Aug. 13, 2026
Grandparent Texts: Gary Edward Schnittjer on How the New Testament Reads the Old
The usual complaint about the New Testament's use of the Old is that the apostles play fast and loose. Dr. Gary Edward Schnittjer thinks the problem runs the other direction. The Old Testament has gone missing from the research, and once you cut it off, ordinary exegetical moves start looking bizarre. Second Temple interpreters and the New Testament authors resemble each other because they were both apprenticed to the same thousand years of Old Testament authors interpreting earlier Old Testament texts.
In this episode, Dr. James Spencer and Dr. Schnittjer work through what he calls vertical context. Scholarship attends to the paragraph and chapter around a quoted verse. What gets skipped is the depth beneath it. More than eighty times, the New Testament cites an Old Testament text that is already citing something older. Zechariah's king on a donkey reaches back to the blessing of Judah in Genesis 49, blended with Isaiah 62, and by the time the gospel writers use it, the donkey is carrying a great deal more than a rider. Hebrews turns out to be interested in Torah almost everywhere while quoting Torah almost nowhere, working instead through Psalm 8, Psalm 95, Psalm 110, and Jeremiah.
They also take up fulfillment, which in English carries a prediction-and-payoff sense the Hebrew does not require. Matthew's formula comes off the same plane as 2 Chronicles 36, where fulfilling a word means enacting it into reality rather than clocking a duration. That reframes the hard cases. Hosea 11 contains no prediction at all, but Hosea himself reads Jacob's life forward typologically, so Matthew is reading Hosea the way Hosea reads Scripture. The conversation closes on why this is not a license for interpretive improvisation. Dr. Schnittjer argues for plain sense exegesis throughout, which means reading each author with the grain rather than imposing a modern logic and calling it faithfulness.
Dr. Gary Edward Schnittjer is distinguished professor of Old Testament for Cairn Theological Seminary at Cairn University. He writes at Carpenter's Student.
This is the final episode in our four-part conversation and the second of two on the parallel layout project.
Purchase Old Testament Use of Old Testament in Parallel Layout Volume 1: Torah and Prophets at amazon.com
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm doctor James Spencer and I'm joined again today by doctor Gary Edward Snitcher, and we're going to be discussing his book Old Testament Use of Old Testament in Parallel Layout that is coming out later this year, but specifically today, we're going to be looking at the use of the Old Testament in the New Testament and how that really works, how we might think about it, and really dealing with not just the quotations, but some of the illusions there as well. Very similar to the conversation we had about the Old Testament use of the Old Testament last time, just applied into the New Testament and there will be some differences. So with that said, Gary, welcome back to the program. Thank you very much for being here.
00:00:43
Speaker 2: Thanks James, I really appreciate being here and especially having a chance. I tell my students all the time there is nothing wrong with the New Testament.
00:00:52
Speaker 3: I mean, it's great.
00:00:54
Speaker 2: So I'm happy to be able to look at that, and especially I think what in this particular area the it's a very strange area when you get into the literature, the study of the New Testament used to the Old it's it's amazing to me how I hate to say this, but for these past few generations, the Old Testament is the missing link in the in the research. And so it's a very very strange area of research where you have all sorts of bizarre things being said in this area of scholarship, especially, you know when once there's talk of our hermonutics and their hermaonutics, as though it's a hermautic unto itself, then all of a sudden, you know that things are just being made up. I mean, and that's that's not that's not a helpful way to go. And I think maybe the other area that some of your readers might listeners might be familiar with is there's always a search among the scholarship of the New Testament used to the Old four sort of a Second Temple exegedical tradition that might kind of do this and the failure. And there's nothing wrong with that, because that does have absolutely some influence on how things go. But the failure is to realize that almost all of the Second Temple Jewish exegetical traditions are coming forward out of the Old Testament. And what's very obvious from the New Testament is these authors are studying the Old Testament, and so of course we should expect to find similarities between Second Temple Jewish exegedical traditions in the New Testament. I mean, they're all drinking from the same kool aid in the Old Testament. And the Old Testaments are very rich resource of extra Jesus because the Old Testament authors for a thousand years before.
00:02:58
Speaker 3: The days of Jesus.
00:03:00
Speaker 2: We're executing earlier Old Testament texts, and so it's not the slightest but surprising then that both second Tempo Jewish exegetical traditions and the New Testament authors have similarities because they're studying how to interpret the scriptures by how the Old Testament scriptures interpret the Old Testament scriptures.
00:03:22
Speaker 1: Yeah, I found I discovered one of those when I was studying the Book of Hebrews. Hebrews seven and deals with a lot with Melchizedek, and you have these interesting way in which Melchizedek's name is handled. So he's the King of Righteousness, which is a play on the Hebrew and then obviously king of Peace, which is a play on his identification as the King of Salem. And so you have this word play between Salem and Shalom, so king of peace. He is without father and without mother, without genealogy. You know, these kind of ideas that are sort of drawn into Hebrew seven. And initially, if you look at that and you go, what in the world is the author of Hebrews doing with this guy? Like he's a referenced twice in the Old Testament, you don't get a lot of information about him. You know, he shows up in Genesis fourteen, it's on them one ten, and that's kind of it.
00:04:09
Speaker 3: Why is this guy such a big deal?
00:04:10
Speaker 1: And then I got to look at the Dead Sea scrolls eleven Q thirteen or sometimes called eleven Q Melchizedic, and you see the almost the exact same use and exa Jesus of his name that play on the names, the play on the genealogy, and of course they make Melchizedek into more of a Messianic figure who is to come, whereas Hebrews identifies Melchizedic in that order with Christ.
00:04:37
Speaker 3: So there are real differences, but you just start to.
00:04:39
Speaker 1: Realize exactly what you're saying, that these Second Temple sort of different traditions are sort of in the Ether. They're reading the Old Testament in similar ways, and there are trajectories within the interpretive matrix that make sense within that particular period.
00:04:57
Speaker 2: Because they're well, they're coming out of the Old Testament. I mean, the Author of the Hebrews is a great example, because when he's interested in Genesis, he doesn't quote Genesis, he quotes Psalm eight. When he's interested in the Wilderness, he doesn't quote Numbers or Exodus, he quotes Psalm ninety five. When he's interested in Melchizdek, he's going through the grid, so to speak of someone ten. When he's interested in tabernacle sacrifices, he's in the Psalms. When he's interested in the Covenant, he's in Jeremiah. So we find that he's the Author of the Hebrews is navigating Torah, which is what he's really interested in, but almost never quoting Tora, because he's looking at how Tora was executed throughout the Old Testament.
00:05:44
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's sort of a mediated look at the Torah through that you slightly later tradition that's really faithfully trying to understand and reflect on Torah, which is kind of cool.
00:05:55
Speaker 3: He's almost cheating and using the commentary.
00:05:57
Speaker 1: Doing what we tell students not to, right, don't use the commentary first.
00:06:02
Speaker 3: Go back to the real source.
00:06:04
Speaker 2: But I think that that's why there's so much similarity. Yeah, and so in other words, there's nothing wrong to it's helpful to look at Second Temple Jewish literature. The mistake is when we don't look for the precedence and the things that are coming out from the thousand years of execuses in the Old Testament itself, which is what the exegetical traditions we're studying, what the New Testament authors are studying during this period.
00:06:39
Speaker 3: Agreed.
00:06:40
Speaker 1: Yeah, so you do a little bit just as we think about again Old Testament use in the New We obviously have clear quotations. But you wrote a piece for Currents and Biblical Studies on this long lost grandparent text of the New Testament, not parent text, but grandparent texts. And I found this really compelling. I thought it was interesting. I love the framing of it. So I'm wondering if you can kind of walk us through that a little bit, and then we'll talk a little bit more, just specifically about how the Old Testament is used in the New.
00:07:12
Speaker 2: Sure. So, what a lot of us are familiar with, especially through the studies of the New Testament. Use of the Old is what I call horizontal context, so that the scholarship isn't just looking at the verse, but looking at the surrounding paragraph in chapters. And I call it horizontal context. But what hasn't been done enough is what I call vertical context. And this runs both directions, but a downward vertical context is the deep context. That is, over eighty times the New Testament authors are quoting or alluding to an Old Testament text, that itself is alluding to an order Old Testament texts. We were just talking about examples in Hebrews. And so when a New Testament scholar goes down and stops and just looks at the horizontal context of the seid a verse, that's not good enough when that versus citing us still earlier verse. We need to go down the horizontal con sorry vertical context further to the deep context, because that's really what's in view that that's what's driving I call it progressive revelation forward. The advancement of revelation is that original donor text that's being interpreted again and again in the scriptures.
00:08:38
Speaker 1: Yeah, do you see that in something like you know, the proto of Bengelian in Genesis three, right where we see the serpent's head being crushed by the son of Eve versus what we see in Romans. I believe it's fifteen or sixteen. I'm blanking on the exact verse. But where the church now takes that role and they're supposed to crush the.
00:09:04
Speaker 3: Serpent under the head.
00:09:06
Speaker 1: I've always sort of looked at that and said, you know, yes, this is sort of a gesturing forward in Genesis three, maybe to a Messianic figure of some sort, but we really can't then stop it at Christ when in Romans.
00:09:20
Speaker 3: Sixteen it's being applied to the church.
00:09:24
Speaker 1: Is that the sort of vertical depth you're talking about?
00:09:27
Speaker 3: Or could you give a better example than that?
