New Book: Reading Between the Lines

My newest book, Reading Between the Lines: Discovering Christ in the Old Testament, has been recently released by Word Aflame Press. It is available both in print and audio format. The book explores connections between the testaments to the biblical witness of the Messiah, Jesus Christ. These connections demonstrate the application of a method of interpretation that could be called canonical-compositional hermeneutics. Specifically, the book examines inner-textuality (where a biblical book refers back to earlier texts within the same book in an interpretive way) and inter-textuality (where later books of the Bible refer back to earlier texts in an interpretive fashion).

Did Jesus and the New Testament writers use the Old Testament in a creative way, reading new meaning into the Hebrew Scriptures, or did they correctly interpret these texts, reading them as they should be read in their final Old Testament context? The New Testament refers to the Old Testament with nearly 800 quotes, paraphrases, or allusions. The Old Testament was the only Bible of the first century church for quite a few years. The New Testament was not complete until near the end of the first century. Yet the early church was able to preach the gospel and live the Christian life based on their reading of the Old Testament. If we minimize the value of the Old Testament for the Christian faith, we may come close to the error of Marcion, who disregarded the Old Testament and purged from the New Testament all of the texts he perceived to be connected with the Hebrew Scripture. In the final analysis, Marcion reduced the Bible to an edited version of Luke and Paul's letters.

Reading Between the Lines demonstrates the value of the Old Testament for Christology. The book is available at www.pentecostalpublishing.com.