An atheist commented that it was the use of the Old Testament by the Gospels that convinced him the Bible was just a human creation. It made me think about how we assume the Gospel writers came to the Old Testament texts and what they were doing when they used them to show "fulfillment."
powerstrip dovnloadThis is similar to what many people discover when they are first exposed to the critical, literary study of the Bible. If they have been told that the Bible works a certain way, they are shaken to hear other ways of looking at the Bible. This is particularly true when Divine authorship is suddenly eclipsed by human authors and their various methodologies. When the "magic book" approach has been foundational to your epistemology and your apologetics, you are traumatized. "How can I know God said it if we have to say "What did the authors mean when they wrote it?""
I grew up in Falwellian Baptist Fundamentalism with black, KJV, Scofields being waved around in every sermon. My pastor once preached that the Bible was the fourth member of the Godhead. He said it. I was warned away from college and told not to go to seminary because that faith would be undermined.
I did, and it was. Thank God.
To visit Ed's example, I learned that the OT prophecies were selected, often far out of context, by the Gospel writers. Isaiah 7:14 isn't about the virgin birth of the Messiah. It just isn't. But Matthew makes the verse work that way. Now...God didn't cite Isaiah to Mary in the annunciation, but Matthew says that scripture was fulfilled. There are many examples of this, some more obviously created than others.
Some critics will even point at Psalm 22, and then at the crucifixion in Mark, and say that the details Mark gives were drawn from Psalm 21 to make it appear there was prophecy-fulfillment, when there wasn't. Then we get to Hebrews, and the author is quoting scripture out of context as if no one was checking his work.
What's going on here? Clearly, these first century Christian writers weren't taking dictation from angels. They were creating literature. (Gasp) And doing it in purposeful ways. The purpose is pretty clear: They believe that their experience with Jesus is the fulfillment- the completion- of the Old Testament scriptures.
Now...Christians have emphasized this as "text to text" fulfillment. (Isaiah 7 fulfilled in Luke 1-2, etc.) I would suggest we are looking for a different kind of fulfillment. We might call it "Hope to reality" fulfillment. The hope of the Old Testament text is a deliverance from exile. A remaking of Israel. A Messiah through whom God keeps his promises. The embodiment of Israel's suffering and resurrection in that messiah. (HT to NTW)
If this is the case, then the New Testament writers are "ransacking" the Old Testament to tell this story. Their use of the Old Testament may be controversial, but their aim is true: It's all fulfilled- made real, made actual- in Jesus. They have the cake in hand, and they cite the recipe in bits and pieces, sometimes more accurately than others.
I think the resurrection appearances left the Christian community with the certain knowledge that Jesus was the key to understanding the Scriptures, but they had no "formal" scholarly training to approach the scriptures as we might today. No, they approached it in the creative way the rabbis approached it. It surprised me that Ed Babinski said Jewish writers revealed the errors in these citations, because Jewish writers are the experts at this kind of creative citation!