The Problem With The “Old Testament”

In my opinion, the biggest hindrance to properly understanding and handling the Old Testament is the very term “Old Testament” itself, because it carries a lot of theological baggage in the minds of many people and spawns many unhelpful ideas of being obsolete and irrelevant to our lives today.

However, this was not at all the attitude of Jesus and the first Christians. What we call the “Old Testament”, they called “the Scriptures”. Even when they started recognizing new writings as scripture (i.e., the books of the “New Testament”), they never saw the earlier scriptures as becoming obsolete and irrelevant to their lives. The Apostle Paul writes:

2 Timothy 3:16–17 Every scripture is god-breathed, and profitable for teaching, for conviction, for correction, for training which is in righteousness, so that the man of God would be equipped, having been fully equipped for every good work

Whether or not Paul had the New Testament in mind when he said “every scripture”, he definitely meant to include the “Old Testament”—every single book, every single sentence, and even every single word. For all intents and purposes, what we call the “Old Testament” was the Bible of Jesus and the first Christians, and in their perspective, there was nothing “old” about it.

Of course, we should distinguish the “New Testament” scriptures from the scriptures which came before that. However, to call the earlier scriptures the “Old Testament” is not accurate. The English word “testament” means “covenant”, and therefore the “Old Testament” refers to the Old Covenant which God made with Israel at Mount Sinai, and not the scriptures of Jesus, his fellow Jews, and the first Christians.