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Course 7 · Lesson 8.1

Fulfilment and continuity: how the New Testament uses the Old

12 minute read

Lessons in this course

Course 7 outline

Module 1: The World of the New Testament

  1. Second Temple Judaism in the time of Jesus
  2. Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes and other movements
  3. Rome, the Herods and the province of Judea
  4. Hopes, protest and revolt in Jewish political life

Module 2: Jesus in History

  1. Sources for Jesus: Christian, Jewish and Roman
  2. The quests for the historical Jesus and their methods
  3. Criteria of authenticity and their limits
  4. Historical results and Christian confession

Module 3: The Gospels as Books

  1. The gospels and ancient biography
  2. Traditions of authorship and the arguments about them
  3. The synoptic problem: the evidence of agreement and difference
  4. Solutions: Markan priority, Q, Matthean priority and others
  5. Four portraits of Jesus: the distinct emphasis of each gospel

Module 4: Acts and the Spread of the Church

  1. Pentecost and the Jerusalem church
  2. The mission to the Gentiles and the council at Jerusalem
  3. Paul in Acts and in his own letters
  4. Acts as history and as theology

Module 5: Pauline Theology

  1. Paul and his letters: occasion, authorship and order
  2. Gospel, faith and righteousness in Romans and Galatians
  3. Christ, the Spirit and the body of Christ
  4. Reading Paul: traditional, new perspective and other approaches

Module 6: Johannine Theology

  1. The Gospel, the three letters and Revelation: authorship questions
  2. Word, light, life and love in the Gospel of John
  3. The signs and the I am sayings
  4. The Spirit, the community and the Johannine letters

Module 7: Hope, Authority and Church Order

  1. The kingdom of God and last things in Jesus and the apostles
  2. Ways of reading New Testament eschatology
  3. What an apostle was and how apostolic authority worked
  4. Offices and order in the first churches
  5. How Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant churches read the evidence

Module 8: The Testaments Together

  1. Fulfilment and continuity: how the New Testament uses the Old
  2. Law and covenant across the Testaments
  3. Comparing Paul and John: a method
  4. Shared convictions and meaningful differences

All courses

Program / Course 7: New Testament Theology and History / Lesson 8.1

What you will learn

  • Describe the main ways New Testament writers use the Old Testament: quotation, allusion, typology and fulfilment.
  • Explain what it means to say that Christ fulfils the Scriptures.
  • Work through examples such as Matthew 2:15 and Hosea 11:1, and Matthew 1:23 and Isaiah 7:14.
  • State the questions Jewish readers and modern scholars raise about the New Testament’s use of Scripture.

The big idea

The New Testament writers believed that the story of Jesus was the climax of the story told in the Scriptures of Israel. They quote the Old Testament hundreds of times, echo it constantly, and find in its events, persons and promises patterns that point to Christ. This is called fulfilment. It does not always mean a prediction of a single event. Sometimes it means that a pattern is brought to its completion. Jewish readers have often not found these readings persuasive, and modern scholars discuss how they work.

Key terms

Fulfilment
The completion or realization of what Scripture promised or pointed toward. The Greek verb plēroō can mean to fill up, and it covers more than prediction and exact match.
Typology
A way of reading in which a person, event or institution of the Old Testament (the type) is seen as a pattern that is completed in Christ (the antitype). Adam is called a type of the one to come (Romans 5:14).
Allusion and echo
A reference to the Old Testament by wording or imagery, without a formal quotation. Richard Hays has studied such echoes in Paul.
Messianic prophecy
A text that Christians understand as pointing to the Messiah. Scholars debate which texts were understood this way before Jesus.
Septuagint
The Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, which many New Testament writers quote. Its wording sometimes differs from the Hebrew text.
Midrash
A Jewish way of interpreting Scripture that explores meaning beyond the surface. Some scholars compare New Testament interpretation to midrash.
Supersessionism
The teaching that the church has replaced Israel in God’s plan. Many churches now reject or qualify it, in light of Romans 9 to 11.

Background

The first Christians were Jews, and their Bible was the Law, the Prophets and the Writings, mostly in Greek. They read it in the light of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Luke tells how the risen Jesus, on the road to Emmaus, ‘beginning at Moses and all the prophets, expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself’ (Luke 24:27), and later said that everything written about him in the law, the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled (Luke 24:44). Christians took this as a key for reading the whole Bible.

Reading Scripture in the light of a new event was not unique to Christians. The Dead Sea Scrolls contain commentaries which read the prophets as speaking of the community’s own time. What was distinctive was the claim that the event was Jesus. The question for the student is how the New Testament writers actually read, and how their readings are to be understood today.

