Can Christians Speak of "the Old Testament" These Days?

You say 'Tanakh'; I say 'Old Testament':

Let's Call the Whole Thing Off?

These are my rough-and-ready and unadorned notes for my worskshop at Leeds Day Limmud, 1 November. I will annotate after the fact, so that the thought progression becomes (a little?) clear. 

It is a truism of Jewish-Christian dialogue that for Christians to speak of ‘the Old Testament’ causes offence and some more ‘neutral’ language needs be found. But what if what Christians mean by ‘Old Testament’ is so different from Tenakh (language, ordering of books, the books themselves, let alone different interpretive principles), that it is actually a different text, such that the Christian terminology has its own integrity in context? Can we differ, better?

Patrick Morrow

Patrick studied interfaith relations in Ireland, and Jewish-Christian relations at the Woolf Institute, Cambridge. He worked for the Council of Christians and Jews as a Branch activist and a Programme Manager. He is an Anglican priest, chaplain and Yorkshireman. He makes too much out of being able to read Hebrew out loud.

1. Good manners cost nothing!

2. Cultural misunderstanding!

3. 'Against the Jews'/Adversus Iudaeos 'tradition'

John Chrysostom. First Homily Against the Jews (386/7)

'Nothing is more miserable than those people who never failed to attack their own salvation. When there was need to observe the Law, they trampled it under foot. Now that the Law has ceased to bind, they obstinately strive to observe it. What could be more pitiable than those who provoke God not only by transgressing the Law but also by keeping it. On account of this Stephen said: “You stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart, you always resist the Holy Spirit,” not only by transgressing the Law but also by wishing to observe it at the wrong time.'

Augustine Contra Faustum (397/9)

'It is a great confirmation of our faith that such important testimony is borne by enemies. The believing Gentiles cannot suppose these testimonies to Christ to be recent forgeries; for they find them in books held sacred for so many ages by those who crucified Christ, and still regarded with the highest veneration by those who every day blaspheme Christ.'

5. What does the 'New' Testament itself say
   about the 'Old' in general
   and the Scriptures in particular?

6. What are the other options?

7. How different from TN”K does the Christian Testament have to be
   for it to make no difference?

5. THE NEW TESTAMENT

Mark 2.18-22

cf. Matthew 9.14-17; Luke 5.33-39; (Gnostic Gospel of Thomas 47)

'Now John's disciples and the Pharisees were fasting and people came to him and said to him. “Why do John's disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?” Jesus said to them, “The wedding guests cannot fast while the bridegroom is with them, can they? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast on that day. No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak, otherwise, the patch pulls away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made. And no one puts new wine in to old wineskins, otherwise the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins, but one puts new wine into fresh wineskins.”'

Hebrews 8.8-13

6 But Jesus has now obtained a more excellent ministry,

and to that degree he is the mediator of a better covenant [diatheke],

which has been enacted through better promises.

7 For if that first covenant [diatheke] had been faultless,

there would have been no need to look for a second.

8 [God] finds fault with them when he says:
‘The days are surely coming, says the Lord,
when I will establish a new covenant [diatheke] with the house of Israel
and with the house of Judah;
9 not like the covenant that I made with their ancestors,
on the day when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt;
for they did not continue in my covenant

and so I had no concern for them, says the Lord.
10 This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel
after those days, says the Lord:
I will put my laws in their minds,
and write them on their hearts,
and I will be their God,
and they shall be my people.
11 And they shall not teach one another
or say to each other, “Know the Lord”,
for they shall all know me,
from the least of them to the greatest.
12 For I will be merciful towards their iniquities,
and I will remember their sins no more.’

13 In speaking of ‘a new covenant’, he has made the first one obsolete.

And what is obsolete and growing old will soon disappear.

En to legein Kainen pepalaioken ten proten...

to de palaioumenon kai geraskon eggus aphanismou

(and cf. 8.6, 10-11 for other references to 'old diatheke')

2 Corinthians 3.4-16

'Such is the confidence that we have through Christ toward God. Not that we are competent of ourselves to claim anything as coming from us; our competence is from God, who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant [diatheke], not of letter but of spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. Now if the ministry of death, chiseled in letters on stone tablets, came in glory so that the people of Israel could not gaze at Moses’ face because of the glory of his face, a glory now set aside, how much more will the ministry of the Spirit come in glory? For if there was glory in the ministry of condemnation, much more does the ministry of justification abound in glory! Indeed, what once had glory has lost its glory because of the greater glory; for if what was set aside came through glory, much more has the permanent come in glory!