00:09:30
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, that's a good example of what we call the what I call I think people usually say the one and the many. I'd like to talk about the individual versus the collective. And so there's that constant interchange between the individual and the collective. And there's many, many examples of that. The one you just cided as a good one. But where let's say, Isaiah fifty five is quoting from the Covenant actually an interpretation of the Dividic Covenant in David's last word in Second Samuel twenty three. And so that's a really powerful example because he's citing the Davidic Covenant, but he says, y'all says you plural, it's to you collectively. And so then there's a sense in which, of course the Davidic Covenant is an individual covenant to David in his dynasty, and it refers to these davidict messiahs. But then there's a broader sense in which no, no, no, the king is Israel, the King is the covenantal people. Yeah, so when we see Second Chronicles chapter six site Isaiah fifty five, or we see Paul cite Isaiah fifty five, they're both taking advantage of that collective sense, so that what Christ does comes over into the Son of God the Church.
00:10:56
Speaker 3: I see, Yeah, no, that's helpful.
00:10:59
Speaker 2: So I think though maybe an example of this vertical context might be something like Zachariah nine to nine, where the donkey is coming. The king is writing a donkey into Jerusalem, and so there's a very distinctive donkey language in that, so that the kind of the mother text, so to speak, or the grandparent text, is the blessing of Judah in Genesis forty nine. And so if in Genesis forty nine, the Judah King comes into the vineyard and ties up the donkey to a vine of all things, you know, there's no old West tumbleweed's going by. It's a very lush place. Where where else you're going to tie a donkey up?
00:11:48
Speaker 1: Right?
00:11:48
Speaker 2: And what the what Zachariah does is he he kind of gives a vision of Okay, if the Judah King is in Judah in the vineyard with a donkey, what happens before that? So he creates a prequel of the king riding a donkey into the city. But what's really remarkable, you know? You have that. So that's the parent text and the grandparent text, if you will. And then the child text is all the citations in the New Testament. But what Zachariah does is he has the control text back there in Genesis forty nine, the promise of the Judah King, but he mixes it together with what we call Isaiah sixty two eleven, daughter Zion, see here comes your king righteous. But then maybe the most remarkable thing, and I hadn't noticed this until Mark Bodis commentary on Zachariah came out. But the king is saved riding on a donkey, saved passive, and so it's a very remarkable thing. But digging around just a little bit, all of a sudden, Wow, it's the song of David where he talks about that the humble are the ones that you have saved. And so you find the very same language out of David's mouth, of all things, and so we can see that, you know, there's the main interpretive blend between Isaiah sixty two and Genesis forty nine, but then there's these minor themes that really enrich it in a really surprising way, where we have this humble saved king coming in on the donkey, and of course the gospel writers use this in very remarkable ways. It's not quoted in Mark, but we find right this is a prelude to Jesus coming into the city talking about how the the vine growers beat up the sun and kill him and toss him out of the city, and then he is crucified as the king of the Jews. So it's just really remarkable how the the deep context drives forward and provides such a rich way, theological way for the New Testament authors to present the Gospel of Christ.
00:14:27
Speaker 1: What I find fascinating about all of that, aside from all the different interconnections, is if you think through, you know, if you thought through your big ten texts in the Old Testament, that probably doesn't make the list, right. I mean, you know, Genesis forty nine is not one that we spend a ton of time on, and you know, Zechariah is is sort of not a book that most of us, you know, we spend a whole lot of time on. And yet that scene of Jesus riding in on the donkey, I mean have a whole Sunday dedicated to that, right, And so you have the New Testament authors really picking up these fairly nuanced, sort of Old Testament texts and understandings that are by no means like these big major ideas that we would necessarily see in you know, when we're reading the Old Testament. They're pulling these little strands together in pretty intricate ways and then showing how Jesus's life is the extension of that patterning.
00:15:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think you're right that our favorite texts in the Bible are different than the biblical author's favorite texts, right, because some of the ones that we really don't spend much time and they go to again and again. And the way it works is the more that a text is executed by authoritative exegetes as scriptural authors, the more it has to offer. So it's not ever depleted. It actually builds up in theological and exogenical connotations that later biblical authors can take advantage of in more and more subtle ways. They can do bigger things with less work as the advancement of revelation moves forward. Yeah, so that's one one case where we kind of go down from right to Zachariah down to Genesis. But there's other cases where this vertical context we call it a trace.
00:16:32
Speaker 3: So that.
00:16:35
Speaker 2: And I just want to use a clear example to not be confusing. And I know you're one of your professors. Greg Biale did a lot with this. He talks about how, you know, there's this text that the New Testament quotes, and the New Testament doesn't quote the other Old Testament texts that quote it, but they're actually controlling what's going on. So for example, in as we're chapter one, there's some the people are coming back to the land, and so there's this typology of the First Exodus that's sort of in the background as that people come back in a new Exodus to Judah. And what the author of as Reniam I does not do doesn't bother quoting Isaiah and the New Exodus, and so we kind of have the same thing going on in the New Testament. The New Exodus of Isaiah provides this sort of way of using the original Exodus typologically. And so there's just this reading of Jesus the Messiah right up against Torah. And we call it a trace because we can't prove that it's really Isaiah on the mind because it's not quoted, but it's really a control text or a control set of texts that sort of is part of that vertical context. And maybe it's I don't want to get too carried away with this metaphor, but it's like if there's the grandfather text and then there's these uncles and cousin texts out there, if.
00:18:07
Speaker 3: You will no, I mean it makes sense.
00:18:10
Speaker 1: It feels like to me the traces are almost like an extension of the horizontal context. So when I think of it, I almost think of it like Saturn, the planet Saturn. You have the core planet, and then you have the rings that are going around it, and these other texts that are sort of surrounding the planet, or are those texts that are flipping around and they make Saturn what it is now, there's obviously a near context in which all of those passengers are used, and.
00:18:40
Speaker 3: We want to pay attention to that.
00:18:41
Speaker 1: But the reality is that we can't get so caught up that we get myopically focused only on the six verses that surround this thing. There has to be a recognition that there's an interpretive trajectory in the Old Testament that's using this theme, these verses, these ideas that are swimming around that's being pulled across into the New Testament. And to your point, we have to be careful with that because if it's not quoted, it's easy for us to import something that maybe isn't there. And so I think there's a sense in which the sense making sort of is this coherent? Does it make sense? Maybe a good question is is it plausible? You know, is probably where we land on a lot of those trace texts. Is that a fair assessment in your mind?
00:19:29
Speaker 2: I think so, and I think you're getting it. The more important thing, and if I were to summarize back to what you're saying, if we're to understand what the New Testament is doing with the Old, we really really need to know the Old Testament, because that's what the New Testament authors, that's what Christ, that's what these teachers are doing. But we can also, I guess, be helped by analogy in more subtle and difficult ways. So let's say we were just talking about I can use an example. In the beginning of Mark one, two and three, he cites Isaiah, but then he's really doing Malachi, who's using Isaiah and really doing something with Exodus twenty three, twenty and twenty one. Yeah, and so there's this So it's this rich vertical context, but there's so many views of why would he say Isaiah says, but then kind of blend together these various.
00:20:24
Speaker 3: Texts, imlay and yeah, yeah.
00:20:27
Speaker 2: The top two views are well, it's a mistake, that's one view, and the other top view is well, this is this second Temple Jewish thing, right, Well, okay, those are fine ideas, but this happens in the Old Testament. So, for example, in Second Chronicles thirty six, verse twenty one, the chronicler cites Jeremiah, but then blends the seventy years of Jeremiah with what we would call a passage here in Leviticus chapter twenty six. So he's he's citing one, but really his U U and I guide us with the seventy years. But really it's the covenental language of Leviticu's twenty six, which is playing the bigger role in the destruction of Jerusalem there and so this and this is a particularly important text out. That's why I wanted to bring this up. Is this fulfillment formula there in Second Chronicles thirty six, verse twenty one. It's maybe, uh, let's just pretend Mark was written first, and so he's this very iconic beginning. Well, it seems like Matthew might have caught wind of this, because when we look at the fulfillment formula in Matthew, he's, yeah, I'm gonna read this sea from from the Bible. I mark this ahead of time. Okay, this is Second Chronicles thirty six, twenty one. He's using the word fulfill not as a call but a pel So it's that's what you have to do to fulfill a word, not just a time, but to actualize a word into reality. So the chronicler says, to fulfill the word of Yahweh by the mouth of Jeremiah. Let me follow this right up with Matthew chapter one. All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet Matthew chapter two, and so it's fulfilled what the Lord said through the prophet. Here Matthew's kind of coming right off of this. That's okay, yeah, no, that's that mixes it up because I'm going on on and on with this boring converce.
00:23:01
Speaker 3: But no, no, you're good talking about grammar.
00:23:05
Speaker 2: But the shift to the pl is so significant. But that's all of a sudden. What we see Matthew doing is he's talking about fulfilling a word, and he's he's looking at it right off the same sort of plane, if you will, as what we saw in the beginning part of Mark. Mark's not using that language, but Matthew is coming along and using the language from the same place.
00:23:35
Speaker 1: And just to give everybody at home, the cow and the pl or forms in Hebrews, so you can think of him as different forms of the same word, and when they're in that particular form, they can take on a different meaning. And so for instance, there's another form called the hithhil, and the hithil often has more of a forceful, assertive or causative sort of nuance to it. Not in every case, you don't want to stare type these things, but just give an example. The pl has that same sort of strengthening to it. But in this case, what you're suggesting is that the cow, which is sort of the base form we could think of it as in Hebrew, is really talking about the fulfillment of an act doing something, versus the pl, which has the nuance of actually getting something done.