Step-by-step explanation

Step 1: Different kinds of use

Direct quotations introduced by a formula are the most visible. Matthew uses a refrain that something happened ‘that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet’ (Matthew 1:22, 2:15, 2:23 and others). Paul quotes Habakkuk 2:4, ‘the just shall live by faith’, in Romans 1:17 and Galatians 3:11. Hebrews quotes the Psalms at length. The author of Acts presents the early sermons as built on texts such as Joel 2 and Psalms 16 and 110.

Other uses are subtler. The gospels shape the story of Jesus after the exodus, the wilderness and the story of David. The baptism of Jesus echoes Isaiah 42 and Psalm 2, the feeding of the crowd echoes Moses’ manna and Elisha’s loaves. Revelation draws on Daniel, Ezekiel and Isaiah in almost every verse though it quotes none by name. Scholars find that the New Testament authors often invoke the whole context of a passage with only a few of its words.

Step 2: Examples that raise questions

Matthew 2:15 says that the flight to Egypt fulfilled ‘Out of Egypt have I called my son.’ In Hosea 11:1 this refers to the exodus of Israel: ‘When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt.’ Matthew is not claiming that Hosea predicted the infant Jesus’ journey as a prophecy in the narrow sense. He sees Jesus as embodying Israel, retracing its story. Many scholars read this as typology and an example of the wider meaning of fulfilment.

Matthew 1:23 quotes Isaiah 7:14: ‘Behold, a virgin shall be with child.’ The Hebrew word almah means a young woman, and the Greek Septuagint translates it parthenos, which usually means virgin. In Isaiah the sign was given to King Ahaz about a child to be born in his own time. Matthew’s use depends on the Greek wording and sees a deeper fulfilment. Jewish readers often object that the original context is not about a messiah. Christians reply that the New Testament writers read the text in light of its fuller fulfilment, and traditions differ about whether the verse had a double sense.

Step 3: Paul, Hebrews and typology

Paul treats Adam as a type of Christ (Romans 5:14) and the rock in the wilderness as Christ (1 Corinthians 10:4), saying that these things ‘happened unto them for ensamples’ and were written for our admonition (1 Corinthians 10:11). In Galatians 4:21 to 31 he uses the story of Hagar and Sarah as an allegory of two covenants, a reading that departs from the usual sense of the text. Hebrews reads the tabernacle, the sacrifices and the priesthood as shadows of the heavenly reality fulfilled in Christ (Hebrews 8:5, 10:1).

These readings assume that God’s work in history has a pattern, so that earlier events anticipate later ones. The patristic writers developed this approach, and the Western tradition spoke of four senses of Scripture: the literal, the allegorical, the moral and the anagogical. The Reformers returned to the literal sense, though they too found Christ throughout the Old Testament.

Step 4: Questions and responses

Jewish interpreters have raised fair questions: that the New Testament sometimes takes texts out of context, relies on the Greek translation, and finds in the Hebrew Bible meanings that its original readers could not have seen. Christian scholars respond in various ways. Some say that the New Testament writers used the interpretive methods of their day and were accurate about the larger story. Others say that a text can have a meaning beyond what its human author intended, which is disclosed in the light of Christ. Others, such as C. H. Dodd, argued that the New Testament writers used texts as pointers to the broader passage in which they stand.

Many churches now state that continuity and fulfilment do not mean that God has rejected Israel. Paul asks, ‘Hath God cast away his people? God forbid’ (Romans 11:1) and holds that the gifts and calling of God are without repentance (Romans 11:29). The church’s reading of the Old Testament is a reading in light of Christ, which does not cancel the Jewish people’s own reading or covenant.

  1. What does it mean to say that a pattern, and not only a prediction, is fulfilled?
  2. How does Matthew’s use of Hosea 11:1 differ from reading it as a direct prediction?
  3. Why does the Greek wording of Isaiah 7:14 matter for Matthew’s reading?
  4. What do you think of the claim that a text may have a fuller meaning than its human author saw?
  5. How would you respond to a Jewish reader who says that the New Testament misreads the Hebrew Bible?
  6. Why does Paul say in Romans 11 that God has not cast away his people?

Examples

The servant in Isaiah

Isaiah 53 describes a suffering servant who bears the sins of many. The early church applied this passage to Jesus (Acts 8:32 to 35, 1 Peter 2:22 to 25). In Jewish tradition the servant is often understood as Israel. The passage shows how a text can be read in more than one way.

