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Podcast: The NT Authors Quoted the OT Way More Than We Do (Greg Lanier)

June 20, 2022 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

A Vision for How the New Testament Uses the Old

In today's episode, Greg Lanier talks about the many ways that the Old Testament stands as an indispensable foundation for the New.

Old Made New

Old Made New

Greg Lanier

In Old Made New, Greg Lanier explains how New Testament authors used the Old Testament to communicate the gospel and present the person and work of Jesus. Writing for a broad range of readers, Lanier distills thorough research into descriptive examples and a simple 3-step study method.

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Check out other Crossway Podcasts including the new podcast Blessed: Conversations on the Book of Revelation with Nancy Guthrie.

Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:08 - Can We Cut Ties with the Old Testament?

Matt Tully
Greg, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Greg Lanier
Thanks for having me.

Matt Tully
Today we’re going to talk about how the New Testament writers used the Old Testament in what they said and what they wrote down in the scriptures that we have from them. But before we get into that, I just wanted to get your thoughts on a broader trend that I think we’ve probably all seen. Crossway has done surveys in the past that have shown that as a general rule Christians spend more time reading and studying the New Testament than they do the Old Testament. There are probably lots of reasons that we could give for why that might be. My guess is that one obvious reason is that the Old Testament can sometimes feel more intimidating to us than the new; maybe harder to understand. Do you resonate with that? Has that ever been your experience?

Greg Lanier
It’s not really all that surprising I suppose. From a chronological perspective, it’s so much farther removed from what we’re familiar with. Of course, the New Testament is nearly two millennia removed from our current context, but it still feels a bit more familiar. Greek cities, sailing ships—it sounds more familiar because we’re used to Jesus and his parables and his teachings. So, it’s no surprise at all that if someone is going to sit down who is a casual Bible reader and pick up their copy of the NIV, ESV, or whatever, they’re going to gravitate towards something in Matthew vs. something in 2 Chronicles. That’s not really all that surprising. I think there’s also, in certain quarters depending on the church your in, there’s an unspoken, or overt, neo-Marcionite view of things. Marcion was one of the earliest “heretics” of the church who famously poo-pooed the Old Testament and its God as being the bad God of the Old Testament and Jesus being the nice God of the New Testament. There can be either a principled way in which certain big-name preachers and ministries intentionally distance us from the Old Testament and the problems that it raises—such as the conquest of the Canaanites, stoning adulterers, or what have you. Or there can even be a naive, Jesus is in the New Testament, so I’m going to go with the New Testament. My little Gideon Bible with the Psalms and New Testament is what I need. It kinda depends on the background you come from, but it’s not really all that surprising. I do think even serious Bible readers and serious expository churches are probably going to lean pretty hard in the New Testament direction unless they’re disciplined in maintaining a steady Old Testament diet. And even if you do have some sort of commitment to the Old Testament, you’re mostly going to camp out in Genesis, Psalms, the latter part of Isaiah, and Jonah—something like that. There’s not a lot of comprehensive knowledge of Zephaniah running around out there.

Matt Tully
I have a quick question about one of the things that you just said. I think a lot of us resonate or have seen examples of non-Christians attacking the Christian in faith in part by attacking the Old Testament and some of these difficult passages, or the way that it depicts God that maybe on a surface level can feel a little bit different than how the New Testament depicts Jesus and God. You also mention that we sometimes see this neo-Marcionite approach to the Old Testament even in the church. Is that what you’re getting at? Where are you seeing this emphasis from, I guess, Christians?

Greg Lanier
I don’t want to name names, and there has obviously been many rounds of the debate. The idea of unhitching from the Old Testament has been popularized by some big-name folks that don’t need to necessarily be explicitly named. That’s part of it. The Old Testament is embarrassing. The Old Testament is old. We now are in the Jesus era, so let’s just cut ties from the Old Testament. Let’s cut our losses. I think the idea is that it presents these immense challenges with contemporary culture in terms of sexual ethics, creation and science and the alleged tension thereof, the purported idea that God commanded the genocide of the Canaanites—you name it. There’s a ton of it. I think some churches, by practice or because of big thinkers and teachers and pastors, are self-consciously trying to distance themselves from it. Of course, there’s been a lot of pushback on that and I don’t need to retread those waters. I think it probably comes from a good place—an apologetic desire to make Christianity more palatable in a very different landscape than the Bible Belt of the past fifty years. To be as charitable as I can, I think the idea, perhaps for many, starts in a good place. I just think it’s sort of fundamentally naive, and it’s not an option that the New Testament gives us. I was just doing some work on Jesus’ woes against Bethsaida and Capernaum and Chorazin—it’s not the nice Jesus that I think a lot of folks want to pass off. It’s interesting because he goes to Sodom and Gomorrah, which of course is the passage that either gets used as a bludgeon or it’s the passage that shall not be named in contemporary discussions on sexuality. It’s interesting that Jesus goes there as a kind of paradigm for the judgment that he will bring in its eternal timeframe. Again, that’s not the familiar, hipster, wandering, guru Jesus. The idea that we need to distance ourselves from the Old Testament because Jesus is nice and cuddly in the New Testament—that’s a misconception of the Old Testament, and that’s a profound understatement of Jesus. There’s a lot we could probably say about it that would take us far afield, but ultimately I think it comes from a good place, but it’s a very muddled, naive, simplistic place that really the New Testament doesn’t even give us as an option.