00:24:24
Speaker 3: That's been said is that.
00:24:26
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And especially the call form, the vanilla form yes of fulfill Malt is used to say a duration of time. So that's what Daniel he's thinking about.
00:24:42
Speaker 3: The seventy duration of time, got it?
00:24:45
Speaker 2: Whereas the pl, which is a more intensive it's it's it's rare for that word to be used in fulfill. It's only about five times in the Old Testament, two of them and then two are parallel. But there we have a word isn't separate like so it's not like, Okay, here's a protection, here's a conclusion. Because it's God's word, it initiates the reality of what it speaks about. God's prophetic word binds reality to itself, so that because of what he said has to come to past if you will, it is enacted into reality. And so the pl catches that sense, I sit, an actual word can be fulfilled, it can be enacted into reality.
00:25:35
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, that's really helpful, and I think it makes more sense of the Metheian use of fulfillment, particularly when we get into the odd ones in Matthew, which we get probably turned to. So there are a lot of Old Testament quotations in the New Testament that are relatively transparent to understand. Right these are what we normally think of as maybe rightly or wrongly, here's a prediction, and then there is a there's this moment where we see that prediction worked out in a very specific way. And I think that's overly simplistic, but a lot of times we can see those things and they're a little easier for people to grasp. The reality is that I think a lot of times what we're looking at is more of a patterning that's coming into focus as we get into the New Testament, and that's what opens it up to something we talked about at the beginning of the podcast, like the Hoseiah quotation in Matthew, which is difficult to even understand as a prophecy other than it comes out of Hoseia.
00:26:39
Speaker 3: So maybe we can talk through that a little bit.
00:26:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, that's a really good example. That's probably the textbook example that a lot of people go to. And I think that, I mean, you said it. We can imagine somebody buys a new Bible and there's a page in this new Bible with Versus in the left column and Versus in the right column, and it was like, wow, it's an incredible page, and it really brings a lot of comfort to the reader to know that everything lines up. And as long as the reader doesn't look those verses up, everything's okay, everything's great. Yeah, it's when the reader starts to look things up there like there's something wrong with my Bible. And you know, how come it's like this because there's actually very few that line up the way we want them to. And even those, if we prob a little deeper, like we were just talking about Zacharian nine. Well, that that's poetry in this, so it only there's a poetic shaped reality that makes it work. It wouldn't have had to quite be that way. So when we look back at jose eleven, he's Josea is looking backward at the Exodus. I mean, you're alluding to that. There's no prediction there at all, But he kind of mixes the language what we would call Deuteronomy chapter seven, verse eight, which begins, but it was because YAHWEH loved you Israel and so on, and brought you up out of Egypt. And so what Joseah does is mixes that with well, this is what most people think anyway. I think it's probably right that in Exodus four that I know that Pharaoh is not going to let my son go, so I'm going to kill his son because you'll let my son go. So jose sort of mixes together this this loved Israel with my son. But what troubles I guess us when we look at Joseiah is he's looking backward, and so there's no prediction there. So where does Matthew get off saying? So this was to fulfill what was said by the prophet, and I just read that a minute ago, which Matthew practically takes right out of Second Chronicles thirty six. Right, Well, Matthew is not only using the fulfillment formula in a Chronicles like way. When we go a little bit further into Hosea, we realize, oh, Joseiah is often going backward and typologically reading historical facts coming forward. So in Hoseiah chapter twelve, he does this very thing with Jacob's life, very famously goes through a series of allusions to Jacob, and there's no prediction there. This is a narrative about this ornery guy who kind of deceives people and wrestles with people and so forth. But Hoseiah reads that forward and talks about how these people who at Bethel are worshiping this idol of their God, they need to find Yahweh there. And so what Hoseiah is doing is he's, or we'll say, Matthew Matthews reading Hoseiah in a very Hosea like way, somebody who's this prophet who's looking at historical narratives with no prediction but seeing how these teachings reach forward. And Matthew's doing he's he's reading Hoseah with the grain, so to speak. He's doing with Hoseah what Hosea does with Hoseiah.
00:30:23
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:30:24
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a good way to put it. I think even some of the more straightforward ones. The one I've worked with the most and the people tend to ask me to ask me about the most is the virgin birth, you know, Isaiah seven fourteen, and I think you have something very similar going on there that that Matthew is not looking at this as if there's a you know, the way it's normally thought through is there's a sign that makes sense, you know, in the context that's given to a Has, and then there's a this is a further sign, sort of a you know in Christ. My reading of it is, you know, one of the worst things you could possibly get when you're going into war as a baby and so and so for a HAS, it's like, here's your sign, a HAS, You're going to get a baby.
00:31:12
Speaker 3: And the bad thing about this baby is that it ain't gonna help you fight, like you're done.
00:31:18
Speaker 1: But the good thing about the baby is that it's going to grow up, and so all is not lost. Like the baby represents no help in the presence but hope for the future. And I think that Matthew is playing with something like that when he cites the isaiahsm. Fourteen and the virgin birth. Is that what we're supposed to conjure up almost is that look at this vulnerable child who is now the hope of the world kind of idea. But it's not a one to one that whole conversation about al Mah, which is young woman and Hebrew and doesn't necessarily connote.
00:31:55
Speaker 3: Virgin, at least in my reading of it. And then you have the more.
00:31:59
Speaker 1: Specific word for virgin use in Greek in Matthew. This is very confusing for people because if we read fulfillment in terms of it was said back here and it needs to be completed up here, now we have a misunderstanding of how that can come over and the ways that the New Testament writer.
00:32:19
Speaker 3: Is really using that. So I don't know whether you want to comment on that too, but it just.
00:32:23
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, that's exactly the point about fulfillment is sort of we're we have a certain prediction fulfillment sort of mechanism in the English language, and so we would look at Hoseiah at eleven one there's no prediction here, so how can it be fulfilled?
00:32:41
Speaker 1: Right?
00:32:42
Speaker 2: And it's a little bit different. There is actually a prediction in Isaiah seven, but it's that's another one of these ones where I think one of the things that helps us is it's to y'all. Right, it's a signed to y'all. It's not a sign to you personally A has, but to y' all the collective that A has represents. And so then there's something bigger that we can see even as but I don't want to trouble your readers, but as the editor of the Book of Isaiah put together what we call Isaiah eight through ten right on the back of Isaiah seven, then all of a sudden, we're reading this am Manuel together with the child that is come for us, and so there's this bigger reality for y'all. Then maybe just the trouble of sign child for a has personally you brought up really well.
00:33:40
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think that's a great way to think of it, you know, when we think about this, because I do think the prophecy fulfillment sort of a language, especially in English, conveys something very very specific, and I've always sort of opted to talk about that patterning that comes across it's it's very clear to what you'd read in like the Book of Hebrews, the copies and shadows, that these are gesturing forward to something more, but not necessarily one more thing. Now they find their ultimacy in Christ. But you can watch that advance toward Christ, and you can see even that you know it takes on now that even Christ is the substance. It's not as if these things have lost complete meaning.
00:34:27
Speaker 3: And so you have that sort of beautiful patterned progression moving forward.
00:34:33
Speaker 1: And that's the way I've tended to think about prophecy and fulfillment, or at least try to help people understand it.
00:34:38
Speaker 3: A little differently. But I'm wondering if you have a better way.
00:34:42
Speaker 2: No, I think that what we might want to do is expect sort of a richer and more dynamic sort of when we go back to the Old Testament, expect more of it. So even in Matthew chapter two, a little further on, there's the quotation of from Jeremiah thirty one, where after the slaughter of the Bethlehem children, Rachel refuses to be comforted. Now we go back to a text like that, though there's this again grandparent texts waiting for us because what Jeremiah's doing when he says he's being a little bit poetic here, right, Rachel's weeping for her children. He's talking about this exile moment, and she's refusing to be comforted because they are no more. Well, that language is out of Genesis, and so we have this. It's Jacob who, when he sees the bloody coat, refuses to be comforted. And it's the children who remember that Jacob says, my son is no more. So there's this really something rich going on with uh. We think of Bethlehem, right is where Rachel dies, and she's being her typical selfishself. Right, She's she's not crying. She's crying not because she's going to die, but but she well because she's going to excuse me. But she names her child after this not a good name, because she always gives children, right, Joseph is I hope I have another kid? And Benjamin is well Benny by child of my like, she's not worried about the kids. She's giving the kids names about her contest with her sister Leah. But anyway, that the point here is that we shouldn't have like this checklist thing. And I think that that that page in our Bible with the things on the left and right, attempts to say, okay, here's another one check the children are weeping, there's a fulfillment of Jeremiah thirty one. Well, I think we need to be invited backwards and say, there's something really rich going on here. This is a very surprising thing that Jeremiah did by naming Rachel, which is the perfect tag for this bethelhen trouble later, but then actually referring to the morning of Jacob for a son that actually wasn't lost yet, a son that he was going to get back one day. So I mean, there's a real richness that we cut ourselves off from when we're worried about just checking the box of prediction fulfillment. And again, it probably only works that way when we make these pages and study Bibles. It doesn't actually work that way in the Bible.
00:37:47
Speaker 3: It does.
00:37:48
Speaker 1: I think you bring up a really excellent point, because I think it cultivates a wrong orientation that becomes problematic when we hit certain texts.
