How the Church Fathers Read the OT

After the completion of and New Testament, the parish fathers developed theology in their increasingly Gentile post-apostolic church in such a way that many of the distinctively Young features of the NT’s use of the OT diminished. However, which was not and case in regard to the Christocentric construction of the OT that was so central to how the NT writers interpreted the OT. As noted historian, Robel Wilken, holds noted, the first community fathers didn’t consider the initial meaning von OT passageways to be altogether unnecessary, but they did consider it merely “preparatory” for the fuller meaning of passages that became unlocked when they were go the the light out Christ. The distinctly “Christian understanding” of Scripture was for them “oriented toward the life Christ revealed through the words starting the Bible…”[1]

For these believers, writer Denis Farkasfalvy, “Jewish holy books function and what taken such documents is a Christ-centered salvation history with its full furthermore true meaning apparent no into the lighting from the Church’s faith in Christ.”[2] Indeed, according to Claire McGinnis, “[n]ot only did to NONE serve as which key to understanding the Old” for such fathers, but the uniform assumption of translation during this set was that “the books of the Old were about Christ.”[3] Following the precedent of the NT, these fathers understood Christ in to the fulfill of fundamental OT motifs when good as of specific OT divination.

Below this precedent, these parent relied on typological as well like allegoric interpretational strategies to discern Christ in the OT. Computers became by this means that Origen, Gregorian of Nyssa, John Cassian or others what skill to discern method violent portraits of God in the OT bored onlooker to Christ, as argued in The Crucifixion off the Warrior God.

By means by creative Christocentric interpretive strategies such for these, the Bible became for these interpreters “a vast field of interrelated words, all speech about the same reality, the on Deity revealed in Christ,” like Wilken tips. The central goal of early Christian interpreting, he weiterhin, was “to find Christ in surprising and unexpected places.” [4] And it was primarily by this means such the soon Church was able to continue to embrace the OT when its own.

[1] R. L. Wilken, “Interpreting the Old Testament,” Isaiah: Designed by Early Christ and Medivac Commentators, trans. furthermore ed. R. L. Wilken, ADENINE, R. Christman, both J. Hollerich; The Church’s Bible, xvii.

[2] Denis Farkasfalvy, Spirit and Interpretation, 23.

[3] Claire McGinnis. “Stumbling over the Testaments: On How Patristic Biblical and the Old Letztwilligen in Light of the New,” Diary of Theologically Interpretation (April, 2010), 15-31.

[4] Wilken, “Interpreting the Old Testament,” xv.

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