How Catholics Read the Old Testament

By Anthony Pagliarini 

In 1 Corinthians 15, St. Paul reiterates the Gospel he preached in Corinth, the center of which is Christ’s death and resurrection. “I delivered to you as of first importance,” he writes, “what I also received” (1 Cor 15:3). A central feature of this tradition is not only that it is something received from those who were with Jesus but that also the claim that what took place in Christ took place in fulfillment of the Scriptures of Israel. So central is this idea that St. Paul mentions it in two successive sentences: “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures” (1 Cor 15:3-4). 

This is a startling claim, and it needs some clarification. What does it mean for something to happen “according to the Scriptures”? We hold, of course, that the New Covenant is the fulfillment of the Old. Yet, as Cardinal Henri De Lubac teaches us, this directedness of the Old Testament toward Christ was in large measure a hidden reality. “If, to suppose an impossibility,” he writes, “Christ had not come, no man confronted with the sacred text [of the Old Testament] would have the right to go beyond its literal meaning.” The plain meaning of the text did not openly speak of Jesus Christ. There are, of course, prophecies that anticipate the coming of a messiah, and Christ fulfills these. But many of the texts which we now rightly read as speaking of Christ could not have been understood as such in the period before his coming. The story of Abraham and Isaac was simply the story of Abraham and Isaac. So too is the story of Joseph. And even the prophecy of Immanuel in Isaiah 7 likely had as its first meaning the birth of King Hezekiah. And yet as we read these and so many other passages of the Old Testament, we rightly understand them as speaking of Jesus. How is this possible? 

The analogy of a good novel will help. In literature that is poorly written, the ending may be completely visible in advance. The plot progresses mechanically and predictably. Everything is given ahead of time. Alternatively, the ending may be a complete and total surprise—an event that is in no way anticipated. In the first case, we can say that the ending is wholly continuous; in the second, that it is wholly discontinuous. In contrast to these, good literature sits in the middle. The ending cannot be known in advance, but once it occurs, the whole book is seen to fit together as a whole. There is a certain necessity even. We can say, “Of course!” as we think back to earlier moments and understand them anew. The ending fits beautifully even though we did not and could not have seen the whole of it in advance. 

The Pontifical Biblical Commission uses the same idea to illustrate what it means for Christ to fulfill the Scriptures. 

The notion of fulfillment is an extremely complex one, one that could easily be distorted if there is a unilateral insistence either on continuity or discontinuity. … Jesus is not confined to playing an already fixed role—that of Messiah—but he confers, on the notions of Messiah and salvation, a fullness which could not have been imagined in advance; he fills them with a new reality; one can even speak in this connection of a “new creation”(2 Co 5:17; Ga 6:15). It would be wrong to consider the prophecies of the Old Testament as some kind of photographic anticipations of future events. All the texts, including those which later were read as messianic prophecies, already had an immediate import and meaning for their contemporaries before attaining a fuller meaning for future hearers. The messiahship of Jesus has a meaning that is new and original. (The Jewish People and their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible, §21)   

The great early Church theologian Origen captures the same idea when he writes that 

Before the coming of Christ, the Law and the Prophets were not yet, one may say, the announcement of what came to pass in the Gospel since he who was to make their mysteries clear had not yet come. But when the Savior had come to us and had given a body to the Gospel, then, by means of the Gospel, he effected that the whole [of the Scriptures] should be like the Gospel. (In Ioh I.8) 

 

This is what the Tradition means to say with the well-known phrase Novum in Vetere latet, Vetus in Novo patet. (The New Testament lies hidden in the Old. The Old Testament is unfolded in the New.) The coming of Christ opens our eyes to see what God, who is the divine author of history and Scripture, has always intended us to see in the events and words of the Old Testament. Christ brought it about that “the whole [of the Scriptures] should be like the Gospel,” and so now we can read them anew. All that he did happened “according to the Scriptures,”  and thereby they opened those Scriptures for us that we might see them in their fullness. To summarize, let us turn to the words of Dei Verbum §16 

God, the inspirer and author of both Testaments, wisely arranged that the New  Testament be hidden in the Old and the Old be made manifest in the New. For, though  Christ established the new covenant in His blood (see Luke 22:20; 1 Cor. 11:25), still the books of the Old Testament with all their parts, caught up into the proclamation of the  Gospel, acquire and show forth their full meaning in the New Testament (see Matt. 5:17; Luke 24:27; Rom.16:25-26; 2 Cor. 14:16) and in turn shed light on it and explain it. 

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