Matt Tully
You have that line of thinking that the God portrayed in the New Testament is different than the God of the Old, but I think even further and more to the point of what you’re getting at in your book is that the New Testament is just replete with quotations, citations, and allusions to the Old. Something I’ve wondered before is do you happen to have a sense for how many times the New Testament writers are quoting or alluding to a specific Old Testament passage?

Greg Lanier
In the book I do a catalog at the end where I try to—and it’s 20+ pages—I try to document the generally agreed upon set. There’s always going to be a debate about this or that faint echo. It’s easy to pinpoint whenever they actually explicitly say “as it is written” or something like that. Those are all fairly easy to pin down. Whenever they don’t signal it, like when Paul will use some bit of Deuteronomy without telling you and unless you know Deuteronomy you don’t realize he’s doing that, those are harder to quantify and it depends on the criteria you use. They had much more flexibility in their day in terms of how they would use things. They didn’t have to footnote themselves, so to speak. The point of that being that I attempted to quantify, and I ended up with over 400. Other resources nail it down at something in the 300 range. The hardest point to quantify is when do you say something is a vague echo of Proverbs or whatever, or is that just sort of a figment of your imagination. There are a lot of gray areas, but you’re going to be somewhere between 100 to 200 explicit citations, and then you got this big group of more imprecise quotations and allusions that are hard to pin down. Some more aggressive numbers are going to be in the thousands, but at that point it’s like every single word can be traced to the Old Testament, so that seems to be a bit overzealous as well. I usually 300 to 400, give or take.

10:11 - Writing Style in the Ancient World

Matt Tully
You mentioned that the standard practices and ways of thinking about quotations in the ancient world are just different from how we would think about those things today. We footnote everything—that’s an important principle for writing.

Greg Lanier
And plagiarism is obviously a huge thing to grapple with.

Matt Tully
Yeah, that’s a concern for us. But I think something that I think people might be surprised to hear is that quotation marks weren’t even something that were actually original to the text. Unpack that a little bit more about how the New Testament writers would have thought about what the rules were, so to speak, for using and citing a passage from the Old Testament.

