2 of 4

What is the most popular Old Testament passage or theme for New Testament writers?

Beale: Probably the Old Testament passage quoted and alluded to most is Psalm 110:1, where it says, "The Lord says to my Lord: 'Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.'" It's referring not only to a kingly figure but also to a divine kingly figure identified as Jesus in the New Testament. Another is Isaiah 6:9—10 where Isaiah is commanded to tell the people, "you have eyes that can't see and ears that can't hear." Intriguingly, that text is quoted fully in all four Gospels, at the end of the Book of Acts, and alluded to at the conclusion of the seven letters of Revelation and again in chapter 13.

You and Dr. Carson describe how this commentary's contributors adopted an "eclectic grammatical-historical literary method." Briefly describe this method, and tell us why it leads to better understanding of the New Testament's relation to the Old Testament.

Beale: Historical-grammatical exegesis traditionally has been used to exegete a Hebrew or Greek paragraph. You try to interpret it contextually in the book, using word studies, grammar, and syntax. You try to understand the logical development of thought within the paragraph, historical background, and theological or figurative problems. You check for parallel texts. It's a whole array of things you bring to bear on a particular paragraph.

Eclectic and literary [method] extends grammatical-historical exegesis from just looking atomistically at the paragraph in the context of its book. In my view, part of exegetical method has to do with how the passage fits into the corpus of the author, how it fits in the New Testament, and how we relate it to the Old Testament. One would especially want to pay attention to Old Testament allusions and quotations, going back to see what's happening in the Old Testament. You might call that a biblical-theological perspective that really goes beyond the traditional understanding of grammatical-historical.

I like to use the phrases "narrow-angle exegesis" and "wide-angle exegesis," letting Scripture interpret Scripture, or "canonical-biblical exegesis." This lets later texts in the Old Testament interpretatively develop the earlier texts, and traces how the trajectory finds further development with the New Testament writers. They tend to be sensitive, when quoting one text, to other developments of that text in the Old Testament. That's a wider consideration than just looking at your paragraph in the New Testament book. You have to do both.

Does interpreting the Bible this way require a certain level of trust in the inspiration of the New Testament writers?

Beale: In the introduction we say that even if one does not believe in the inspiration of the Bible, one should at least grant the privilege to the biblical authors and respect that they did. If you're going to try to understand the New Testament as a historical document, you need to try and see what their presuppositions were. I don't think among evangelicals it's a matter of trust. You've got to show inductively through exegesis that in fact, what they're saying really does make sense of the Old Testament text. It depends on the inductive evidence.

Why does this commentary deserve a spot on bookshelves?

Carson: There is no other one-volume work that treats every instance where the New Testament quotes or clearly alludes to the Old Testament. At least for the quotations, we aim to understand the New Testament context, the Old Testament context, how Judaism uses the same Old Testament passage, any text-critical challenges (remembering that the Old Testament was written in Hebrew and Aramaic while the New Testament was written in Greek), the interpretive assumptions on display when the New Testament writer uses the Old Testament passage, and the theological significance of the quotation. Through the indexes, one can start at the other end: e.g., if you are preaching from, say, a passage in Job, you might be wise to use the index to see if anything in that passage has been picked up in quotation or allusion anywhere in the New Testament.

next page... |  2 of 4

share this page

February (Web-only) 2008, Vol. 52