they discuss the incident of the burning bush, just mentioned. After listening to Justin’s interpretation, Trypho says, ‘This is not what we understand from the words quoted: we understand that, while it was an angel that appeared in a flame of fire, it was God who spoke to Moses.’ Here Trypho’s understanding is sounder than Justin’s.
On the same principle Justin argues that it was Christ who announced Isaac’s birth to Abraham and Sarah (Gen. 18:10), who overthrew the cities of the plain (Gen. 19:23), who spoke to Jacob in his dreams at Bethel and Paddan-aram and wrestled with him at Peniel (Gen. 28:13–15; 31:11–13; 32:24–30), who appeared to Joshua as captain of the Lord’s host (Josh. 5:13–15), and so forth. All this Trypho finds quite unacceptable. Even more unacceptable to him is Justin’s claim that Jewish rabbis have deliberately altered the text of scripture so as to obscure clear references to Christ. For instance, Justin’s Greek text of Psalm 96:10 ( 95:10) read ‘the Lord reigned from the tree’—to him a clear prediction of the crucifixion. Trypho’s Bible did not contain these additional words (and neither does ours). ‘Whether the rulers of our people’, said Trypho, ‘have erased any portion of the scriptures, as you allege, God knows; but it seems incredible.’ Again, Trypho was right.
Trypho even comes to the point of agreeing that Justin is right in saying that, according to the scriptures, the Messiah must suffer; but that, he insists, does not prove Jesus to be the Messiah. After two days’ discussion the two men part as friends, but neither has begun to convince the other.
Justin’s exploitation of the motif of the ‘real presence’ of Christ in the Old Testament has passed into much traditional Christian theology, but it goes far beyond the interpretative tradition of the New Testament and indeed goes beyond the limits of the rational use of language.
Quite apart from the differences between the Hebrew text and the Septuagint, Jews and Christians could no longer be said to read the same scriptures in any material sense, in view of the divergent traditions of interpretation which they followed. The accepted Christian tradition became more sharply anti-Judaic, and the Jewish tradition in turn became increasingly careful to exclude renderings or interpretations, previously quite acceptable, which now proved to lend themselves all too readily to a Christian purpose. So, in spite of the shared heritage of the holy book, the two opposed traditions hardened. Only in more recent times, with the acceptance on both sides of the principles of grammatico-historical exegesis, have the hard outlines softened, so that today Jews and Christians of varying traditions can collaborate happily in the common task of biblical interpretation.
C H. Dodd, The Old Testament in the New (London, 1952), p. 8; cf his According to the Scriptures (London, 1952), p. 57 (‘it is more probable that both writers were guided by a tradition in which this psalm was already referred to Christ’).
It is used as a ‘testimony’ already in the synoptic tradition (Mark 12:10f. and parallels).
Cf Luke 20:17f.; Rom. 9:32f.; 1 Pet. 2:6–8. See J. R. Harris, Testimonies, I (Cambridge, 1916), pp. 27–32.
Cf 1 Cor. 15:24–28; Heb. 2:6–9.
See F. F. Bruce, Biblical Exegesis in the Qumran Texts (London, 1960); G. J. Brooke, Exegesis at Qumran (Sheffield, 1985).
Cf John 13:18 (also 17:12, ‘none of them is lost but the son of perdition, that the scripture might be fulfilled’).
Pss. 69:25 (LXX 68:25); 109:8 (LXX 108:8). For Ps. 69 cf n. 1 above. Compare also the application of Ps. 2:1f. in Acts 4:25–28 to ‘Herod and Pontius Pilate with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel’ (a similar, but not identical, application of Ps. 2:1f. is found in Tertullian, On the Resurrection of the Flesh, 20).