00:37:58
Speaker 3: So I'm thinking specifically of one Corinthians.
00:38:02
Speaker 1: Seven and the way that Paul uses the creation there to talk about man being made in God's image and being the glory of God and the woman being the.
00:38:13
Speaker 3: Glory of man.
00:38:14
Speaker 1: And you just sit back and you're like, well, Paul, weren't you know all men created in God's image, male and female?
00:38:22
Speaker 3: He created them? Like what are you doing there?
00:38:25
Speaker 1: And if we're so stuck on the cross reference, like it goes from here to here, that's a real tension point. If we're willing to let Paul be more poetic as Jeremiah as being more poetic, as joseas being more poetic, as Matthew's being more poetic, if we're allowing him some freedom to do with this text something that.
00:38:49
Speaker 3: Is drawing for the whole tradition, not just.
00:38:53
Speaker 1: Going back and citing one particular verse or trying to deny one doctor or another.
00:38:58
Speaker 3: It gets a little easier to reach.
00:39:01
Speaker 1: It's not like we it's not at all smooth out and there's no other problems, but it does allow you to make some more sense of those texts, as opposed to saying, well, it has to be this way because Paul's saying it about creation, and there's a creative order, and so obviously this is just what it is. That First Corinthian seven passage is one that I've I've studied a little bit more than most, and you just sort of have to go with Paul a little bit. You have to trust that he's you know, what he's doing makes sense to him because a very difficult text. But I don't know, I think the cross referencing and that sort of strict prophecy fulfillment or you know, this notion that if he's quoting a normative text in the Old Testament, it's obviously you know, sort of sanch Or Sagington the New I think those sort of tendencies need to be exploded a bit.
00:39:53
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think that you're doing something really great. I appreciate that you bring me onto your pro today to talk about New Testament Extra Jesus, because I think that, like this book, Old Testament use of Old Testament in parallel, it's obvious to people in Old Testament, And if there is such a thing as people interested in the Old Testament, it's obvious what it's used for there. But what's really important and not done enough is how the Old Testament enriches our understanding of the New Testament. Because this is the go too. This is where the New Testament authors lived as teachers, and so they're not doing something weird. It's only weird if we don't understand the Old Testament. They're doing very straightforward exegetical theological maneuvers within the framework of the Old Testament that has been going on for a thousand years before their days, and they're they're bringing that forward to the glory of God. You know, for us in the Church, we just chopped the New Testament off. Then it seems very strange because we're trying to say, well, how does this early church writings relate to my life here in the modern world. Well, we need to connect ourselves back into the vibrant biblical framework that you know, we might call it the Bible of Jesus that comes forward into the Gospel of Christ.
00:41:31
Speaker 1: Maybe one last question before we end here. But one of the things that I've noticed is we do you know, as I see people doing Old Testament use in the New there's a claim that says, well, the New Testament writers can do this because they're the New Testament writers, But it isn't a methodology that we should adopt. You I think you may have referenced this at the beginning of the episode when you're talking about their Hermi Munich versus our hermon Mudic. I think this is probably part of what you were referring to, but maybe not. But this notion that while they were inspired, so they can do whatever they want. So when Paul does the play and Galatians, you know, the Child the Promise versus the Child of the Flesh, and does the whole Hagar versus Sarahi thing, you know, it's like, that's something Paul can pull up. But we should really stay away from those exegetical gymnastics, like we're gonna pull muscles all over the place. How do you think about that? And our need to have a degree of rigor in the way that we look at the text and understand the text, but also a degree of play a looseness to it so that we're not missing things that we really should be connecting.
00:42:47
Speaker 2: Yeah. I have a little book that I put out as a co author book with a New Testament guy in twenty twenty three or twenty twenty four. I don't remember well how to study the Bible, use of the Bible, and it's trying to reframe this whole thing that it's not. We can't just do the New Testament use of the Old or we come up with this all this weird stuff. We have to work in the framework of the Bible's use of the Bible, because that's what the New Testament authors are doing. They're not doing something new, they're not doing this one off. And so the claim that we make there and that I make, is we just use plain sense, execess plain sentence reading. That's what the Biblical authors did, That's what we should do. And it's when we start getting weird because we've cut off the Old Testament that we have problems. So one good example is there's a lot of use of this term by New Testament use of the Old scholarship census plentier, which just means fuller meaning yes. And so the whole point of that is the Biblical authors don't know what they're saying because there's a fuller meaning that God has in mind. So the Biblical authors are saying one thing, but God has in mind something else, and he has this fuller meaning that we can only see in retrospect. But really, the even the better versions of that site, well, the fuller meaning is the full conon of the Bible. Well, okay, but no Biblical author, no New Testament author, had the full canon. So that is to say, no Biblical author understood what they're talking about.
00:44:29
Speaker 3: So it's crazy.
00:44:31
Speaker 2: And so I think just to to say, when I'm saying plain SENSEX to Jesus, to be fair and to kind of go with what you're saying. I don't think that I would just want to say we need to be looser. Right. It's not that we're playing fast and loose, but that is, we need to read the Bible the way the Biblical authors read the Bible. We need to treat the Bible the way they did. And so we've looked at a few examples in this episode. Come to hose On, Hosea's terms, come to Chronicles on Chronicles terms come to Matthew Mark, and I think those are the main pastor of Hebrews on their own terms. And so it's not a looseness relative to say the rules of plain sense. It's plain senses, reading with the grain, reading Joseiah the way Josea reads scripture. That's plain SENSEX of Jesus. So I think I think you're kindred, but I just in my classroom. I'm not telling my students, Oh no, just do whatever you want. I mean, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying, study the Bible and do what they do.
00:45:40
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was interesting, I will say when I taught hermaonutics, you know, we often we can define hermaeutics as the art and science of Biblical interpretation, let's say. And I would almost always start with the art, and I'd try to help them understand because I found when I was teaching them the science of it, sort of the more structured pieces they had trouble getting out of that. But if I could go to passages that demonstrated the art of this that you know, you're not just looking at the primary colors and isolation, you're actually seeing a full painting done and going, look, this is what we can.
00:46:12
Speaker 3: Create, they caught it a lot better.
00:46:16
Speaker 1: And then they could understand why they're using the techniques that they're using because they have a vision of what they're getting to. And passages like that with you know, Paul Galatians, or even some of the things in Revelation, you know, Hebrews.
00:46:30
Speaker 3: The way they're using these.
00:46:31
Speaker 1: Old Testament texts was just fascinating, and I think they hope they caught a glimpse of what that art really is, which is, as you're saying, a real deep understanding of the Old Testament and growing and deep understanding of the Old Testament to understand the New Testament.
00:46:47
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, and I think that to your point then it's it might seem like a looseness compared to yes, sort of the sort of rigid approach that we might take as we're trying to be conservative and faithful to the text, but we're using we're imposing modern logic on it. We're not getting into the literature of the scriptures and seeing that logic move forward. And so so it's in plain sense, Exe Jesus, but in respect to what God has been pleased to reveal by the Spirit of God.
00:47:27
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:47:27
Speaker 1: We had Norman Wurzba on the program and he talked a little bit about mastery in the two different senses of the word mastery, and it just strikes me that this is sort of what we're both talking about. But you know, there's a sense of mastery where we can have a dominating relationship, you know, we can force something on someone else. But his understanding of mastery was what you do when you try to learn the guitar, right, you approach the guitar, and this guitar is capable of making this amazing music.
00:47:58
Speaker 3: In your role as gaining mastery of.
00:48:02
Speaker 1: It is to learn how to do that, use it on its own terms, and be really really good at it so that when you play music, people actually want to listen to it. And it seems to me that that is the sort of thing we're kind of talking about with the Old Testament with a New Testament, that the development of mastery is a working with the text and drawing out from the text what's already there so that everything makes more and more and more sense and we really do understand than what it is that the text is trying to tell us. I think that's a playing an instrument. You kind of get that idea of mastery. And I think if we viewed not that I want to view the text as an instrument, but you get the analogy, that's the same sort of mastery we're trying to develop over the text.
00:48:53
Speaker 2: Yeah, and we have to conform ourselves to the rules of the game, so to speak. Yeah, because you know, we all cringe when somebody's picking up a violin and a bow for the first time. Okay, but you know, you go to a symphony with somebody that does it as a career and you're like, it's incredible. You can't imagine how does what's the difference? You know? So it's it's I remember it was a faculty meeting back in the nineteen nineties and the physical ed professor he was trying to make an illustration, and so he was claiming in the faculty meeting that he could play one note of the piano just as well as this world class musician that we worked on a faculty with. And I'm sitting there as a young faculty member saying, no, you couldn't, Like, I don't think you could play one note on the piano as good as this world renowned musician. You're comparing yourself to it. Because he was just making an illustration, try to break things down, and I agreed with his larger point, just I disagreed with no. I mean, there's there's there's something really wonderful about somebody that has that kind of master that you're talking about.
00:50:17
Speaker 1: I agree, I agree, Well, Gary, this has been fantastic. These are the kind of conversations. I love I love trying to get at what the Bible means and how we understand what the Bible means, and so really appreciated your work in this area, and this has been a great conversation.
00:50:33
Speaker 3: So thank you very much for being here today.
00:50:35
Speaker 2: Yeah, thanks for having me on for these several things. And I guess I guess it's time for me to move out of your studio now we wrapped.