Greg Lanier
It wouldn’t really just apply to the Old Testament. Paul quotes from pagan philosophers at various points in Acts and 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy, and we have some other evidence of that kind of thing going on as well. So, it’s not just citing the Old Testament that is relevant. It’s actually hard to pin down because the spectrum of what was allowable was so much broader than today. It wasn’t simply that they didn’t have a quotation marks button on their keyboard. There were ways that you could mark it, so it’s not like they didn’t have that function. There are certain words you can use in Greek, and you could also introduce it with “as it is written.” They did actually have a way to indicate it, and in fact some ancient manuscripts would actually put these little carrot marks out in the margins to show you that this is from the Old Testament. You see that pretty early as well. They did have some technology, so to speak, or markup. They had ways to do it. For them it was much more of a broad spectrum of we are drawing on ancient sources, whether that’s Homer or Moses, for a whole variety of reasons—to directly verbatim quote it, or to maybe even tweak it because I think that person was wrong (if I’m quoting Plato) or if I want to be clever and remix it a bit. Like even today if we quote some famous figure and change a word to be funny. So, there are a lot of things you can do. You see the whole spectrum in the New Testament where sometimes it is word for word, in the precise order, with all the same verb tenses, with all the same case endings (which we don’t have in English) as its original source every single time. For instance, quotations of Leviticus 19:18 several times in the New Testament, as far as I’m aware, are verbatim the same. Other times at the other end of the spectrum, you might have quotations of the same passage—Isaiah 6:9–10 being a famous example. That’s Isaiah’s commissioning: “Go and preach to these people so that seeing they won’t see, hearing they won’t hear lest I turn and heal them.” It’s quoted four or five times in the New Testament, and every single time it’s different—sometimes substantially so, and there are a lot of reasons for that. It’s all recognizably from Isaiah 6:9–10. None of them would have seen themselves—Jesus, Paul, etc.—they would not have seen themselves as erroneously quoting anything. It just fit with how they did it back then. You might use a theoretical ellipsis mark, which they didn’t actually have, but you could do that by just taking out a phrase that you don’t want to include. We do that today, but we just have to use punctuation to note it. You could rearrange the word order. Sometimes they might be working from the Hebrew instead of the Greek or vice versa. So, there are a lot of moving parts, but for them it was a much more relaxed approach that for us to bring modern, Turabian, Crossway style guide limitations to the table is very, very, anachronistic. In fact, it’s anachronistic as soon as you move beyond the 1600s or 1700s. It was just much more flexible and it wasn’t deemed to be bad. It’s actually quite the wormhole to get into, but it’s important for lay people to know about because so often, and I mentioned this briefly in the book but I didn’t want to get down too much into the weeds, but a lot of times when you’re trying to look up a quotation that is in Mark and you want to trace it back to whatever the Old Testament source is, if you’re just looking at the ESV or the NIV or whatever you have, they may not match verbatim. In fact, often they won’t match verbatim. There are a lot of reasons for that. Speaking of apologetics, some skeptics might say, Look! There’s an error! There’s a contradiction!. Well, that’s not really even a relevant point to make because the ancient standards were just so different. It might look like a contradiction in modern standards, but that’s not how they were operating. It’s just important to know that. As a lay person, you don’t necessarily have to be able to sort all of that out, but just be aware that there is a lot of flexibility built into how you might use a prior source. There was just a higher degree of comfort level with that than today.

15:41 - How Does Old Testament Prophecy Work?

Matt Tully
One of the broad areas in the Bible that I think is most relevant to this conversation of how the New Testament writers are referencing the Old Testament has to relate to this issue of prophecy—Old Testament prophecy that is, in some way, fulfilled in Christ, in Jesus, and in the gospel. You argue, along with many others, that the New Testament writers often embraced the idea of Jesus expanding or filling up the meaning of various Old Testament prophecies. I think the nuanced approach of how you would understand that and articulate that is maybe a little different than the way I think a lot of average Christians who are sitting in a pew would understand the meaning of something like a prophecy from the Old Testament. I wonder if you could expand on that a little bit. How should we think about this topic of Old Testament prophecy and New Testament fulfillment?

