Our Lord's View of the Old Testament

Abstract

"We shall not attempt in this paper to deal in any general way with our Lord’s use of the Old Testament, because the Gospels contain a vast amount of material, which could not possibly be handled in a single lecture. We shall consider His use of the Old Testament only in so far as it throws light upon His fundamental view of the Scriptures. And we shall not attempt to deal with the limits of the canon acknowledged by our Lord. We shall content ourselves with seeing how He viewed the Old Testament Scriptures that He used, without attempting to discover whether His canon of Scripture coincided precisely with our Old Testament. Nor shall we tackle the question of the authority to be given to our Lord’s view of Scripture once that view has been discovered. The problems of Kenosis are of supreme importance, but they come outside our subject and we shall not attempt to grapple with them. We shall be concerned solely with the question of what, as a plain matter of history, He believed and taught."