00:50:45
Speaker 1: Up, Yes, it's about that time, but you're always welcome back. So thanks very much for being here for these series, and thanks very much for the work you're doing. Check out everything Gary does. You can find him. I'm gonna to send you to his Carpenter's student website.
00:51:03
Speaker 3: So it's Carpenter's student dot Substack dot com.
00:51:08
Speaker 2: Well student dot com, Carpenter's.
00:51:12
Speaker 1: Student dot com, my apologies, Carpenter's student dot com.
00:51:16
Speaker 3: So that's two s's in the middle. Carpenter's plural student starts with an S.
00:51:21
Speaker 1: That link will be in the show notes, and we'll have links to Gary's book as well. I think once this episode airs, this book will at least be available for pre order, if not available for actual order. It's a two volume work but you can also find a lot of other Gary's works here and we've got those links in the show notes in Amazon and so just encourage you to check out his work at Carpenter's student dot com as well as his books that are available and those links are in the show notes. So thanks everybody for being with us, Thanks again, Gary for being here, and we'll see all in the next episode of Thinking Christian.
00:51:54
Speaker 3: Take Care,
Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm doctor James Spencer and I'm joined again today by doctor Gary Edward Snitcher, and we're going to be discussing his book Old Testament Use of Old Testament in Parallel Layout that is coming out later this year, but specifically today, we're going to be looking at the use of the Old Testament in the New Testament and how that really works, how we might think about it, and really dealing with not just the quotations, but some of the illusions there as well. Very similar to the conversation we had about the Old Testament use of the Old Testament last time, just applied into the New Testament and there will be some differences. So with that said, Gary, welcome back to the program. Thank you very much for being here.
00:00:43
Speaker 2: Thanks James, I really appreciate being here and especially having a chance. I tell my students all the time there is nothing wrong with the New Testament.
00:00:52
Speaker 3: I mean, it's great.
00:00:54
Speaker 2: So I'm happy to be able to look at that, and especially I think what in this particular area the it's a very strange area when you get into the literature, the study of the New Testament used to the Old it's it's amazing to me how I hate to say this, but for these past few generations, the Old Testament is the missing link in the in the research. And so it's a very very strange area of research where you have all sorts of bizarre things being said in this area of scholarship, especially, you know when once there's talk of our hermonutics and their hermaonutics, as though it's a hermautic unto itself, then all of a sudden, you know that things are just being made up. I mean, and that's that's not that's not a helpful way to go. And I think maybe the other area that some of your readers might listeners might be familiar with is there's always a search among the scholarship of the New Testament used to the Old four sort of a Second Temple exegedical tradition that might kind of do this and the failure. And there's nothing wrong with that, because that does have absolutely some influence on how things go. But the failure is to realize that almost all of the Second Temple Jewish exegetical traditions are coming forward out of the Old Testament. And what's very obvious from the New Testament is these authors are studying the Old Testament, and so of course we should expect to find similarities between Second Temple Jewish exegedical traditions in the New Testament. I mean, they're all drinking from the same kool aid in the Old Testament. And the Old Testaments are very rich resource of extra Jesus because the Old Testament authors for a thousand years before.
00:02:58
Speaker 3: The days of Jesus.
00:03:00
Speaker 2: We're executing earlier Old Testament texts, and so it's not the slightest but surprising then that both second Tempo Jewish exegetical traditions and the New Testament authors have similarities because they're studying how to interpret the scriptures by how the Old Testament scriptures interpret the Old Testament scriptures.
00:03:22
Speaker 1: Yeah, I found I discovered one of those when I was studying the Book of Hebrews. Hebrews seven and deals with a lot with Melchizedek, and you have these interesting way in which Melchizedek's name is handled. So he's the King of Righteousness, which is a play on the Hebrew and then obviously king of Peace, which is a play on his identification as the King of Salem. And so you have this word play between Salem and Shalom, so king of peace. He is without father and without mother, without genealogy. You know, these kind of ideas that are sort of drawn into Hebrew seven. And initially, if you look at that and you go, what in the world is the author of Hebrews doing with this guy? Like he's a referenced twice in the Old Testament, you don't get a lot of information about him. You know, he shows up in Genesis fourteen, it's on them one ten, and that's kind of it.
00:04:09
Speaker 3: Why is this guy such a big deal?
00:04:10
Speaker 1: And then I got to look at the Dead Sea scrolls eleven Q thirteen or sometimes called eleven Q Melchizedic, and you see the almost the exact same use and exa Jesus of his name that play on the names, the play on the genealogy, and of course they make Melchizedek into more of a Messianic figure who is to come, whereas Hebrews identifies Melchizedic in that order with Christ.
00:04:37
Speaker 3: So there are real differences, but you just start to.
00:04:39
Speaker 1: Realize exactly what you're saying, that these Second Temple sort of different traditions are sort of in the Ether. They're reading the Old Testament in similar ways, and there are trajectories within the interpretive matrix that make sense within that particular period.
00:04:57
Speaker 2: Because they're well, they're coming out of the Old Testament. I mean, the Author of the Hebrews is a great example, because when he's interested in Genesis, he doesn't quote Genesis, he quotes Psalm eight. When he's interested in the Wilderness, he doesn't quote Numbers or Exodus, he quotes Psalm ninety five. When he's interested in Melchizdek, he's going through the grid, so to speak of someone ten. When he's interested in tabernacle sacrifices, he's in the Psalms. When he's interested in the Covenant, he's in Jeremiah. So we find that he's the Author of the Hebrews is navigating Torah, which is what he's really interested in, but almost never quoting Tora, because he's looking at how Tora was executed throughout the Old Testament.
00:05:44
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's sort of a mediated look at the Torah through that you slightly later tradition that's really faithfully trying to understand and reflect on Torah, which is kind of cool.
00:05:55
Speaker 3: He's almost cheating and using the commentary.
00:05:57
Speaker 1: Doing what we tell students not to, right, don't use the commentary first.
00:06:02
Speaker 3: Go back to the real source.
00:06:04
Speaker 2: But I think that that's why there's so much similarity. Yeah, and so in other words, there's nothing wrong to it's helpful to look at Second Temple Jewish literature. The mistake is when we don't look for the precedence and the things that are coming out from the thousand years of execuses in the Old Testament itself, which is what the exegetical traditions we're studying, what the New Testament authors are studying during this period.
00:06:39
Speaker 3: Agreed.
00:06:40
Speaker 1: Yeah, so you do a little bit just as we think about again Old Testament use in the New We obviously have clear quotations. But you wrote a piece for Currents and Biblical Studies on this long lost grandparent text of the New Testament, not parent text, but grandparent texts. And I found this really compelling. I thought it was interesting. I love the framing of it. So I'm wondering if you can kind of walk us through that a little bit, and then we'll talk a little bit more, just specifically about how the Old Testament is used in the New.
00:07:12
Speaker 2: Sure. So, what a lot of us are familiar with, especially through the studies of the New Testament. Use of the Old is what I call horizontal context, so that the scholarship isn't just looking at the verse, but looking at the surrounding paragraph in chapters. And I call it horizontal context. But what hasn't been done enough is what I call vertical context. And this runs both directions, but a downward vertical context is the deep context. That is, over eighty times the New Testament authors are quoting or alluding to an Old Testament text, that itself is alluding to an order Old Testament texts. We were just talking about examples in Hebrews. And so when a New Testament scholar goes down and stops and just looks at the horizontal context of the seid a verse, that's not good enough when that versus citing us still earlier verse. We need to go down the horizontal con sorry vertical context further to the deep context, because that's really what's in view that that's what's driving I call it progressive revelation forward. The advancement of revelation is that original donor text that's being interpreted again and again in the scriptures.
00:08:38
Speaker 1: Yeah, do you see that in something like you know, the proto of Bengelian in Genesis three, right where we see the serpent's head being crushed by the son of Eve versus what we see in Romans. I believe it's fifteen or sixteen. I'm blanking on the exact verse. But where the church now takes that role and they're supposed to crush the.
00:09:04
Speaker 3: Serpent under the head.
00:09:06
Speaker 1: I've always sort of looked at that and said, you know, yes, this is sort of a gesturing forward in Genesis three, maybe to a Messianic figure of some sort, but we really can't then stop it at Christ when in Romans.
00:09:20
Speaker 3: Sixteen it's being applied to the church.
00:09:24
Speaker 1: Is that the sort of vertical depth you're talking about?
00:09:27
Speaker 3: Or could you give a better example than that?
00:09:30
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, that's a good example of what we call the what I call I think people usually say the one and the many. I'd like to talk about the individual versus the collective. And so there's that constant interchange between the individual and the collective. And there's many, many examples of that. The one you just cided as a good one. But where let's say, Isaiah fifty five is quoting from the Covenant actually an interpretation of the Dividic Covenant in David's last word in Second Samuel twenty three. And so that's a really powerful example because he's citing the Davidic Covenant, but he says, y'all says you plural, it's to you collectively. And so then there's a sense in which, of course the Davidic Covenant is an individual covenant to David in his dynasty, and it refers to these davidict messiahs. But then there's a broader sense in which no, no, no, the king is Israel, the King is the covenantal people. Yeah, so when we see Second Chronicles chapter six site Isaiah fifty five, or we see Paul cite Isaiah fifty five, they're both taking advantage of that collective sense, so that what Christ does comes over into the Son of God the Church.
00:10:56
Speaker 3: I see, Yeah, no, that's helpful.
