The New Testament misuses the Hebrew Bible

Begin with the hardest case. If Matthew meant that Hosea foresaw a family’s flight to Egypt, he misread Hosea. Hosea is recalling the Exodus, and the “son” is Israel. A Christian who insists that Hosea 11:1 is a forecast is not reading Hosea.

Matthew, though, knew his Bible well, and his Gospel suggests he knew what Hosea was about. He tells Jesus’ early life as a retelling of Israel’s. A child is carried down to Egypt and brought out. He passes through water at his baptism. He is tested in the wilderness for forty days, as Israel was for forty years, and he answers each temptation with a verse from Deuteronomy, beginning with “man does not live on bread alone” (Deuteronomy 8:3). Then he goes up a mountain and teaches.

Matthew’s claim is not that Hosea predicted a trip. It is that Jesus relives the story of God’s son Israel and brings it to the end it was reaching for. That is a large claim, and you may reject it. The Greek word Matthew uses, usually translated “fulfill,” means to fill something up, to bring it to its full measure. It can describe a prediction coming true, and it can describe a pattern being completed.

The idea that Israel’s history repeats in meaningful shapes is native to the Hebrew Bible. Isaiah describes the return from Babylon as a new Exodus: the God who made a road through the sea is about to do a new thing and make a road in the wilderness (Isaiah 43:16-19). The prophets read their own times through the patterns of the Torah.

Later Jewish interpreters did the same. Nachmanides, commenting on Abraham’s journey through the land in Genesis 12, states the principle that what happened to the fathers is a sign for the children. He reads Abraham’s descent to Egypt in a famine, the plagues on Pharaoh, and Abraham’s departure with wealth as an outline of the Exodus to come. Among the Dead Sea Scrolls, the commentary on Habakkuk reads the prophet’s words, line by line, as speaking of the community’s own Teacher of Righteousness and his enemies.

Matthew belongs in this company. The way of reading he used was not a Christian invention, and many Jews of his time and after would have recognized it. That does not make every use of it sound; pattern-reading can be done well or badly, by Jews and Christians alike. What counts is whether the pattern Matthew claims is really there in the Hebrew text.

Lumping every New Testament citation together as “prophecy” hides how differently they work. They fall into at least three kinds.

Some are offered as predictions. Micah 5:1 (5:2 in Christian Bibles) speaks of a ruler of Israel coming out of Bethlehem, and the Aramaic Targum of Micah reads that verse of the Messiah. A citation like this can be tested as a forecast.

Some are patterns. Hosea 11:1 is one, and so is Matthew’s use of Rachel weeping for her children (Jeremiah 31:15), a lament over exile set beside the grief of Bethlehem’s mothers. These claim a likeness in the story, not a forecast.

Some are echoes. When Jesus on the cross cries out the first line of Psalm 22, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” (Mark 15:34), a Jewish listener would hear the whole psalm called up by its opening, as psalms were often named by their first words. Psalm 22 moves from abandonment and mockery to deliverance and the nations turning to the LORD.

A pattern should not be graded as a failed prediction, and a prediction should not be excused as a pattern.

Psalm 22:17 (22:16 in Christian Bibles) is the best-known case. The Masoretic text reads ka’ari, “like a lion,” which leaves the line without a verb: “like a lion my hands and my feet.” The Septuagint, the Greek translation made by Jews in the centuries before Jesus, reads a verb meaning “they dug.” A psalms scroll from Nahal Hever, near the Dead Sea, appears to read ka’aru, a verb, rather than the noun “lion.” Scholars of every background disagree about the original wording, and “pierced” is a possible reading, not a certain one.

The New Testament does nothing with that line. The Gospels quote Psalm 22’s opening cry and the dividing of garments (22:19, or 22:18 in Christian Bibles, quoted in John 19:24), but none of them quotes the line about hands and feet. The “pierced” argument belongs to later Christian apologetics, and it should be argued, if at all, as an honest textual question.

The New Testament writers usually quote the Septuagint because it was the Bible of Greek-speaking Jews. Where they follow it, they follow a Jewish text. Sometimes the Dead Sea Scrolls agree with the Greek against the later Masoretic text, and often they agree with the Masoretic text, which was copied with great care. Neither side gains by pretending the differences are not there.

As a record of what the first Jewish followers of Jesus believed, the New Testament is clear about its central claim. Luke says that after the resurrection Jesus, “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets,” explained what the Scriptures said about him, that the Messiah would suffer and then enter his glory (Luke 24:25-27). The claim is about the shape of Israel’s Scriptures as a whole: a righteous sufferer vindicated by God, a son of David who reigns, and the nations blessed through Abraham’s seed (Genesis 22:18).

That claim can be tested against the Hebrew, and Jewish tradition has read many of the same passages of the Messiah. The Targum of Isaiah opens the servant song of Isaiah 52:13 with “My servant the Messiah.” The Talmud reads Zechariah 12:10 and Daniel 7:13 of the Messiah. The sages did not reach Christian conclusions from these texts, but they saw the Messiah in them, and that matters for the charge that Christians invented the connections.

None of this shows that Jesus is the one the pattern points to. That rests on his life, his death, and the claim that he was raised. It shows that his first followers were reading Israel’s Scriptures in a way Jews recognized, and that the case should be judged on its strongest texts. Two of those texts are discussed in the suffering servant is Israel and the virgin birth mistranslates almah.