Abstract
The last common misconception about the Bible is that the Old Testament's only purpose is to predict Jesus, an idea that distorts the Church's actual teaching. The Church teaches that Scripture is to be read as whole, but this does not mean that only the "ending," i.e. the New Testament is important. It means that we read knowing that God is most fully revealed in [Christ]. The purpose of Scripture is to reveal God, and the perfection or fulfillment of that revelation is Christ, but that does not mean that every Old Testament passage has a secret message about Jesus imbedded in it. Okay, here's more theology for you. God is a Trinity; always has been, always will be. The God of the Old Testament IS the Trinity. You don't need secret messages or predictions to get Christ in there. The God the Israelites experienced is the SAME God we worship at Mass. only we also experience this God through Christ as well. It's this last misconception that, as an Old Testament scholar, bothers me the most. It's what leads most people in the pews to ignore the Old Testament. If we think that the main purpose of the Old Testament is to pre-figure Jesus, then what do we do with the thousands of verses that don't deal with things that appear in the New Testament? And why even read the texts where Christ is hidden when we can just read the New Testament? This is a very old problem for the Church, but as Vatican II says, "The books of both the Old and New Testaments in their entirety, with all their parts, are sacred and canonical because written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have God as their author and have been handed on as such to the Church herself (paragraph II, emphasis mine). In other words, you need the whole Old Testament for the fullness of God's revelation in Scripture. Stories about women in the Old Testament rarely appear in the lectionary. You might know that Sarah was [Abraham]'s wife, and that she was the mother of Isaac, but did you know that she asked Abraham to sleep with her female slave so that she could use her as a surrogate mother (which he did)? Or that Abraham had told her to lie to Pharaoh about their marriage, so that Abraham ended up getting paid for Sarah "entering Pharaoh's house"? Now, if you assume the Old Testament is only about Christ, or that it only tells stories of saintly actions, these stories may confuse you. If instead, you read them as stories ancient Israelites told about their ancestors (being sensitive to genre), then you'd expect interesting details and intriguing story lines. You'd see this as part of a series of stories the Israelites told to explain who they were and where they came from. They'd be a lot more like our stories of the pilgrims at Thanksgiving than a documentary on the history channel.