Did Jesus reinterpret the Old Testament?

A colleague just showed me an article he has written addressing the issue of anti-Zionism in the Christian Church and the claim that the Old Testament promises of land made by God to to the Jewish people were “reinterpreted” by Jesus and the Apostles. In the article, he asks where that leaves 2 Timothy 3:16, which says “All Scripture [by which Paul means the Old Testament scriptures] is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.”

That set me thinking.

What I’m expressing here are my embryonic thoughts and I need to think more deeply about them but, for what they are worth, here are my first observations.

What do Colin Chapman, Stephen Sizer and other anti-Zionists mean when they tell us that Jesus and the Apostles “reinterpreted” the land promises found in the pages of the Hebrew Scriptures? The implications of such a claim are very serious.

If we can understand the Old Testament only through the lens of Jesus and the Apostles, as Chapman and Sizer claim, in what way can the Hebrew Scriptures be said to be “profitable … for teaching” in their own right? Why bother to read them at all? Why not just read the New Testament?

The claim that Jesus and the apostles reinterpreted the Old Testament Scriptures implies the promises of a land for Abraham’s physical descendant had one meaning before Christ (i.e. a literal meaning) but now they mean the opposite (i.e. they have a spiritual meaning). Either the promises always had a spiritual meaning (which no one, not even Moses understood) or they continue to mean what they always meant.

If the promise of land to Israel no longer means a promise of land, the implication is that we can no longer take the Old Testament at its face value.

If, however, we still read those “God-breathed” Scriptures at face value, we cannot do so with “profit” because although the promise of “land” may have meant what it said on the tin to the original readers, it no longer has the same meaning because Jesus and the apostles supposedly “reinterpreted” the promise.

The anti-Zionist claim also presents us with another problem. If the reinterpretation of the land promises by Jesus and the apostles is true, the new interpretation must have always been the way to understand them. So we are faced with a problem of God promising material blessing to Israel when, in fact, he is really talking about spiritual promises to “the Church”.

We cannot therefore use the term “reinterpretation” without doing damage to the New Testament doctrine of Scripture.

We can talk about Jesus and the apostles exposing “deeper meanings” to the land promises. We can say the New Testament uncovers “fresh layers” or draws out previously unknown “implications” to Old Testament texts but we cannot talk about reinterpretation.

The New Testament itself recognises that the meaning of some Scriptures was previously unknown or misunderstood until the coming of Christ but that is not the same as saying Christ “reinterpreted” the meanings.

And nowhere does Jesus imply the land promises did not really mean the promise of land.

The safest and most common sense approach to the promises God made to Abraham and his descendants of land is to accept that although there may be deeper layers to the promises and greater implications behind the texts, the basic face-value meaning of the “land” passages remains inviolate.

Of whom does the prophet speak?

A Hasidic Jew I’ve spoken to every day this week was down at the sea later than usual this morning. He’s usually emerging from the water by 6.15 but today I walked the length of the town’s promenade three times before I saw him. He waved to me and I went down to the water’s edge where he was drying his toes.

I asked if he had had a good Shabbos. It had been good.

I asked how he spent Shabbos afternoon. Did he study?

He and his family had a meal that lasted till about three o’clock, then they all went to bed and slept for a couple of hours.

I joked that all the davening in the morning must have worn him out.

Yes, Abraham said, davening is hard work.

I told him that after synagogue I had read a wonderful passage of Scripture and that I’d been meditating on it this morning. Abraham asked what it was and I recited the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah. I asked if he knew the passage. He didn’t.

Did he know where it was from? He didn’t and asked me to tell him. I told him and shared a thought that had come to me as I’d been thinking on the passage this morning. God’s Servant in the passage acts as Cohen Hagadol (the High Priest) because he makes intercession for transgressors but he is also the corban, the sacrificial offering. Who could this amazing person be?

My friend didn’t know and asked who I thought the Servant was. I told him that Jesus was the only person who fitted the description of God’s Servant and that in Jesus I had found atonement for my sins. This was why I was so grateful to the Jewish people because I had discovered this truth in their Scriptures. Through Jesus the Jewish Messiah I was enjoying the blessings of the Brit Hadashah (the New Covenant). Did my friend know about the New Covenant?

He had never heard of it; where was it? In Yirmiyahu (Jeremiah) 31. I explained that, as a gentile, I was once far from the commonwealth of Israel, a stranger to God’s covenants of promise, without hope and without Hashem but through Jesus I had been brought into Israel’s Brit Hadashah and knew Hashem because he no longer remembered my sins and iniquities. Did he know the blessings of the Brit Hadashah?

