Home » Dorms » Student Lounge

Pick a Canon, Any Canon

Dare to Compare

Here's something you don't hear often in Christian circles: "If I could choose which books went in the Bible, I'd get rid of the New Testament all together. Heck, I'd even get rid of the Psalms and Proverbs. In fact, just give me the first nine chapters of 1 Chronicles. You know, the section that goes on and on about who was the father of whom or the son of whom or the mother of whom or the accountant for whom, etc. That should keep me nice and tickled."

C O F F E E  S H O P

---

Is one testament more important than the other?

Join the discussion!

The next time you're in a Christian bookstore that carries Old Testament and New Testament commentaries, try comparing the size of the two sections. I suspect that the two sections will either be equal in size, or that they will carry more New Testament than Old Testament commentaries.

Now, take your Bible and look at how many pages the Old Testament occupies compared to the New Testament. The Old Testament is over two-thirds of the Scriptures! So, why is there such a disproportionate emphasis on the New Testament?¹

No Man's Land

The general attitude toward the Scriptures held by most Christians is something like, "The New Testament is more important (and certainly more interesting) than the Old Testament." Of course, no one would say it out loud, but why do we even think it? There are probably several reasons, some of which 'are: too dry, too legalistic, too long, too repetitive, too scandalous, too irrelevant, too difficult, too strange, too athletic, and so on.

The problem is that even though people don't say this out loud, they shout it through their actions (notice which commentaries are in the majority at your local bookstore, or which verses get more sermon time in the pulpit). Barring the Psalms and Proverbs, we almost never venture into the landscape found in Ezekiel, Ezra, Numbers and the rest. Unless you're an Old Testament scholar or need to borrow a verse for your own purposes (e.g. 2 Chronicles 7:14), we simply regard it as no man's land.

As people who are seeking to be Christ-like, we must keep in mind that Jesus had an intimate knowledge of the Old Testament. If we want to better understand his words and his actions, we should seek to emulate him in this way.

OT: Obsolete Testament

It's only been within the past few years that I stopped trying to covertly slip by the Old Testament. In 2 Timothy 3:16, Paul explains that "all Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work." For so long, I had been missing the point of this verse, as if it were saying that the Gospels and Paul's epistles were useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. While this is true, that's not what Paul was saying.

C O F F E E  S H O P

---

Is the Old Testament relevant for today?

Join the discussion!

The word "Scripture" is always used in the New Testament to refer to the Old Testament. In other words, he considered Hosea and Nehemiah, Lamentations, etc. as being useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and so on.

The thing is, if I had told any of the New Testament writers that their writings were more important than the Old Testament or that their writings were more useful for teaching and training, they would have laughed me out of the first century.

Giving Away the End

For a while now, Gideons International has been handing out little copies of the New Testament (plus the Psalms and Proverbs). Just to let you know, it is not my intent to pick on the Gideons; they're just a well-known organization; in fact, God has done amazing work through their organization over their century-long existence; using this many semi-colons in one sentence is absurd, unorthodox, ungrammatical, distracting, and biblical (see Romans 1:30).

While I support the Gideons' vision, I must admit that handing out the New Testament without the Old Testament is the equivalent of handing someone the last part of a novel. Sure, you'd know what happened in the end, but you wouldn't know why. In fact, many of the references would be absolutely meaningless because they would assume knowledge of the first chunk of the book.

For example, if I had never read C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia and someone handed me the final book, The Last Battle, I would think, The last battle? Were there other battles? And who is this Aslan character? Why's he significant? I would venture to say that reading the New Testament is kind of like that. Jesus doesn't come out of nowhere.² The gospel doesn't just show up out of the blue.³

In short, the New Testament was not written in a vacuum. It assumes the Old Testament; that is, the writers of the New Testament assumed that their audience had knowledge of the Old Testament to such an extent that they could use words or phrases from somewhere in the Old Testament with full confidence that their listeners would know what they were referring to.

This is why passing out only the New Testament wouldn't make sense to Jesus or any of the biblical writers.⁴

What's Next: Part 2

In part two of this two-part article, I'll give some specific examples of how the New Testament just cannot make sense with out its former counterpart.