Greg Lanier
I would make two upfront clarifications on that because I think this is a deeply important area. One of the points I make early on in the book, and it’s immediately relevant to the conversation we just had, is a lot of folks who end up in the place where they’re persuaded and then, therefore, in panic mode about the New Testament’s use of the Old and how the apostles distorted the Bible—a lot of the ways they get there is that they have a very malnourished understanding of what it means for something to be prophetic and to be fulfilled. They want to approach every single time Matthew, Mark, Luke, John—or whomever—use the Old Testament as a prophecy that has a direct fulfillment in the New Testament. Therefore, if they then go look up in their Old Testament—Zechariah or Hosea 11 or whatever—they’re like, Wait a second. This isn’t even a prophecy. At least not in any reasonable since. Therefore, if I only read this in the New Testament as a fulfilled prophecy, and it wasn’t even given as a prophecy, there you go! There’s your proof that the apostles are not only bad exegetes, but they’re turning something into a prophecy that wasn’t even a prophecy! They failed out of the gate! I think a lot of the misconceptions, even among big-league scholars—stem from a very wooden, one-size-fits-all approach to prophecy and fulfillment where they want to say that every single thing is a fulfilled prophecy. The reality is that’s not what the New Testament authors are doing many, many times. Is that a big component? Yes. In Acts when Paul stands up and says, Look, this guy, Jesus, who was put to death and has now been raised and is ascended, he is the one who Moses wrote about saying, ’I’ll raise up a prophet from among you who will be better than Moses’ (Deut. 18:15). He is saying that Moses predicted this, and it has come to pass. Does that happen? Absolutely. But is it the only thing that happens? No. Knowing that that’s not the only tool we have has, for me, been very freeing, and I think it’s been very liberating for my students because it makes so much more sense if you realize, Not everything is being crammed into a prophecy mold. Not everything was explicitly a prophecy. Sometimes it’s a historical pattern that then the New Testament says, Hey look—history is repeating itself. Stephen does that in Acts 7. He says, Look! Here’s what Israel always did to its prophets: they put them to death and they rejected them over and over again. You know what? You’re doing the exact same thing right now. It wasn’t like that was prophesying that this was going to happen in Acts 7 and then he’s going to get stoned. He’s just saying, You’re doing what your forefathers did. That’s a totally legit way that the New Testament authors draw on the Old Testament. So, just having extra categories is a big part of it, and realizing that prophecy is not the only tool. The other up front point I would make is that prophecy and fulfillment needs to have a proper definition. Sometimes it is a one-for-one exchange. For example, Isaiah foresaw X, and then 700 years later it comes true. That happens; that’s a category. But it’s not only limited to that. Sometimes prophecies have multiple layers of fulfillment. The prophets famously foresee judgment by God because of the curses in Deuteronomy. They’re proclaiming the curses of Deuteronomy: A foreign nation is going to destroy us, but there’s going to be a day of restoration. This is a big category both in the Old and New Testaments. Mark 1:1 and Mark 3:3 starts there, quoting Isaiah and Malachi. As history plays out, that happens. That’s the prophecy fulfilled. And a kind of restoration happens under Joshua the high priest and Zerubbabel, Ezra, Nehemiah, and all those guys. This is where the biblical illiteracy thing becomes a problem because all that stuff I just said, a lot of people have no idea what I’m talking about and they’ve already lost me. But about a third of the Old Testament is dealing with this, so it’s actually a tremendously important thing. I was criticized by someone at my church in England because I assumed in a sermon that the audience knew what the exile was. I responded, If they don’t know what the exile is, then that’s your fault not mine, as the pastor of that church. I probably shouldn’t say that. Actually, I think I said that in my heart and not out loud. But it’s true though. We’ve got to give people these categories. The point being, you have the fulfillment of the prophecy in a time of restoration in the 500s and 400s BC, but it’s not the final fulfillment. They are still sort of in exile. They’re still scattered. So it’s totally legit to say that when Jesus comes, that’s a new wave of fulfillment. When he comes back, that’s the final fulfillment. The point of all this is that prophecy has a complicated fulfillment. It’s not just a very simplistic they said it once, and it comes true once. No. They said it once, and then kept saying it over and over again, and then God works things out in his plan of redemption in stages. We see the ebbs and flows of Israel’s history spilling into the New Testament. All of that is background to, What do we see in the New Testament? What we see in the New Testament is not some sort of magic decoder ring where it’s like, Oh! No we have the answer! There is some sense to that, but what they are seeing—and I try to labor to prove this out in the first chapter of the book—what they are seeing is the fulfillment of the ages, that all of these good promises of God are now coming into their final stage of fulfillment. But it’s tapping into this unfinished story of Israel, where we’ve already gotten a taste of this. Where they already got to the promised land, but it wasn’t the final promised land. Where they got a king, but it wasn’t the final king. Where they got a temple, but it wasn’t the final place of worship. The got a sacrificial system, but it’s pointing forward to the real sacrifice. They got a judgment of exile that is pointing forward to final judgment. They got restoration that is pointing forward to the Day of the Lord—the good side of the Day of the Lord, the blessing of it. So, the New Testament authors were very savvy in how they understand that flow of history. Whenever they’re making the claim that a prophecy has been fulfilled, what they mean by that is we’re seeing all of this weight of Israel’s history reach its turning point, typically related to Jesus, but sometimes related to the church or what have you. Sometimes there are prophecies about us being the new temple or what have you. They see this big, historical flow coming to its crescendo with the first and second coming of Jesus. As you sit there and listen to me pontificate, I think the realization is that it’s a much more complex and rich story than I think a lot of folks bring to the table. It’s very easy to want a simple answer: Isaiah prophesied X. Boom. We see it now. And then you read some blog post that says, No, Isaiah didn’t prophecy that. Well actually, there is a sweep of hundreds and hundreds of years of history—and we’re still in it—that’s what fulfilled prophecy is dealing with. God is still at work and has been at work. Whether we’re talking about Christ’s kingly office, his mediatorial role, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the formation of the people of God in the church as the culmination of the people of God in ancient Israel—all of that is a fulfillment of God’s purposes as it’s been playing out. That’s a much richer way to tell the story, but it’s a much more complicated way to tell the story, and it doesn’t fit very well in a one-line blurb on a fancy nature scene on Twitter. But I think it’s a better story that we need to equip our people with to make sense of any of this.