00:10:59
Speaker 2: So I think though maybe an example of this vertical context might be something like Zachariah nine to nine, where the donkey is coming. The king is writing a donkey into Jerusalem, and so there's a very distinctive donkey language in that, so that the kind of the mother text, so to speak, or the grandparent text, is the blessing of Judah in Genesis forty nine. And so if in Genesis forty nine, the Judah King comes into the vineyard and ties up the donkey to a vine of all things, you know, there's no old West tumbleweed's going by. It's a very lush place. Where where else you're going to tie a donkey up?
00:11:48
Speaker 1: Right?
00:11:48
Speaker 2: And what the what Zachariah does is he he kind of gives a vision of Okay, if the Judah King is in Judah in the vineyard with a donkey, what happens before that? So he creates a prequel of the king riding a donkey into the city. But what's really remarkable, you know? You have that. So that's the parent text and the grandparent text, if you will. And then the child text is all the citations in the New Testament. But what Zachariah does is he has the control text back there in Genesis forty nine, the promise of the Judah King, but he mixes it together with what we call Isaiah sixty two eleven, daughter Zion, see here comes your king righteous. But then maybe the most remarkable thing, and I hadn't noticed this until Mark Bodis commentary on Zachariah came out. But the king is saved riding on a donkey, saved passive, and so it's a very remarkable thing. But digging around just a little bit, all of a sudden, Wow, it's the song of David where he talks about that the humble are the ones that you have saved. And so you find the very same language out of David's mouth, of all things, and so we can see that, you know, there's the main interpretive blend between Isaiah sixty two and Genesis forty nine, but then there's these minor themes that really enrich it in a really surprising way, where we have this humble saved king coming in on the donkey, and of course the gospel writers use this in very remarkable ways. It's not quoted in Mark, but we find right this is a prelude to Jesus coming into the city talking about how the the vine growers beat up the sun and kill him and toss him out of the city, and then he is crucified as the king of the Jews. So it's just really remarkable how the the deep context drives forward and provides such a rich way, theological way for the New Testament authors to present the Gospel of Christ.
00:14:27
Speaker 1: What I find fascinating about all of that, aside from all the different interconnections, is if you think through, you know, if you thought through your big ten texts in the Old Testament, that probably doesn't make the list, right. I mean, you know, Genesis forty nine is not one that we spend a ton of time on, and you know, Zechariah is is sort of not a book that most of us, you know, we spend a whole lot of time on. And yet that scene of Jesus riding in on the donkey, I mean have a whole Sunday dedicated to that, right, And so you have the New Testament authors really picking up these fairly nuanced, sort of Old Testament texts and understandings that are by no means like these big major ideas that we would necessarily see in you know, when we're reading the Old Testament. They're pulling these little strands together in pretty intricate ways and then showing how Jesus's life is the extension of that patterning.
00:15:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think you're right that our favorite texts in the Bible are different than the biblical author's favorite texts, right, because some of the ones that we really don't spend much time and they go to again and again. And the way it works is the more that a text is executed by authoritative exegetes as scriptural authors, the more it has to offer. So it's not ever depleted. It actually builds up in theological and exogenical connotations that later biblical authors can take advantage of in more and more subtle ways. They can do bigger things with less work as the advancement of revelation moves forward. Yeah, so that's one one case where we kind of go down from right to Zachariah down to Genesis. But there's other cases where this vertical context we call it a trace.
00:16:32
Speaker 3: So that.
00:16:35
Speaker 2: And I just want to use a clear example to not be confusing. And I know you're one of your professors. Greg Biale did a lot with this. He talks about how, you know, there's this text that the New Testament quotes, and the New Testament doesn't quote the other Old Testament texts that quote it, but they're actually controlling what's going on. So for example, in as we're chapter one, there's some the people are coming back to the land, and so there's this typology of the First Exodus that's sort of in the background as that people come back in a new Exodus to Judah. And what the author of as Reniam I does not do doesn't bother quoting Isaiah and the New Exodus, and so we kind of have the same thing going on in the New Testament. The New Exodus of Isaiah provides this sort of way of using the original Exodus typologically. And so there's just this reading of Jesus the Messiah right up against Torah. And we call it a trace because we can't prove that it's really Isaiah on the mind because it's not quoted, but it's really a control text or a control set of texts that sort of is part of that vertical context. And maybe it's I don't want to get too carried away with this metaphor, but it's like if there's the grandfather text and then there's these uncles and cousin texts out there, if.
00:18:07
Speaker 3: You will no, I mean it makes sense.
00:18:10
Speaker 1: It feels like to me the traces are almost like an extension of the horizontal context. So when I think of it, I almost think of it like Saturn, the planet Saturn. You have the core planet, and then you have the rings that are going around it, and these other texts that are sort of surrounding the planet, or are those texts that are flipping around and they make Saturn what it is now, there's obviously a near context in which all of those passengers are used, and.
00:18:40
Speaker 3: We want to pay attention to that.
00:18:41
Speaker 1: But the reality is that we can't get so caught up that we get myopically focused only on the six verses that surround this thing. There has to be a recognition that there's an interpretive trajectory in the Old Testament that's using this theme, these verses, these ideas that are swimming around that's being pulled across into the New Testament. And to your point, we have to be careful with that because if it's not quoted, it's easy for us to import something that maybe isn't there. And so I think there's a sense in which the sense making sort of is this coherent? Does it make sense? Maybe a good question is is it plausible? You know, is probably where we land on a lot of those trace texts. Is that a fair assessment in your mind?
00:19:29
Speaker 2: I think so, and I think you're getting it. The more important thing, and if I were to summarize back to what you're saying, if we're to understand what the New Testament is doing with the Old, we really really need to know the Old Testament, because that's what the New Testament authors, that's what Christ, that's what these teachers are doing. But we can also, I guess, be helped by analogy in more subtle and difficult ways. So let's say we were just talking about I can use an example. In the beginning of Mark one, two and three, he cites Isaiah, but then he's really doing Malachi, who's using Isaiah and really doing something with Exodus twenty three, twenty and twenty one. Yeah, and so there's this So it's this rich vertical context, but there's so many views of why would he say Isaiah says, but then kind of blend together these various.
00:20:24
Speaker 3: Texts, imlay and yeah, yeah.
00:20:27
Speaker 2: The top two views are well, it's a mistake, that's one view, and the other top view is well, this is this second Temple Jewish thing, right, Well, okay, those are fine ideas, but this happens in the Old Testament. So, for example, in Second Chronicles thirty six, verse twenty one, the chronicler cites Jeremiah, but then blends the seventy years of Jeremiah with what we would call a passage here in Leviticus chapter twenty six. So he's he's citing one, but really his U U and I guide us with the seventy years. But really it's the covenental language of Leviticu's twenty six, which is playing the bigger role in the destruction of Jerusalem there and so this and this is a particularly important text out. That's why I wanted to bring this up. Is this fulfillment formula there in Second Chronicles thirty six, verse twenty one. It's maybe, uh, let's just pretend Mark was written first, and so he's this very iconic beginning. Well, it seems like Matthew might have caught wind of this, because when we look at the fulfillment formula in Matthew, he's, yeah, I'm gonna read this sea from from the Bible. I mark this ahead of time. Okay, this is Second Chronicles thirty six, twenty one. He's using the word fulfill not as a call but a pel So it's that's what you have to do to fulfill a word, not just a time, but to actualize a word into reality. So the chronicler says, to fulfill the word of Yahweh by the mouth of Jeremiah. Let me follow this right up with Matthew chapter one. All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet Matthew chapter two, and so it's fulfilled what the Lord said through the prophet. Here Matthew's kind of coming right off of this. That's okay, yeah, no, that's that mixes it up because I'm going on on and on with this boring converce.
00:23:01
Speaker 3: But no, no, you're good talking about grammar.
00:23:05
Speaker 2: But the shift to the pl is so significant. But that's all of a sudden. What we see Matthew doing is he's talking about fulfilling a word, and he's he's looking at it right off the same sort of plane, if you will, as what we saw in the beginning part of Mark. Mark's not using that language, but Matthew is coming along and using the language from the same place.
00:23:35
Speaker 1: And just to give everybody at home, the cow and the pl or forms in Hebrews, so you can think of him as different forms of the same word, and when they're in that particular form, they can take on a different meaning. And so for instance, there's another form called the hithhil, and the hithil often has more of a forceful, assertive or causative sort of nuance to it. Not in every case, you don't want to stare type these things, but just give an example. The pl has that same sort of strengthening to it. But in this case, what you're suggesting is that the cow, which is sort of the base form we could think of it as in Hebrew, is really talking about the fulfillment of an act doing something, versus the pl, which has the nuance of actually getting something done.
00:24:24
Speaker 3: That's been said is that.
00:24:26
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And especially the call form, the vanilla form yes of fulfill Malt is used to say a duration of time. So that's what Daniel he's thinking about.
00:24:42
Speaker 3: The seventy duration of time, got it?
00:24:45
Speaker 2: Whereas the pl, which is a more intensive it's it's it's rare for that word to be used in fulfill. It's only about five times in the Old Testament, two of them and then two are parallel. But there we have a word isn't separate like so it's not like, Okay, here's a protection, here's a conclusion. Because it's God's word, it initiates the reality of what it speaks about. God's prophetic word binds reality to itself, so that because of what he said has to come to past if you will, it is enacted into reality. And so the pl catches that sense, I sit, an actual word can be fulfilled, it can be enacted into reality.