No, he said, but he was planning to study them with his friends one day. Then make it soon, I said.

“Yes?”

“Yes, make it soon and also study Yeshayahu 53.”

As he got into his car and wished me a good day, my heart went out to him. He is so devout and yet in so much darkness.

As I had driven into town this morning and saw the mist lying in some of the valleys, I knew that as the sun rose that mist would evaporate and I prayed that God’s Word, as I shared it with his ancient people this morning, would be like the rising sun and dissolve the mist in which their hearts are enshrouded.

I will have one last meeting with my friend tomorrow and I want to offer him a copy of the New Testament.

Personal Jesus

I'm writing this during a coffee break at the final sessions of the World Reformed Fellowship General Assembly in Edinburgh, after listening to three excellent reports on the churches in Brazil, India and China. I just spoke to the Indian delegate about something in his report that set my alarm bells ringing.

According to his paper, Christianity is perceived in India as a Western and colonial religion, and a major concern of Indian Christians is to 'focus on the Asian identity of Jesus Christ'. The Chinese report flagged up a similar issue. In China, believers are seeking to make Christianity a 'genuinely Chinese religion'.

I have just shared my concerns over a cup ofcoffee with the Indian delegate. Though I understand the concern of my Indian brothers and sisters to demonstrate that Christianity is not a Western religion, Jesus is not 'Asian'; he is Jewish. Ia am concerned that our Indian and Chinese brothers are going to repeat the mistake of the English church. Christianity was (and still is by some) regarded as English, and missionaries often converted the nations not only to Christianity but also to Englishness.

Jesus is in a very real sense the universal man but he can never be identified with any particular nation other than Israel. He can never be Palestinian, English, Chinese or Indian. Nor can Christianity ever be anything other than Jewish. While we seek to contextualise the gospel, Christianity can never be an English or Chinese religion.

If Chinese missionaries take a 'Chinese' gospel to the nations, although they may experience some success, they will be making the same mistake as the Western colonialist missionaries of a former age.

Indian Christians, if they insist that Jesus is Asian, risk alienating and antagonising Muslims. I understand that concern but substituting one error for another is less than wise.

The inevitable result of any nation claiming Jesus is 'one of us' will be the dejudaising of Jesus. If Jesus is no longer Jewish the Jewish people are marginalised and Replacement Theology is strengthened. Replacement Theology tends to diminish concern for Jewish mission and the diminishing of outreach to the Jewish people delays the glorious day when 'all Israel shall be saved' (Rom 11:26), an event which will be 'life from the dead' for the nations (Rom 11:15).

Happy Hanukkah to all my Jewish readers!

Hanukkah begins tonight, so here’s a question to see how much you know about the festival.

Where in the Bible is Hanukkah mentioned?

Deduct ten points if you said the Books of Maccabees. Maccabees is not officially in the Bible. It is part of what is known as the apocryphal, or “hidden” books, those books that didn’t make it into the Hebrew Scriptures.

It’s no use looking for it in the first 39 books of Scripture. The only reference to Hanukkah is in the Gospel According to Johanan (better known to you and me as John) in the last twenty verses of chapter 10:

At that time the Feast of Dedication [Hanukkah] took place at Jerusalem. It was winter, and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the colonnade of Solomon. So the Jewish religious leaders gathered around him and said to him, "How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly."

Jesus answered them, "I told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father's name bear witness about me, but you do not believe because you are not part of my flock. My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father's hand. I and the Father are one."

The religious leaders picked up stones again to stone him.

Jesus answered them, "I have shown you many good works from the Father; for which of them are you going to stone me?"

The Jewish leaders answered him, "It is not for a good work that we are going to stone you but for blasphemy, because you, being a man, make yourself God."

Jesus answered them, "Is it not written in your Torah, 'I said, you are gods'? If he called them gods to whom the word of God came - and Scripture cannot be broken - do you say of him whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world, 'You are blaspheming,' because I said, 'I am the Son of God'? If I am not doing the works of my Father, then do not believe me; but if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father."

Again they sought to arrest him, but he escaped from their hands.

He went away again across the Jordan to the place where John had been baptizing at first, and there he remained. And many came to him.

And they said, "John did no sign, but everything that John said about this man was true."

And many believed in him there.
(Gospel According to John 10:22-42)

Now there’s something to think about!

Hag Sameach!