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IV. How the New Testament Uses the Old

A. C.H. Dodd’s According to the Scriptures

All of what we’ve been talking about so far represents a relatively new discovery (or re-discovery) for New Testament scholarship.

Probably the decisive turning point in the scholarship was a little book published in 1953 by a Protestant scholar, C.H. Dodd, According to the Scriptures: The Sub-Structure of New Testament Theology.

Dodd started off by challenging the presumption that the New Testament writers didn’t know what they were doing or that they quoted the Old Testament out of context. His careful study proved two things:

First, that the New Testament writers always quote Old Testament passages in context. And although they bring a fresh and deeper interpretation to those passages, their interpretations remain largely faithful to the original intentions of the Old Testament authors.

Secondly, Dodd proved that in their citations of verses and sentences from the Old Testament, the New Testament writers always pointed the reader to the "the whole context" of the passage being referred to. In interpreting these passages, he added, the New Testament writers always followed "intelligible and consistent principles." That is to say, they operated from a basic agreement that there was a "right way" to read and interpret Scripture and they always followed those rules.

Those conclusions - which flew in the face of the scholarly consensus - were dramatic enough, especially coming from Dodd, who was one of the most respected New Testament scholars in the world.

But Dodd went on to argue - convincingly, too - that the Old Testament texts cited in the New were just the tip of the iceberg. He said the entire Old Testament served as a kind of "narrative sub-structure" for the New Testament, as well as for the dogmas, creeds and sacraments of the early Church. He writes:

Though not stated explicitly in the New Testament it is everywhere presupposed….[T]he history of the people of God is built upon a certain pattern corresponding to God’s design for man, His creature. It is a pattern, not in the sense of a pre-ordained sequence of inevitable events, but in the sense of a kind of master-plan imposed upon the order of human life in this world by the Creator Himself….It is this pattern, disclosed ‘in divers parts and divers manners’ in the past history of Israel, that the New Testament writers conceive to have been brought into full light in the events of the Gospel story.

What Dodd describes here sounds a lot like the way we described the "biblical worldview" above. And it is.

B. Subtexts and New Contexts

The implications of these findings for us, as present-day interpreters of the Bible, are significant.

Why? Because most of us have been brought up to read the Bible with the same prejudices that formed the scholarly consensus we have described.

We’ve been taught to read the Old Testament almost as if it’s a different book than the New. You can still hear this in parish Bible studies and catechesis - there’s talk of "the God of the Old Testament" as if He’s different from the God of the New; there’s talk of the "Hebrew Scriptures" as if they’re not a part of the Christian Scriptures, and so on.

This divorce of the Old Testament from the New was the stuff of heresy in the early Church.

What we have today is less heresy than naivette. We think we’re being more "scientific" in reading this way. We examine Scripture almost like a botanist might examine a leaf - through dissection and cross-section.

But what Dodd and others since him have shown, is that we can’t even scratch the surface of understanding the New Testament if we read this way. We have to pay attention to the "narrative sub-structure." Which means we need to study the Old Testament context of the New Testament texts.

So that’s what we’re going to do in this class, using the Gospel of Matthew as our subject. We’re going to study not the veins of the leaf, but the whole leaf. Not only the whole leaf, but the tree the leaf came from.

We’re going to be interested not only in quotations and citations from the Old Testament but also echoes and allusions. And we’re going to look at the larger contexts of those quotations. We’re going to find that the Old Testament - the entire Old Testament - forms the context for what Matthew is doing in his Gospel.

Continue to Section 5