Early Christians Could Not Interpret The OT with the NT Because They Did Not Possess A Full NT
It is all very well sitting back in our plush chairs with our laptops or tablets resting against our knees while sipping a latte and carelessly typing out the line, “the OT must be understood through the NT.” It’s easy to do. But a reality check is in order here. In our 21st Century world, where so many things are just a click away, and where we can summon an array of Bible translations in seconds, it would be a sobering exercise to ask a basic question: “What kind of access did the average Christian have to the books of the NT, let alone the whole NT?”
Remember, the thesis we are enjoined to receive is that the OT, if it is to be rightly understood, needs to be comprehended via the NT and its witness to Christ.
Very well, let’s go back in time to say, 40 A.D. and the city of Antioch, where belivers were first called “Christians” (cf. Acts 11:26). You head to the local house church in your area and you sit down. The preacher annunces his intention to study the great temple in Ezekiel 40 to 48. He proceeds then to give a basic description of this edifice, being careful to remind you that the coming of the Shekinah Glory into the new temple corresponds with its departure from the old temple in Ezekiel 10.
But then he begins to say some startling things. He tells the congregation that this new temple is not a literal building at all, and that the vision Ezekiel was given in Ezekiel 43, which was just like the one he was given in Ezekiel 10 (Ezek. 43:3), was in actuality not the same. The reason it was not the same is that in Ezekiel 10 the description was of a literal temple in Jerusalem, but this larger temple was not literal (so the vision couldn’t be literal). The preacher then revealed that this latter temple was in fact the Church, and the returning Shekinah was the regenerating Spirit of God. Huh!
You began to wonder where the preacher obtained this information. Were there any new inspired books you did not know about? Meanwhile the preacher was enthusiastically telling his audience that since Christ is the fulfillment of the OT prophecies every bar the second coming has been fulfilled in Him and in the Church, which is the true temple and the true Israel. He goes on to explain that the dimensions of Ezekiel’s huge temple plan correspond to the dimensions of the New Jerusalem. The details are not really important. They simply were big spiritual numbers that indicated enormity of the saved. Hallelujah!
You sit there a little befuddled. How did he get all that from your Bible? Upon what authority did he make these grand claims? On what basis should you follow this new teaching? Yes, Jesus has come and has died and been raised again, but don’t the words of the Prophets mean what they say? Didn’t they accurately predict Jesus and His Passion? Nowhere, as far as you can tell, does your Bible (or the preacher’s Bible) give you leave to reinterpret the words right before your eyes. And what was all this talk about “New Jerusalem?” And what would give this preacher the right to claim that the prophecies given to Israel were not literal and had somehow been redirected and fulfilled in some spiritualized way in the Church?
No, you say to yourself. I see absolutely no verification of the preacher’s teaching in the Bible I have access to. You decide to cleave to the Scriptures and to never again listen to this new fangled theology. You get up to leave, but you have to wait your turn. Many of your fellow beliebers have come to the same conclusion. Listen to the Word of God!
I placed this scenario in Antioch in the 40’s A.D. But in actual fact you could place it anywhere in the Roman world for centuries after the ascension of Christ. There were some “lucky” ones, like those who happened to reside in Ephesus while Paul was teaching in the School of Tyrannus for two years (cf. Acts 19:9-10), who may have heard these new doctrines from an Apostle. But a person could verify whether the preacher was telling the truth only if he ran into a busy Apostle and waylaid him for a while.
Universal access to the whole NT was not realistically possible for a very long time after the books which comprise the NT were gathered together in one volume. Textual Critics tell us that towards the end of the First Century the Gospels and Acts were transmitted as a group. The same to a lesser degree was true of Paul’s Letters with Hebrews, and even less common the General Epistles and Revelation. But how many believers could study these works, let own them? According to James O’Donnell’s biography of Augustine (which I do not recommend), the famous bishop of Hippo did not possess a full NT; and that in the first years of the Fourth Century!
My point has hopefully become clear. How could the vast majority of Christians in the first centuries of the Chritian Church do what our contemporary amillenniala and postmillennial brethren insist upon and use the NT to understand the OT? The fact of the matter is, they couldn’t. And if they couldn’t, we shouldn’t. It is far more plausible to believe that the Greek penchant for allegorizing and spiritualizing that we see in Philo and later in Origen and Augustine is the source of all this new doctrine and the motto they rely upon.
It was a practical impossibility for those in the Early Church to try to comprehend the meaning of the OT through NT because they had little to no access to much of the NT, and thereby no opportunity to indulge in the spiritualization, typologization, and general theological gerrymandering of the OT.
Personal Thoughts About Commentaries (8): Mark