The Old Testament and its Interpretation in the New Testament 1

Nextweek I will begin a couple of posts based on "The Old Testament and its Interpretation in the New Testament". These series of posts will be based on Peter Enns' book "Inspiration and Incarnation" (the title of the post is borrowed from a chapter of the book; Chapter 4) which I finished some time ago. I heartily recommend the book because it raises important issues on how we are to understand our scripture being inspired, and his book deals with the bulky part of our bibles, the Old Testament.

I thought of posting a series of post on the book as a whole but this would be way beyond my area of expertise. I am not a scholar so don't expect me to answer your questions :) . I just hope that we can have some decent discussions base this particular series.

I choose my reflections based on Chapter 4 of the book because

1. This chapter is worth the price of the book!

2. Enns contends that the Apostles methods of using the OT text were how other interpreters in their period of time interpreted the OT.

3. The time period mentioned here is known as the Second Temple Period.

4. He gives 'enough' (I wished he dealt with all the relevant passages) examples for our consideration on how the Apostles were following methods of interpretation understood in their time.

5. It raises important issues on how we are to interpret the OT text in the way of the Apostles.

I wanted to start posting tommorow but I better compose them before hand. So I hope you will join me in this discussion. Before that though, this is a link (see below) to an article by Enns based on this particular issue. It would shed some light on this particular subject:

Apostolic Hermeneutics and an Evangelical Doctrine of Scripture: Moving Beyond a Modernist Impasse.