00:25:35
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, that's really helpful, and I think it makes more sense of the Metheian use of fulfillment, particularly when we get into the odd ones in Matthew, which we get probably turned to. So there are a lot of Old Testament quotations in the New Testament that are relatively transparent to understand. Right these are what we normally think of as maybe rightly or wrongly, here's a prediction, and then there is a there's this moment where we see that prediction worked out in a very specific way. And I think that's overly simplistic, but a lot of times we can see those things and they're a little easier for people to grasp. The reality is that I think a lot of times what we're looking at is more of a patterning that's coming into focus as we get into the New Testament, and that's what opens it up to something we talked about at the beginning of the podcast, like the Hoseiah quotation in Matthew, which is difficult to even understand as a prophecy other than it comes out of Hoseia.
00:26:39
Speaker 3: So maybe we can talk through that a little bit.
00:26:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, that's a really good example. That's probably the textbook example that a lot of people go to. And I think that, I mean, you said it. We can imagine somebody buys a new Bible and there's a page in this new Bible with Versus in the left column and Versus in the right column, and it was like, wow, it's an incredible page, and it really brings a lot of comfort to the reader to know that everything lines up. And as long as the reader doesn't look those verses up, everything's okay, everything's great. Yeah, it's when the reader starts to look things up there like there's something wrong with my Bible. And you know, how come it's like this because there's actually very few that line up the way we want them to. And even those, if we prob a little deeper, like we were just talking about Zacharian nine. Well, that that's poetry in this, so it only there's a poetic shaped reality that makes it work. It wouldn't have had to quite be that way. So when we look back at jose eleven, he's Josea is looking backward at the Exodus. I mean, you're alluding to that. There's no prediction there at all, But he kind of mixes the language what we would call Deuteronomy chapter seven, verse eight, which begins, but it was because YAHWEH loved you Israel and so on, and brought you up out of Egypt. And so what Joseah does is mixes that with well, this is what most people think anyway. I think it's probably right that in Exodus four that I know that Pharaoh is not going to let my son go, so I'm going to kill his son because you'll let my son go. So jose sort of mixes together this this loved Israel with my son. But what troubles I guess us when we look at Joseiah is he's looking backward, and so there's no prediction there. So where does Matthew get off saying? So this was to fulfill what was said by the prophet, and I just read that a minute ago, which Matthew practically takes right out of Second Chronicles thirty six. Right, Well, Matthew is not only using the fulfillment formula in a Chronicles like way. When we go a little bit further into Hosea, we realize, oh, Joseiah is often going backward and typologically reading historical facts coming forward. So in Hoseiah chapter twelve, he does this very thing with Jacob's life, very famously goes through a series of allusions to Jacob, and there's no prediction there. This is a narrative about this ornery guy who kind of deceives people and wrestles with people and so forth. But Hoseiah reads that forward and talks about how these people who at Bethel are worshiping this idol of their God, they need to find Yahweh there. And so what Hoseiah is doing is he's, or we'll say, Matthew Matthews reading Hoseiah in a very Hosea like way, somebody who's this prophet who's looking at historical narratives with no prediction but seeing how these teachings reach forward. And Matthew's doing he's he's reading Hoseah with the grain, so to speak. He's doing with Hoseah what Hosea does with Hoseiah.
00:30:23
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:30:24
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a good way to put it. I think even some of the more straightforward ones. The one I've worked with the most and the people tend to ask me to ask me about the most is the virgin birth, you know, Isaiah seven fourteen, and I think you have something very similar going on there that that Matthew is not looking at this as if there's a you know, the way it's normally thought through is there's a sign that makes sense, you know, in the context that's given to a Has, and then there's a this is a further sign, sort of a you know in Christ. My reading of it is, you know, one of the worst things you could possibly get when you're going into war as a baby and so and so for a HAS, it's like, here's your sign, a HAS, You're going to get a baby.
00:31:12
Speaker 3: And the bad thing about this baby is that it ain't gonna help you fight, like you're done.
00:31:18
Speaker 1: But the good thing about the baby is that it's going to grow up, and so all is not lost. Like the baby represents no help in the presence but hope for the future. And I think that Matthew is playing with something like that when he cites the isaiahsm. Fourteen and the virgin birth. Is that what we're supposed to conjure up almost is that look at this vulnerable child who is now the hope of the world kind of idea. But it's not a one to one that whole conversation about al Mah, which is young woman and Hebrew and doesn't necessarily connote.
00:31:55
Speaker 3: Virgin, at least in my reading of it. And then you have the more.
00:31:59
Speaker 1: Specific word for virgin use in Greek in Matthew. This is very confusing for people because if we read fulfillment in terms of it was said back here and it needs to be completed up here, now we have a misunderstanding of how that can come over and the ways that the New Testament writer.
00:32:19
Speaker 3: Is really using that. So I don't know whether you want to comment on that too, but it just.
00:32:23
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, that's exactly the point about fulfillment is sort of we're we have a certain prediction fulfillment sort of mechanism in the English language, and so we would look at Hoseiah at eleven one there's no prediction here, so how can it be fulfilled?
00:32:41
Speaker 1: Right?
00:32:42
Speaker 2: And it's a little bit different. There is actually a prediction in Isaiah seven, but it's that's another one of these ones where I think one of the things that helps us is it's to y'all. Right, it's a signed to y'all. It's not a sign to you personally A has, but to y' all the collective that A has represents. And so then there's something bigger that we can see even as but I don't want to trouble your readers, but as the editor of the Book of Isaiah put together what we call Isaiah eight through ten right on the back of Isaiah seven, then all of a sudden, we're reading this am Manuel together with the child that is come for us, and so there's this bigger reality for y'all. Then maybe just the trouble of sign child for a has personally you brought up really well.
00:33:40
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think that's a great way to think of it, you know, when we think about this, because I do think the prophecy fulfillment sort of a language, especially in English, conveys something very very specific, and I've always sort of opted to talk about that patterning that comes across it's it's very clear to what you'd read in like the Book of Hebrews, the copies and shadows, that these are gesturing forward to something more, but not necessarily one more thing. Now they find their ultimacy in Christ. But you can watch that advance toward Christ, and you can see even that you know it takes on now that even Christ is the substance. It's not as if these things have lost complete meaning.
00:34:27
Speaker 3: And so you have that sort of beautiful patterned progression moving forward.
00:34:33
Speaker 1: And that's the way I've tended to think about prophecy and fulfillment, or at least try to help people understand it.
00:34:38
Speaker 3: A little differently. But I'm wondering if you have a better way.
00:34:42
Speaker 2: No, I think that what we might want to do is expect sort of a richer and more dynamic sort of when we go back to the Old Testament, expect more of it. So even in Matthew chapter two, a little further on, there's the quotation of from Jeremiah thirty one, where after the slaughter of the Bethlehem children, Rachel refuses to be comforted. Now we go back to a text like that, though there's this again grandparent texts waiting for us because what Jeremiah's doing when he says he's being a little bit poetic here, right, Rachel's weeping for her children. He's talking about this exile moment, and she's refusing to be comforted because they are no more. Well, that language is out of Genesis, and so we have this. It's Jacob who, when he sees the bloody coat, refuses to be comforted. And it's the children who remember that Jacob says, my son is no more. So there's this really something rich going on with uh. We think of Bethlehem, right is where Rachel dies, and she's being her typical selfishself. Right, She's she's not crying. She's crying not because she's going to die, but but she well because she's going to excuse me. But she names her child after this not a good name, because she always gives children, right, Joseph is I hope I have another kid? And Benjamin is well Benny by child of my like, she's not worried about the kids. She's giving the kids names about her contest with her sister Leah. But anyway, that the point here is that we shouldn't have like this checklist thing. And I think that that that page in our Bible with the things on the left and right, attempts to say, okay, here's another one check the children are weeping, there's a fulfillment of Jeremiah thirty one. Well, I think we need to be invited backwards and say, there's something really rich going on here. This is a very surprising thing that Jeremiah did by naming Rachel, which is the perfect tag for this bethelhen trouble later, but then actually referring to the morning of Jacob for a son that actually wasn't lost yet, a son that he was going to get back one day. So I mean, there's a real richness that we cut ourselves off from when we're worried about just checking the box of prediction fulfillment. And again, it probably only works that way when we make these pages and study Bibles. It doesn't actually work that way in the Bible.
00:37:47
Speaker 3: It does.
00:37:48
Speaker 1: I think you bring up a really excellent point, because I think it cultivates a wrong orientation that becomes problematic when we hit certain texts.
00:37:58
Speaker 3: So I'm thinking specifically of one Corinthians.
00:38:02
Speaker 1: Seven and the way that Paul uses the creation there to talk about man being made in God's image and being the glory of God and the woman being the.
00:38:13
Speaker 3: Glory of man.
00:38:14
Speaker 1: And you just sit back and you're like, well, Paul, weren't you know all men created in God's image, male and female?
00:38:22
Speaker 3: He created them? Like what are you doing there?
00:38:25
Speaker 1: And if we're so stuck on the cross reference, like it goes from here to here, that's a real tension point. If we're willing to let Paul be more poetic as Jeremiah as being more poetic, as joseas being more poetic, as Matthew's being more poetic, if we're allowing him some freedom to do with this text something that.
00:38:49
Speaker 3: Is drawing for the whole tradition, not just.
00:38:53
Speaker 1: Going back and citing one particular verse or trying to deny one doctor or another.
00:38:58
Speaker 3: It gets a little easier to reach.
