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Christian Spirituality as Productive of Scripture

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The resurrection experience, as well as the ignominious death of Jesus on the cross, required interpretation in religious categories that could be understood by the first disciples and those to whom they proclaimed salvation in Jesus’ name.

It was to Israel’s sacred literature, the Hebrew Scriptures, that Peter and Paul and the other apostles turned for the religious language that enabled them to interpret the Jesus story as messianic salvation and Jesus himself as Lord and Savior.

For the first Christians and Hebrew Scriptures were the word of God just as they had been for Jesus himself (John 10:34-36). However, the Christians began to interpret the Scriptures differently from the Jews, since the Christians regarded Jesus as the fulfillment of the messianic prophecies whereas Jews still awaited that fulfillment.

Furthermore, within two to three decades after Pentecost-when Peter and the others had experienced the outpouring of the Spirit upon themselves and had begun to preach the gospel- a body of original Christian writings began to develop.

The letters of the apostle Paul to the communities had had founded began to be circulated and read in other communities. Sometime in the sixties the first narrative account of the life, preaching, work, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the document we call the Gospel of Mark, was composed and was followed by a number of other Gospels, three of which (Matthew, Luke, and John) have been included with that of Mark in the ‘canon’, or official book of Christian Scripture.

One of these Gospels, that of Luke, had a sequel, which came to be called the Acts of the Apostles and which described the life of the early church from Pentecost until the end of Paul’s apostolic career.

Finally, toward the end of the first Christian century a piece of Christian apocalyptic literature was written, probably composed in the same community that produced the Gospel of John, and this book of Revelation, or Apocalypse, eventually became part of the Christian canon of sacred writings.

The most striking feature of the Christian writings that eventually came to be regarded as Scripture is that they not only transmitted the teaching of Jesus, namely, his announcement that the promised reign of God was imminent, but also identified that reign as having been inaugurated in and by the person and work of Jesus himself.

Jesus, now believed to be the Son of God, Messiah, and Savior of the world, was the primary content of the Christian teaching.

In confessing Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ, the Christian community expressed the centrality of his person to their monotheistic faith, a development that finally proved incompatible with the Jewish faith in one God, as it was preserved and taught by the synagogue after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 C.E.

The first suggestion that these Christian writings were beginning to be considered “Scripture” appears in 2Peter 3:16 (ca. 100-125) where the author refers to the writings of Paul as on a par with “the other scriptures”.

In Justin’s Apology 1,67, written about 150, we find an indication that some of the Christian writings, notably the Gospels, were being read along with the Hebrew Scriptures at Christian liturgies.

The most important development, in view of what will follow, was the attempt to situate the Christian writings in relation to the Hebrew Scriptures, which the Christians continued to regard as the inspired word of God even after the expulsion of the Christians from the synagogue (ca. 90).

The struggle between Marcion, who rejected the Hebrew Scriptures, and the larger community, which accepted them, precipitated the formulation of the official position that Scripture is a single “book” composed of two Testaments.

The earliest known reference to the Hebrew Scriptures as the Old Testament is that of Melito of Sardis, which is recorded in Eusebius’s Church History (historia ecclesiastica) 4.26 and dates from ca. 170. Tertullian, around 200, seems to have been the first to refer to the Christian writings aw the New Testament.

The Christian designation of the Hebrew Scriptures as the Old Testament was an expression of an intuitive understanding of the process of revelation within history that has never been explained in a fully satisfactory way.

The Christian community came to see itself as the “true” (and eventually as the new”) Israel, the inheritor of the promises made to Abraham and the covenant mediated by Moses.

Thus, the Old Testament was regarded by the Christian community as its own literature, but only in the context of the new covenant established in and by Jesus Christ. What is the whole of Scripture for a Jew is only part, and indeed a preparatory part, of the Sacred Scripture for a Christian. Consequently, the most fundamental law of hermeneutics, the mutually determining relationship of parts and whole, entails a radically different approach to the Hebrew Scriptures by Christians.

The problem of how the Christian is to interpret the Old Testament in light of the New and the New Testament against the background of the Old was the central hermeneutical problem of the Christian use of Scripture during the first half of the Christian era.