Authorized
King James Version (1611)
See the fourteenth-century German mystical treatise now called Christi Leiden in einer Vision geschaut (‘Christ’s Sufferings seen in a Vision’), ed F. P. Pickering (Manchester, 1952); also F. P. Pickering, ‘Christi Kreuzigung: Das neutestamentliche Wort, das mittelalterliche Bild’, in Literatur und Darstellende Kunst im Mittelalter (Berlin, 1966), pp. 146–192, and ‘The Gothic Image of Christ’, in Essays on Mediaeval German Literature and Iconography (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 3–30. Another example is the fifteenth-century English poem Quia amore langueo, where Cant. 1:5 (understood as ‘I suffer pain for love’s sake’) serves as a text for the sufferings of Christ (The New Oxford Book of English Verse, ed. Helen Gardner [Oxford, 1972], No. 11).
An allusion to Is. 6:9f.
Cf Rom. 9:6–11:27.
Heb. 9:1–10:18.
These three representations of the divine presence are brought together in John 1:14, ‘the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us, and we beheld his glory.’
John 6:35; 4:10–14 and 7:37–39; 8:12.
See A. M. Farrer, A Rebirth of Images (London, 1949).
See Is. 43:2, 16, 19; 48:21; 52:12; 63:7–14.
Cf Luke 9:30f, where Moses and Elijah talk with Jesus on the mount of transfiguration about his ‘exodus’ which was to be accomplished at Jerusalem.
LXX renders differently: ‘Not an ambassador, nor a messenger, but he himself saved them.’
But see J. Barr, Holy Scripture (Oxford, 1983), p. 98.
Mark 1:13; cf Deut. 8:2 (it is noteworthy that Jesus’ three citations of scripture in response to the tempter, reproduced in Matt. 4:4, 7, 10 par. Luke 4:4, 8, 12, are drawn from Deut. 6 and 8).
Melito dwells on this motif in his Paschal Homily, 69, etc. (see p. 68).
Neil Macmichael, quoted by J. Macleod, Scottish Theology (Edinburgh, 1945), pp. 253f.
This warning comes in the course of an exposition and application of Ps. 95:7–11 (LXX 94:7–11).
A. T. Hanson, Jesus Christ in the Old Testament (London, 1965), p. 7, etc.
A halfway stage towards Paul’s statement that ‘the rock was Christ’ may be found in the identification of the rock with divine wisdom, attested in Philo, The Worse attacks the Better, 115 (cf Wisdom 11:4).
See B. M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (London/New York, 1971) pp. 725f.
Cf Letter of Barnabas 6:8f.; Justin, Dialogue with Trypho, 113, 132; see J. R. Harris, Testimonies, II (Cambridge, 1920), pp. 51–57.
See especially Phil. 2:9–11.
Compare Justin’s interpretation of ‘my name is in him’ (Exod. 23:21) in Dialogue with Trypho, 75.
W. Barclay, The Making of the Bible (London, 1961), p. 41.
S. T. Coleridge, Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (London,2 1849), pp. 11, 13.
See E. Flesseman-van Leer, ‘Prinzipien der Sammlung und Ausscheidung bei der Bildung des Kanons’, ZTK 61 (1964), p. 407 with n. 14.
Tatian, Address to the Greeks, 29 cf Justin, Dialogue with Trypho, 8.1; Theophilus, To Autolycus, 1.14.
Mark 7:19.
Is. 1:3 LXX.
Justin, First Apology, 63.11f.
Justin, First Apology, 63.5.
Mark 12:24–27 par. Matt. 22:29–32 and Luke 20:34–38.
Justin quotes Luke 20:35f. in Dialogue with Trypho, 81.4.
Dialogue, 60.1.
Dialogue, 56.6–8.
Dialogue, 56.18–21.
Dialogue 58.
Dialogue, 62.4f.
Septuagint (pre-Christian Greek Version of OT)
Dialogue, 73.
Dialogue, 90.1.
Rabbi Aqiba’s colleagues were scandalized when he seemed to accept the identification of the ‘one like a son of man’ of Dan. 7:13 with the Davidic Messiah (TB Ḥagigah 14a; Sanhedrin 38b). See also p. 295 with n. 37.
But this collaboration can scarcely be expected to extend to the ‘plenary sense’ of the Old Testament as developed in Christian tradition; see pp. 316–334.