Since, then, we have such a hope, we act with great boldness, not like Moses, who put a veil [kalumma] over his face to keep the people of Israel from gazing at the end [telos] of the glory that was being set aside [katargoumenon]. But their minds were hardened [eporothe]. Indeed, to this very day, when they hear the reading of the old covenant [anagnosai tes palaias diathekes], that same veil is still there, since only in Christ is it set aside. Indeed, to this very day whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their minds [kardia]; but when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.'

Luke 5.38-39

'...But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins.

And no one after drinking old wine desires new wine, but says the old is good [better, krestos].'

Matthew 13.52

'And [Jesus] said to them, “Therefore ever scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old [kaina kai palaia].'

6. Other Options

The Hebrew Bible The Jewish Bible The Common Testament (E. Schuessler Fiorenza) The First Testament (James Sanders) The Former Testament (as translation!) The Prime Testament (Lacocque) The Scriptures (Paul van Buren)

The New Testament The Christian Bible The Christian Testament (E. Schuessler Fiorenza) The Second Testament (James Sanders) The Latter Testament (as translation!) The Apostolic Sayings The Apostolic Writings (Paul van Buren)

Paul van Buren

A Theology of the Jewish-Christian Reality. Volume One: Discerning the Way

(San Fransisco: Harper and Row, 1987) 125f; 133

'In the middle of the second century, in writing what from our point of view was presumptuously called a “dialogue” with Trypho (a rather hypothetical Jew) – today we would call it a monologue vis-a-vis a symbol – Justin Martyr devoted almost all of his essay to an interpretation of the Scriptures. Precious little is cited from the Apostolic Writings. Justin's gospel quite simply was this interpretation.'

'The Apostolic Writings, within the context of the total Bible of the church bear testimony to the fact that a genuine fork in the road was occasioned by the response of the church going its own way, convinced though we are that it was God who called us into this deviation from the Way of Israel, whereas Israel continued in the Way in which it had been called to walk.'

7. BUT IS THE OLD TESTAMENT A DIFFERENT BOOK ANY WAY?

a. The importance of the Greek (Septuagint)

Classic example: Isaiah 7.14 almah in MT; parthenos in pre-Christian LXX, so Matt 1.23.

b. Additional books/extracts (no two extant versions exactly agree)

Additions to Esther [C] and Daniel [C]

1 Esdras [O]; Tobit [C]; Judith [C]; 1 Maccabees [C]; 2 Maccabees [C];

3 Maccabees [O]; Psalm 151 [O]; Prayer of Manasseh [O];

Wisdom [C]; Sirach [C];

Baruch [C]; Letter of Jeremiah [C].

(4 Maccabees in appendix [O]).

c. Hermeneutical frame.

Concentric circles around Torah

Or progressive history, from the Garden of Eden to the Prophets (Malachi...)

(cf. Matt 11.13: 'For the Prophets and the Law [Nomos] prophesied until John...')

Cf Jonathan Sacks (formerly on blog, but no longer available online)

'And so we come to... Christianity. Here I want to make two fundamental points. Have any of you read Jorge Luis Borges. The Argentinian short-story writer? You have? So you will remember his little short story called “Pierre Menard, [?], author of Don Quixote”, which is a story about a crazy lunatic guy called Pierre Menard who sets out to write Don Quixote in exactly the same words as Cervantes wrote Don Quixote. The only difference was that Don Quixote in 1605 is talking from the advantage point of the late Middle Ages whereas Pierre Menard is talking exactly the same words – he is ironic and anachronistic etc. etc. In other words, Borges is giving us the metaphysical fiction that you can have two books which have the same words but they are two different books. That is his fiction.

Now let me ask you: do we have a case of that, not in fiction but in fact? The answer is obviously yes. There are two books which are completely different from one another but which have the same words. What are they? Tenach and Old Testament. They are completely different books. But they have the same words.

Tenach is whatever it is for us. The Old Testament – which is a quite different document, which in Christianity is seen as prefiguring a particular semi-divine, semi-human being who is the Messiah, who liberates humanity from original sin. There is no way that reading emerges out of the Jewish reading of Tenach. There is no way at all. These are two different books. They just happen to have the same words. I beg you to internalise that. Bite it. Inhale. Whatever you like. You can have two books with the same words but they are different things.

Cf. Jacob Neusner, Jews and Christians: The Myth of a Common Tradition (London: SCM Press, 1991), 1.

Jews and Christian are '[d]ifferent people talking about different things to different people”.

Contrast Daniel Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ (New York: The New Press, 2012)
.

'I wish us to see that Christ too – the divine Messiah – is a Jew. Christology, or the 

early ideas about Christ, is also a Jewish discourse and not – until much later – an anti-

Jewish discourse at all. Many Israelites at the time of Jesus were expecting a Messiah

 who would be divine and come to earth in the form of a human [esp from Daniel 7.9ff.]. 