00:39:01
Speaker 1: It's not like we it's not at all smooth out and there's no other problems, but it does allow you to make some more sense of those texts, as opposed to saying, well, it has to be this way because Paul's saying it about creation, and there's a creative order, and so obviously this is just what it is. That First Corinthian seven passage is one that I've I've studied a little bit more than most, and you just sort of have to go with Paul a little bit. You have to trust that he's you know, what he's doing makes sense to him because a very difficult text. But I don't know, I think the cross referencing and that sort of strict prophecy fulfillment or you know, this notion that if he's quoting a normative text in the Old Testament, it's obviously you know, sort of sanch Or Sagington the New I think those sort of tendencies need to be exploded a bit.
00:39:53
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think that you're doing something really great. I appreciate that you bring me onto your pro today to talk about New Testament Extra Jesus, because I think that, like this book, Old Testament use of Old Testament in parallel, it's obvious to people in Old Testament, And if there is such a thing as people interested in the Old Testament, it's obvious what it's used for there. But what's really important and not done enough is how the Old Testament enriches our understanding of the New Testament. Because this is the go too. This is where the New Testament authors lived as teachers, and so they're not doing something weird. It's only weird if we don't understand the Old Testament. They're doing very straightforward exegetical theological maneuvers within the framework of the Old Testament that has been going on for a thousand years before their days, and they're they're bringing that forward to the glory of God. You know, for us in the Church, we just chopped the New Testament off. Then it seems very strange because we're trying to say, well, how does this early church writings relate to my life here in the modern world. Well, we need to connect ourselves back into the vibrant biblical framework that you know, we might call it the Bible of Jesus that comes forward into the Gospel of Christ.
00:41:31
Speaker 1: Maybe one last question before we end here. But one of the things that I've noticed is we do you know, as I see people doing Old Testament use in the New there's a claim that says, well, the New Testament writers can do this because they're the New Testament writers, But it isn't a methodology that we should adopt. You I think you may have referenced this at the beginning of the episode when you're talking about their Hermi Munich versus our hermon Mudic. I think this is probably part of what you were referring to, but maybe not. But this notion that while they were inspired, so they can do whatever they want. So when Paul does the play and Galatians, you know, the Child the Promise versus the Child of the Flesh, and does the whole Hagar versus Sarahi thing, you know, it's like, that's something Paul can pull up. But we should really stay away from those exegetical gymnastics, like we're gonna pull muscles all over the place. How do you think about that? And our need to have a degree of rigor in the way that we look at the text and understand the text, but also a degree of play a looseness to it so that we're not missing things that we really should be connecting.
00:42:47
Speaker 2: Yeah. I have a little book that I put out as a co author book with a New Testament guy in twenty twenty three or twenty twenty four. I don't remember well how to study the Bible, use of the Bible, and it's trying to reframe this whole thing that it's not. We can't just do the New Testament use of the Old or we come up with this all this weird stuff. We have to work in the framework of the Bible's use of the Bible, because that's what the New Testament authors are doing. They're not doing something new, they're not doing this one off. And so the claim that we make there and that I make, is we just use plain sense, execess plain sentence reading. That's what the Biblical authors did, That's what we should do. And it's when we start getting weird because we've cut off the Old Testament that we have problems. So one good example is there's a lot of use of this term by New Testament use of the Old scholarship census plentier, which just means fuller meaning yes. And so the whole point of that is the Biblical authors don't know what they're saying because there's a fuller meaning that God has in mind. So the Biblical authors are saying one thing, but God has in mind something else, and he has this fuller meaning that we can only see in retrospect. But really, the even the better versions of that site, well, the fuller meaning is the full conon of the Bible. Well, okay, but no Biblical author, no New Testament author, had the full canon. So that is to say, no Biblical author understood what they're talking about.
00:44:29
Speaker 3: So it's crazy.
00:44:31
Speaker 2: And so I think just to to say, when I'm saying plain SENSEX to Jesus, to be fair and to kind of go with what you're saying. I don't think that I would just want to say we need to be looser. Right. It's not that we're playing fast and loose, but that is, we need to read the Bible the way the Biblical authors read the Bible. We need to treat the Bible the way they did. And so we've looked at a few examples in this episode. Come to hose On, Hosea's terms, come to Chronicles on Chronicles terms come to Matthew Mark, and I think those are the main pastor of Hebrews on their own terms. And so it's not a looseness relative to say the rules of plain sense. It's plain senses, reading with the grain, reading Joseiah the way Josea reads scripture. That's plain SENSEX of Jesus. So I think I think you're kindred, but I just in my classroom. I'm not telling my students, Oh no, just do whatever you want. I mean, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying, study the Bible and do what they do.
00:45:40
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was interesting, I will say when I taught hermaonutics, you know, we often we can define hermaeutics as the art and science of Biblical interpretation, let's say. And I would almost always start with the art, and I'd try to help them understand because I found when I was teaching them the science of it, sort of the more structured pieces they had trouble getting out of that. But if I could go to passages that demonstrated the art of this that you know, you're not just looking at the primary colors and isolation, you're actually seeing a full painting done and going, look, this is what we can.
00:46:12
Speaker 3: Create, they caught it a lot better.
00:46:16
Speaker 1: And then they could understand why they're using the techniques that they're using because they have a vision of what they're getting to. And passages like that with you know, Paul Galatians, or even some of the things in Revelation, you know, Hebrews.
00:46:30
Speaker 3: The way they're using these.
00:46:31
Speaker 1: Old Testament texts was just fascinating, and I think they hope they caught a glimpse of what that art really is, which is, as you're saying, a real deep understanding of the Old Testament and growing and deep understanding of the Old Testament to understand the New Testament.
00:46:47
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, and I think that to your point then it's it might seem like a looseness compared to yes, sort of the sort of rigid approach that we might take as we're trying to be conservative and faithful to the text, but we're using we're imposing modern logic on it. We're not getting into the literature of the scriptures and seeing that logic move forward. And so so it's in plain sense, Exe Jesus, but in respect to what God has been pleased to reveal by the Spirit of God.
00:47:27
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:47:27
Speaker 1: We had Norman Wurzba on the program and he talked a little bit about mastery in the two different senses of the word mastery, and it just strikes me that this is sort of what we're both talking about. But you know, there's a sense of mastery where we can have a dominating relationship, you know, we can force something on someone else. But his understanding of mastery was what you do when you try to learn the guitar, right, you approach the guitar, and this guitar is capable of making this amazing music.
00:47:58
Speaker 3: In your role as gaining mastery of.
00:48:02
Speaker 1: It is to learn how to do that, use it on its own terms, and be really really good at it so that when you play music, people actually want to listen to it. And it seems to me that that is the sort of thing we're kind of talking about with the Old Testament with a New Testament, that the development of mastery is a working with the text and drawing out from the text what's already there so that everything makes more and more and more sense and we really do understand than what it is that the text is trying to tell us. I think that's a playing an instrument. You kind of get that idea of mastery. And I think if we viewed not that I want to view the text as an instrument, but you get the analogy, that's the same sort of mastery we're trying to develop over the text.
00:48:53
Speaker 2: Yeah, and we have to conform ourselves to the rules of the game, so to speak. Yeah, because you know, we all cringe when somebody's picking up a violin and a bow for the first time. Okay, but you know, you go to a symphony with somebody that does it as a career and you're like, it's incredible. You can't imagine how does what's the difference? You know? So it's it's I remember it was a faculty meeting back in the nineteen nineties and the physical ed professor he was trying to make an illustration, and so he was claiming in the faculty meeting that he could play one note of the piano just as well as this world class musician that we worked on a faculty with. And I'm sitting there as a young faculty member saying, no, you couldn't, Like, I don't think you could play one note on the piano as good as this world renowned musician. You're comparing yourself to it. Because he was just making an illustration, try to break things down, and I agreed with his larger point, just I disagreed with no. I mean, there's there's there's something really wonderful about somebody that has that kind of master that you're talking about.
00:50:17
Speaker 1: I agree, I agree, Well, Gary, this has been fantastic. These are the kind of conversations. I love I love trying to get at what the Bible means and how we understand what the Bible means, and so really appreciated your work in this area, and this has been a great conversation.
00:50:33
Speaker 3: So thank you very much for being here today.
00:50:35
Speaker 2: Yeah, thanks for having me on for these several things. And I guess I guess it's time for me to move out of your studio now we wrapped.
00:50:45
Speaker 1: Up, Yes, it's about that time, but you're always welcome back. So thanks very much for being here for these series, and thanks very much for the work you're doing. Check out everything Gary does. You can find him. I'm gonna to send you to his Carpenter's student website.
00:51:03
Speaker 3: So it's Carpenter's student dot Substack dot com.
00:51:08
Speaker 2: Well student dot com, Carpenter's.
00:51:12
Speaker 1: Student dot com, my apologies, Carpenter's student dot com.
00:51:16
Speaker 3: So that's two s's in the middle. Carpenter's plural student starts with an S.
00:51:21
Speaker 1: That link will be in the show notes, and we'll have links to Gary's book as well. I think once this episode airs, this book will at least be available for pre order, if not available for actual order. It's a two volume work but you can also find a lot of other Gary's works here and we've got those links in the show notes in Amazon and so just encourage you to check out his work at Carpenter's student dot com as well as his books that are available and those links are in the show notes. So thanks everybody for being with us, Thanks again, Gary for being here, and we'll see all in the next episode of Thinking Christian.
00:51:54
Speaker 3: Take Care,
