HERMENEUTICS

HOW DID JESUS AND THE APOSTLES USE THE OLD TESTAMENT
vs.
"speculative human reasoning"?

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We should not use scripture out of context, and when Jesus or Paul or Peter or John quoted the Old Testament, we should know what the Old Testament passage meant.

In other words, made the text say what we want the verse to say to prove our point.

HOW THE NEW TESTAMENT WRITERS INTERPRET THE OLD TESTAMENT?

part one

One question we should consider is how did Christ interpret the OT
HOW DID JESUS USE THE OLD TESTAMENT HE QUOTED:

The chaps at Expository Thoughts have a series on The Relationship of the Testaments. From the post on Apostolic Hermeneutic:

• ... the New Testament writers’ use of the Old Testament was a function of divine inspiration, and not simply a matter of human interpretation carried out in accordance with divinely revealed hermeneutical principles. In other words, when the apostle Paul quoted or alluded to the OT in his epistles, he wasn’t applying God-given hermeneutical principles to various passages in the Old Testament; he was being superintended by the Holy Spirit in such a way that he wrote precisely what God was pleased to communicate through him. The NT writers, then, do not claim a superior hermeneutical approach to the OT; they claim inspiration. For those who are not able to claim inspiration, this method cannot be employed.

Sola Scriptura

Question One:

WHAT WAS JESUS' ATTITUDE ABOUT THE OLD TESTAMENT SCRIPTURES?

Matthew 4:4,7, 10

What did Deut 6 say in relationship to what Jesus said to Satan?What truths for our Christian life are in Jesus' citation of these particular Scriptures?Jesus was quoting from Deut 6:13-16 10:20 He was referring to Israel's journey in the wilderness experience where the grumbling Israelites put the Lord to the test, angrily demanding that Moses produce water where there was none. (MacArthur Study Bible)

The context of Matthew four had to do with Satan's temptation of Christ in the wilderness. Jesus used an old testament principle given to the Israelites that was still in effect to Satan in Jesus day.

My point:

• If you are going to refer to a text, get the context correct. Knowing and studying the scriptures should be priority before you make comment.Before you say what Jesus meant by what he said, you need to know what he meant. And you need to know what the text he quoted indicated

Acording to Silva, the NT writers were so acquainted with the Scriptures that they would often make "relatively casual references" to the OT. "If they did," Silva writes, "these casual references would reveal nothing about their exegetical method. I couldn’t agree more.

John Walton takes this a step further. According to Walton, the "NT authors never claim to have engaged in a hermeneutical process, nor do they claim that they can support their findings from the text; they claim inspiration"

With this in mind, it is obvious that the modern-day interpreter who seeks to imitate the NT writers’ "interpretations" of the OT will be led astray at times, for often the NT writer is not engaging in the process of interpretation.

When dealing with the use of the OT in the NT, I believe we need to study each passage in its own original context—honoring the principle of "the progress of revelation" in the process—and then determine the relationship between the two, without simply assuming that relationship at the beginning.

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