Christological Midrash—Inherited from Jesus
To acknowledge the evangelists’ debt to Jewish exegesis does not mean we should see it as an adequate explanation for the use of the OT in the New. The exegetical techniques in the gospels may be similar to those found in contemporary Judaism(s), but the underlying hermeneutical axioms are distinctively different.
Many scholars agree that both the relevant Qumran scrolls and the NT adopt the same appropriation techniques, but with different presuppositions. The NT authors viewed the Scriptures through the lens of the Christ-event and the establishment of the church. The Qumran authors viewed them through the lens of the Teacher of Righteousness and the establishment of their own community. Furthermore, as Carson insightfully argued:
[The differences between contemporary Judaism and Christian usage of the OT] relate not only to christology and the way the Old Testament is read as a prefigurement of Jesus Christ, but even to the eschatological stance of the evangelist . . . Thus, Black . . . writes: “Like the primitive church, the Qumrân Essenes believed they were living in the End-Time, so that many pesharim or pesherised texts are apocalyptic and eschatological.” But the understanding of “End-Time” in the two corpora is quite different . . . [T]he Qumran sectarians believed they were in the end times such that they emphasized the coming fulfillment of the OT scriptures that has already taken place-even if their perception of the tension between the “already” and the “not yet” also leaves them anticipating the future. (Carson, “John and the Johannine Epistles, p.257)
Moreover, Earle Ellis has pointed to the difference between narrative midrash found in the gospels and some rabbinic midrash which elaborate on a verse or word of Scripture. In general, while the OT text is primary for the rabbinic midrash, the NT midrash gives primacy to the events of Jesus and only uses the texts to explain or illuminate.
While they may describe the events in biblical language and may on occasion allude to a prior fictional midrash . . . they never seem to reverse their priorities so as to make the OT text the locus for creating stories about Jesus. This holds true also for the Infancy Narratives where . . . the wide-ranging mélange of citations and allusions could only have coalesced around preexisting traditions and, in any case, could not have produced the stories in the gospels. For example, only because Matthew (2:6, 23; 4:15) had a tradition that Jesus was born in Bethlehem and raised in Galilee does he use Mic. 5:2 of Jesus’ birth and Jer. 23:5; Isa. 11:1; 9:2f (8:23f) of his youth and ministry and not vice versa. The texts themselves could be applied to either eventuality. (Ellis, “Biblical Interpretation,” pp. 704-5)
Here we see a shift in the focus of primary revelation from the text to the person. Jesus Christ functions as the central organizing principle for the interpretation of the OT. Here lies the uniqueness of the NT’s appropriation of the OT. Thus, it is not inappropriate to call most of the NT’s use of the OT “christological midrash.”
Owing to such intertextuality, the gospels display both continuity and discontinuity with the OT. The OT and its interpretive traditions provide the matrix out of which the kerygma sprang. Yet, the message the evangelists present does not simply interpret the OT, or simply utilize its language to explain Jesus and his gospel effectively replace and redefine the OT. Carson aptly observes, “This does not mean, for the Evangelists, that they are discarded so much as fulfilled: they find their true significance and real continuity in him who is the true vine, the true light, the true temple, the one of whom Moses wrote” (Carson, “John and the Johannine Epistles,” pp. 255-56). This continuity and discontinuity must be held in tension. To emphasize one against another is not being true to the gospel, as Jesus has proclaimed, “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old” (Matt. 13:52).
Thus, it has often been observed that a knowledge of the OT is essential for an understanding of the Nt. However, in knowing the OT one must be prepared to see it in a new light. Perhaps Greg Beale’s analogy is helpful here:
[W]e can compare an author’s original, unchanging meaning to an apple in its original context of an apple tree. When someone removes the apple and puts it into another seeing (say, in a basket of various fruits in a dining room for decorative purposes), the apple does not lose its original identity as an apple, the fruit of a particular kind of tree, but the apple must now be understood not in and of itself but in relation to the new context in which it has been placed . . .The new context does not annihilate the original identity of the apple, but now the apple must be understood in its relation to its new setting. (G.K. Beale, John’s use of the Old Testament in Revelation, pp. 51-52)
The point of the analogy is that the apple, though different now, will never become a pear even though it may be mixed with pieces of pear in a bowl of fruit salad. Therefore when trying to study the OT in the New, the original context (both literary and exegetical) is important but the new context is essential. (Theresa Yu Chui Siang Lau, “The Gospels and the Old Testament” in The Context and Setting of the Gospel Tradition, eds. Mark Harding and Alanna Nobbs [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2010], 155-80, here, pp. 177-79)