Thus the basic underlying thoughts from which both the Trinity and the incarnation grew

are there in the very world into which Jesus was born and in which he was first written 

about in the Gospels…’

SOME FINISHING (NOT FINAL) REMARKS

Marcion of Synope c 85-160 – the heretic!

Study of the Hebrew Scriptures, along with received writings circulating in the nascent Church, led Marcion to conclude that many of the teachings of Jesus were incompatible with the actions of the God of the Old Testament... Marcion responded by developing a di-theistic system of belief around the year 144. This notion of two gods—a higher transcendent one and a lower world creator and ruler—allowed Marcion to reconcile contradictions between Old Covenant theology and the Gospel message proclaimed by Jesus.

Marcion affirmed Jesus to be the saviour sent by the Heavenly Father, and Paul as his chief apostle. In contrast to other leaders of the nascent Christian church, however, Marcion declared that Christianity was in complete discontinuity with Judaism and entirely opposed to the Old Testament message. Marcion did not claim that the Jewish Scriptures were false. Instead, Marcion asserted that they were to be read in an absolutely literal manner, thereby developing an understanding that YHWH was not the same god spoken of by Jesus. For example, Marcion argued that the Genesis account of YHWH walking through the Garden of Eden asking where Adam was proved YHWH inhabited a physical body and was without universal knowledge (omniscience), attributes wholly incompatible with the Heavenly Father professed by Jesus.

According to Marcion, the god of the Old Testament, whom he called the Demiurge, the creator of the material universe, is a jealous tribal deity of the Jews, whose law represents legalistic reciprocal justice and who punishes mankind for its sins through suffering and death. Contrastingly, the god that Jesus professed is an altogether different being, a universal god of compassion and love who looks upon humanity with benevolence and mercy. Marcion also produced his Antitheses contrasting the Demiurge of the Old Testament with the Heavenly Father of the New Testament.

Marcion held Jesus to be the son of the Heavenly Father but understood the incarnation in a docetic manner, i.e. that Jesus' body was only an imitation of a material body, and consequently denied Jesus' physical and bodily birth, death, and resurrection.

Marcion was the first to introduce an early Christian canon. His canon consisted of still only eleven books grouped into two sections: the Evangelikon, being a shorter and earlier version of the gospel which later became known as the Gospel of Luke, and the Apostolikon, a selection of ten epistles of Paul the Apostle, whom Marcion considered the correct interpreter and transmitter of Jesus' teachings. The gospel used by Marcion does not contain elements relating to Jesus' birth and childhood, although it does contain some elements of Judaism, and material challenging Marcion's ditheism.

Contrast Vatican post-Second Vatican Council – post Nostra Aetate (28 October 1965!)

Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, 1985, Notes on the correct way to present the Jews and Judaism in preaching and catechesis in the Roman Catholic Church.

Footnote:

'We continue to use the expression Old Testament because it is traditional (cf. already 2 Cor 3:14) but also because “Old” does not mean “out of date” or “out-worn”. In any case, it is the permanent value of the O.T. As a source of Christian Revelation that is emphasised here (cf. Dei Verbum, 3).

Already CRRJ, 1974, Guidelines and Suggestions for Implementing the Conciliar Declaration “Nostra Aetate”

'An effort will be made to acquire a better understanding of whatever in the Old Testament retains its own perpetual value (cf. Dei Verbum, 14-15), since that has not been cancelled by the later interpretation of the New Testament. Rather, the New Testament brings out the full meaning of the Old. While both Old and New illumine and explain each other (cf. ibid., 16). This is all the more important since liturgical reform is now bringing the text of the Old Testament ever more frequently to the attention of Christians.'

The Pontifical Biblical Commission The Jewish People and their Sacred Scriptures, 2001 § 22, emphasis added: 'The Jewish reading of the Bible is a possible one, in continuity with the Jewish Scriptures of the Second Temple period, a reading analogous to the Christian reading, which developed in parallel fashion.'

Fabakh as Christian Scripture

1. History (least)
2. Types.
   Adam as Christ (Romans 5.14); Jonah as Christ (Luke 11.29-32; Matthew 12.38-42; 16.1-4)

Burning Bush as Christ, or Mary.

Job/psalmist as Christ.

3. Allegories
   Abraham's 318 men (Gen 14.14) – in Greek IHT. Epistle of Barnabas IH = Iesous. T = Stauros.
4. Promises.
   Prophecy to Eve – re Mary.
   Suffering Servant – re Jesus.

Read not 'Old' but 'Original'.

Ecclesia et Synagoa – now, and then.