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Q.
Do Christians need to read the Old Testament?
Gary Peluso-Verdend
A.
Absolutely! This question was raised as early as the second century
by a Christian named Marcion, who claimed the God of the Jewish
Bible was different from the God of Christian experience. Church
authorities declared Marcion to be a heretic. Church authorities have not
always been right in their judgments, but they were on this one!
We still hear contemporary Christians claim that the Old Testament evi-
dences a God of wrath and the New Testament a God of love. Those persons
who make such declarations have not read either testament closely enough.
Christians have used this misinterpretation over centuries to oppress and even
to murder Jews.
The reasons Christian should read the Old Testament are many, including
the following:
- Jesus was a Jew. His scriptures were largely what Christians now call the
Old Testament. - The New Testament is fi lled with references to the Old. The Christian
Bible is unintelligible without the Hebrew Bible (another name for the
Old Testament). - The Bible, Old and New Testaments, contains dialogues, conversations,
and arguments that later writers carried on with former writers.
Christians should read the whole scriptures in order to enter the
conversations and debates responsibly. - The Bible has been an important infl uence in U.S. public life, but the more
infl uential testament has been the Old! - Christianity has a violent history against Judaism. Contemporary
Christians should seek to avoid all vestiges of anti-Judaism, including
the claim of having eclipsed Judaism (against which, for example, Paul
certainly claimed the opposite; see Romans 9—11).