Jesus and Jonah

Jesus says that as Jonah was three days in the belly of the fish, so the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth (Matthew 12:40). Jonah serves as a sign through a similarity of pattern, not as a prediction in words.

The Emmaus road

In Luke 24 the disciples’ hearts burn as Jesus explains the Scriptures. Churches use the story in the pattern of worship, with the word read and expounded before the breaking of the bread.

Different perspectives

Catholic view

The Catholic Church teaches that the Old and New Testaments form one divine plan, and that the New is hidden in the Old and the Old is unveiled in the New (an idea from Augustine cited in Dei Verbum 16). It recognizes the spiritual senses of Scripture, and holds that the covenant with Israel has never been revoked (a phrase John Paul II used in 1980, echoing Romans 11:29).

Orthodox view

The Orthodox Church reads the Old Testament, especially in the Septuagint, through the Fathers and the liturgy, which is full of types and prophecies of Christ. Typology is a basic method in Orthodox hymns and icons.

Protestant view

Protestants stress the unity of Scripture and the centrality of Christ. Reformed theology speaks of the one covenant of grace, and Lutherans of law and gospel. Dispensationalists distinguish Israel and the church more sharply. Many evangelical scholars, such as G. K. Beale, have written on the New Testament’s use of the Old.

Jewish and scholarly views

Jewish scholars often argue that the New Testament reads the Hebrew Bible in ways foreign to its original sense, while some, such as Jon Levenson, note that Christians and Jews read the same texts in light of different centers. Critical scholars see the New Testament as a part of Jewish interpretive activity in the Second Temple period.

Why it matters

How the New Testament reads the Old affects the way Christians read the Old Testament, the way they speak of Jews, and the way they understand Christ. Studying it carefully protects against careless proof-texting and against dismissing the Old Testament, and helps Christians converse honestly with Jewish neighbors.

Common misunderstandings

Misunderstanding: Every Old Testament prediction fulfilled in the New Testament is a literal prediction written in advance.

Correction: The New Testament uses fulfilment in several senses, including pattern, typology and completion. Not every quoted text was a prediction in its original setting.

Misunderstanding: The Old Testament is only background to the New.

Correction: The New Testament treats the Old as Scripture with its own authority and as the story into which Jesus fits. Most churches hold the Old Testament to be the Word of God for Christians.

Misunderstanding: Fulfilment means that Judaism is obsolete.

Correction: Many churches teach that it does not. Romans 11 affirms that God’s gifts to Israel are irrevocable, and several churches have formally rejected replacement teaching.

Misunderstanding: Jewish and Christian readings of the Old Testament are the same.

Correction: They share texts and much method, but differ on the center, which for Christians is Christ.

Knowledge check

What are some ways the New Testament uses the Old?

Direct quotations introduced by formulas, allusions and echoes of wording and imagery, typology that sees earlier persons and events as patterns of Christ, and the reading of whole stories such as the exodus as shaping the story of Jesus.

How do scholars explain Matthew’s use of Hosea 11:1?

Hosea speaks of God calling Israel out of Egypt. Matthew applies it to Jesus, who is seen as embodying Israel and retracing its story. Most scholars call this typology and fulfilment of a pattern, not a narrow prediction.

Why is Isaiah 7:14 debated?

In Hebrew the word is almah, a young woman, and the sign was given to Ahaz about a child born in his time. The Greek version says parthenos, virgin, which Matthew follows. Christians see a fuller fulfilment, and Jewish readers often object.

What is typology?

A reading in which an Old Testament person, event or institution is a pattern that anticipates and is completed in Christ, such as Adam as a type of Christ, the Passover lamb, or the tabernacle. It assumes that God’s work in history has a consistent shape.

What does Paul say in Romans 11 about Israel?

That God has not cast away his people, that a remnant remains, that the gifts and calling of God are without repentance, and that in the end all Israel will be saved. He warns Gentile believers not to boast over the branches.

Think it through

  1. How do you read the Old Testament differently because of the New?
  2. What responsibilities do Christians have when they read Jewish Scripture as pointing to Christ?
  3. Which example of fulfilment in this lesson do you find most convincing, and which least?
  4. How would you explain fulfilment to a friend without implying that the Old Testament is inferior?

Independent assignment

Two texts side by side

In your own notebook, write 350 to 500 words. Choose one fulfilment quotation in Matthew (for example Matthew 2:15, 2:17 to 18 or 4:14 to 16). Read the Old Testament passage in its own context, then Matthew’s passage. Write what the original text meant, what Matthew does with it, and what kind of fulfilment he seems to claim. Do not send this to anyone.

Further study