Did New Testament Authors Misuse the Old Testament?

The idea that Jesus is the fulfillment of God’s promises to His covenant people Israel is central and foundational to the message of the New Testament. The New Testament is filled with citations and allusions to Old Testament Scriptures, seeking to show that Jesus is the Messiah, the hope of Israel who brings Old Testament salvation history to its climax. Skeptics have argued that the New Testament authors take Old Testament texts out of context, distort them, and misinterpret them in order to try to turn them into prophecies about Jesus. But is this the case?

It is important to recognize that the New Testament authors use Old Testament texts in a variety of ways. Sometimes, they cite Old Testament texts as direct prophecies about the future fulfilled by Jesus. Other times, they cite Old Testament texts in order to show how Jesus fulfilled them typologically. Typological fulfillment means that events during the Old Testament period of salvation history prefigure Jesus, and that Jesus fulfills the theological significance of these events to an even greater extent, thus “summing up” biblical salvation history in Himself. These claims of typological interpretation are not a matter of arbitrarily reading Jesus back into Old Testament texts, but of recognizing the continuity of God’s actions in salvation history, which has always ultimately been moving towards Jesus. Because God’s promises to Israel as a whole are ultimately fulfilled in Jesus the Messiah, the New Testament authors rightly cite various Old Testament texts as pointing to Jesus, even though they were not originally directly about Him. When we understand how the New Testament authors are using the Old Testament texts they cite, we will see that they are not, in fact, misinterpreting them. 

The Psalms

Multiple New Testament authors cite passages from the Psalms as references to Jesus (Psalm 2, 16, 22, 34, 35, 40, 41, 68, 69, 109, 110, 118). Now, the Psalms were not originally predictions about the future; they were a collection of hymns used by God’s people in worship. Yet, as God’s people prayed these Divinely inspired hymns over the centuries, they rightly saw in them implicit promises about God’s actions in the future. A number of psalms focus on the role of the Davidic king in God’s relationship with Israel. These royal psalms do not explicitly refer to God’s promise through His prophets that one day there would be a Messiah, that is, an ideal Davidic king. Yet, it is reasonable to call these psalms Messianic in the sense that the Messiah would, in sharp contrast to the many failed royal descendants of David, actually fulfill the ideal depiction of the Davidic king described in these psalms. And, since Jesus is the Messiah, the ideal Davidic king, it was perfectly right and fitting for the New Testament authors to understand these psalms as ultimately being about Jesus.

Psalm 40, which the author of Hebrews cites as being about Jesus (Heb 10:5-7), contains the line, “my sins have overtaken me, and I cannot see. They are more than the hairs of my head” (Ps 40:12). This might seem difficult to reconcile with the teaching of the New Testament that Jesus was sinless. But, if we understand that “God made Him who had no sin to be sin for us” (2 Cor 5:21), that Jesus the sinless One took upon Himself the guilt of humanity’s sin, then there is a sense in which this line could rightly be applied to Jesus.^[1]We can assume that, as a first century Jew, Jesus would have prayed such confessions of sin found throughout the Psalms as He participated in corporate worship with His fellow Israelites.

Other psalms which New Testament authors cite being about Jesus contain references to military conquest (e.g., Ps 2, 68). This seems difficult to reconcile with the fact that Jesus eschewed violence and taught His followers to love their enemies. But there is a sense in which Jesus won a military victory: He defeated the demonic powers of Hell, the root cause of the evil pagan empires threatening God’s people. This laid the groundwork for His followers, the body of Christ, to conquer these evil pagan nations through the power of love. We must also remember that, as the book of Revelation vividly depicts, when Jesus comes again to bring God’s Final Judgment, He will destroy all the governments of the world in order to replace them with the Kingdom of God.

The Suffering Servant

The Suffering Servant songs of Isaiah (Isa 42:1-4, 49:1-6, 50:4-11, 52:13-53:12), especially the fourth song, are cited by New Testament authors as being about Jesus. Skeptics have argued that this is clearly a misinterpretation, since Isaiah clearly identifies the servant as being the nation of Israel (Isa 41:8, 44:1-2, 45:4, 49:3), not an individual. However, this argument overlooks the fact that, in the second Servant song, the servant is clearly identified as a distinct individual within Israel: “And now the LORD says–he who formed me in the womb to be his servant to bring Jacob back to him and gather Israel to himself. . . It is too small a thing for you to be my servant to restore the tribes of Jacob and bring back those of Israel I have kept” (Isa 49:5-6). Although the nation of Israel is initially identified as the servant, a shift takes place to identifying the servant as an individual Israelite who represents the nation as a whole. 