Matt Tully
It strikes me that that vision of how that nuanced—and as you sometimes say, that complicated vision for how the New Testament uses the Old—it is a true vision and it’s a rewarding vision as we dig into that and study that, but it does require a lot more of us than maybe we’re used to giving to the Bible. It requires a certain knowledge and familiarity and even intentionality with how we go about studying the Old Testament, which is, as we’ve already established, sometimes harder for us than studying the New Testament.

Greg Lanier
I don’t have a lot of great solutions for that, but one of them, I think, is being excited about biblical theology, and teaching it.

26:15 - Understanding the Role of Biblical Theology

Matt Tully
Unpack biblical theology and how that has a special relationship to this topic that we’re talking about today.

Greg Lanier
It sort of is that topic. Biblical theology—or whatever you want to call it. I guess there’s debate about the nomenclature, but I don’t personally care. It’s understanding the whole sweep of the Bible, from Old to New Testaments and how they’re connected.

Matt Tully
Often tracing a particular theme or idea.

Greg Lanier
Right. Tracing big themes and big movements through the Bible. That’s the kind of stuff I think we want to be doing in grade school, and then for people who didn’t grow up in the church, we’ve got some catching up to do as adults. I think there can be a temptation, as someone in ministry, to get bored by the Old Testament because it’s technical. Or, if you’re a Bible study leader, it’s like, Let’s just jump to Jesus. Let’s just do the beatitudes. The funny thing about that is you can’t even do the beatitudes without knowing the Old Testament and the Psalms. Anyway, it’s imperative on us with this generation to say, No, this is exciting! And not to be overly postmodern, but it works quite well if that’s someone’s approach to life, to the extent that the new generations want to find their place in a grand narrative—and we’re lacking a grand narrative in the post-war generation—the Bible is the grand narrative for all of humanity, every tribe, tongue, and nation. I think that is a place that we can get people really excited if we’re not simply cherry-picking verses that we harp on. No, let’s do the whole Bible. Let’s trace all these themes. It’s all rich and wonderful. If you do that, then it’s going to unlock Scripture for you. That’s the kind of stuff that we need to be equipping our kids, our youth, and our adult believers with. What I try to demonstrate in the book is that maybe the place to start with that isn’t a daily Bible-reading plan that you tap out of once you get to Numbers (if you even get to Numbers). But it’s let’s follow the New Testament’s lead in doing this. The whole thing I’m trying to describe is I’m not making this up. Greg Beale is not making this up. Geerhardus Vos isn’t making this up (if listeners know those names). Stephen and Paul and Jesus are the ones who sort of came up with this. All I’m simply saying is let’s be faithful to not just like this chapter/verse that we like from the Sermon on the Mount, but how do they tap into the entire story? Maybe that goes back to your point and to something I said earlier: to the extent that someone looks at a New Testament quotation and says, This doesn’t make sense as a fulfilled prophecy, that assumes that you, as the reader, know the story and you’re sort of inside Matthew’s head. It may very well be that Matthew knows the story better than we do. He certainly signals that in his genealogy and how he brackets Israel’s history in a certain nuanced way.

29:36 - Getting Started with the Old Testament

Matt Tully
As a final question, speak to the person listening right now who does want to get to work on this, who feels like, Yeah, I want to try my hand in a new way that I’ve never done before at understanding and digging into the Old Testament background to some of these key New Testament passages. I wonder if you could recommend a passage in the New Testament that does include a quotation or strong allusions to the Old Testament that would be a good starting point for somebody who’s never really tried to explore that before. What would be one that you would say to start with?

Greg Lanier
Not to over-complexify things, I think there’s a step zero, especially for someone who maybe realizes they don’t know the Old Testament as well as they want to know it and want to grow in that area. Before you actually start hacking away at a specific passage, I think that step zero is go to the Cliffs Notes of the Old Testament that we already have. The three best examples are going to be Matthew’s genealogy—

Matt Tully
Why are the genealogies there actually a great place to start?