It is debatable whether the prophet was talking about some individual (himself?) during his own day who somehow filled this role of the servant, or whether he was intending to speak of a future individual. However, this ultimately does not matter. Either he was directly prophesying about Jesus, or he was speaking about someone in his own time filling this role of the servant, which eventually would be filled in an even deeper way by Jesus. Either way, the authors of the New Testament were certainly justified in applying the words of the Suffering Servant songs to Jesus. Jesus is the ultimate servant of God, the representative of Israel who was finally able to faithfully fulfill the role of being God’s servant which God had called Israel to. 

The Gospel of Matthew

Matthew is often singled out by skeptics as being the worst offender among New Testament authors in misusing Old Testament texts. Matthew quotes the prophet Isaiah, “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son and they will call him Immanuel” (which means, “God with us”) (Isa 7:14), as being fulfilled by the birth of Jesus. But Isaiah 7:14-17 is about a young woman having a baby in Isaiah’s day, who would still be a child when God would use Assyria to defeat Aram and Israel, the enemies of Judah. Matthew quotes the prophet Hosea, “Out of Egypt I called my son” (Hos 11:1) as being fulfilled by Jesus’s family sojourning in Egypt (Matt 2:14-15). But Hosea 11:1 is about the nation of Israel being rescued by God from Egypt during the Exodus. Matthew quotes the prophet Jeremiah, “A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more” (Jer 31:15), as being fulfilled by Herod’s slaughter of the male children around Bethlehem (Matt 2:16-18). But Jeremiah 31:15 is about the mothers of Israel weeping for their children who have been sent into exile during the time of Jeremiah.

In none of these cases is the Old Testament text Matthew quotes a prophetic prediction about events in the distant future. However, this is a problem only if we assume that this is what Matthew must always have meant when he speaks of Jesus fulfilling Old Testament prophecies. Once we understand that there are a variety of ways that Matthew speaks of fulfillment, then we will be able to see that Matthew is not, in fact, abusing or misinterpreting these Old Testament texts.

Isaiah 7:14 speaks of a child being born as a sign for Judah that “God is with us,” that God will preserve the Davidic line. Matthew rightly sees this prophecy as being fulfilled in an even deeper way by the birth of the child Jesus, the Davidic Messiah who is also God Incarnate, truly “God with us.” Hosea 11:1 speaks of God bringing His “son,” Israel, out of Egypt. Jesus, God’s Son, is understood by Matthew to represent the nation of Israel as a whole (recall the Suffering Servant). As true, faithful Israel, Jesus “recapitulates,” sums up and relives, Israel’s history^[2]See Joel R. Kennedy, The Recapitulation of Israel: Use of Israel’s History in Matthew 1:1-4:11 (ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2008). in his sojourn in Egypt and, later, his testing in the wilderness (Matt 4:1-11). It is in this sense that Matthew understands the prophet’s words about God calling His son Israel out of Egypt as being typologically fulfilled in Jesus sojourning in Egypt. Jeremiah 31:15 speaks of the pain of Israel in being in exile, an exile that had still not truly ended at the time of Jesus, when a foreign monarch ruled over the land of Israel and killed its children. But Jeremiah 31 goes on to give hope that one day the exile will be ended, Israel will be restored, and God will make a new covenant with Israel. And this is what Jesus would accomplish: the end of Israel’s exile (a major theological theme in the New Testament), the restoration of Israel, and the establishment of a new covenant through His blood.

So, Matthew is not misinterpreting Old Testament texts or taking them out of context. He rightly understands them as being typologically fulfilled in Jesus. To some, it might seem that such typological fulfillment is not really much of a real fulfillment. But this would be to miss the point that Jesus is the fulfillment of the Old Testament as a whole and all of its promises: “all the promises of God are Yes in Him” (2 Cor 1:20). This is why Matthew is right to see these particular prophecies as finding their ultimate fulfillment in Jesus.