Greg Lanier
In some respects, it’s helpful today that ancestory.com and the DNA testing sites are popular because when I was growing up no one cared, but now people care more. I think there’s a greater realization that ancestry matters, and the list of names is not just a list of names. Even for me today, it’s not just a list of names because with the names comes the stories. When you mention Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, even if you just had a week of VBS at some point when you were a ten-year-old, something about those names rings a bell: Oh yeah! I remember Abraham tried to sacrifice Isaac. That was crazy! Or, Jacob and Esau—wasn’t that wild! Even if you just have a very rudimentary knowledge of the Bible, with the names comes the story. What’s brilliant about Matthew’s genealogy going from Abraham down to Jesus (and Luke’s genealogy takes it all the way back to Adam in Luke 3) is that the names are the shortest possible way you can summarize the entire Old Testament. What Matthew does in addition to just giving us a list of forty-two some-odd names is he breaks it down into three phases—really four phases if you add the fourth. He goes Abraham through David—that’s the first chunk of Israel’s history when it becomes a nation and finally gets its classical king. Saul was Israel’s mistake. Then, it goes from David to the exile—that’s the falling apart. Things were good; things fell apart. Then, you have the exile coming to partial restoration and then the coming of Jesus. He brackets history in a certain way. That is basically Genesis up through 2 Samuel, etc. It sort of gives you a road map to understand the entire Bible, and Matthew’s saying, If you want to understand Israel’s history, let me give you the two-sentence summary: Abraham up to David, David to exile, exile to Jesus. That’s the bracketing of history. So, just knowing that, I think, is remarkably important just to give you a basic big picture. Once you start there, I would fast forward either to Acts 13 or Acts 7. Maybe go to Acts 13 first and then to Acts 7. In both of those situations, Acts 7 being Stephen and Acts 13 being Paul, they give a more detailed summary of the history of Israel. Stephen’s speech is brilliant in tracing through what happened to Egypt with Moses, David and the temple, and all these kinds of things. He kind of puts it all together. The reason why I think that matters is that Stephen, Paul, Matthew, and Luke aren’t just cherry-picking good proof texts from the Old Testament. That’s the reason why this matters. The top ten verses that you put on your Instagram in the ancient world. They had read it very well, they had been taught it very well, and they understood the flow. They understood what the story was—where it ended and where it’s going to pick up with the coming of Jesus. Those are great places to see how the apostles, and then Stephen as a second generation, grappled with the whole story. Let me get the basic picture. I would guess, and when I was twenty something I probably couldn’t do it, that the vast majority of Christians couldn’t sit down and outline the Old Testament in twenty bullets. My guess is that most people couldn’t do that. Or, if you find yourself where you couldn’t do that, then go start there and that will give you the bullet points. So, that was my step zero. If somebody wanted to pick a singular place to start digging in, I would probably say Mark 1:1–3. It’s one of my favorite ones. There’s a lot there to unpack. It’s notable because you’re like, Alright, Matthew starts his gospel and I’m finally going to meet Jesus . . . he starts with the genealogy? What is that about? That’s a snoozer. Let’s get rid of Matthew. What’s the next one? Let’s do Mark. What does Mark do? The first thing he does right out of the gate is make a prolonged quotation of Isaiah and Malachi and maybe a bit of Exodus. Alright, let me roll up my sleeves and figure out why he starts the story of Jesus that way. Starting there, and it is an example I go over in the book at some length, is really fantastic because a) he says “this is the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” Alright, you Christians talk about Jesus, you use this fancy word called gospel, I want to figure out what that’s about. He says if you want to know what the beginning of the gospel of Jesus is, he says—and it sometimes gets obscured in English translations—“. . . , as it is written . . . .” For me, that’s a mind-blowing insight that Mark says if you want to know what the starting point of the gospel is, you’ve got to go left in your Bible. You’ve got to go back to the Old Testament. He quotes Isaiah and Malachi in particular, and both of the passages (Isaiah 40 and Malachi 3 and 4) are wonderful ways that capture the longing of Israel for God to come back and restore his people. That’s where the Old Testament ends. It takes that and it marries it to the coming of John the Baptist and Jesus. When John comes, and then Jesus comes, you realize, Oh! The story is going to conclude. Isaiah and Malachi ended in Avengers fashion with “The story will be concluded in Avengers: End Game.” Then, Jesus comes and you finally have end game. That was probably a really bad analogy, but I tried. So, I would probably go there. That one is a great exercise in studying the wording and there’s a lot of christology stuff. I’m persuaded that Mark is intentionally portraying Jesus as God in a full sense there, but you also have this historical fulfillment of God’s promise to save his people. All that is going on, so it’s a great place to go, and it happens to be right at the beginning of the shortest Gospel, so that’s a fairly nice place to start as well.

Matt Tully
Greg, thank you so much for helping understand our New Testaments a little bit better by pointing us back to the Old Testament. We appreciate it.

Greg Lanier
Thanks for having me.

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