FAQ: What About the New Testament?

When first examining the New Testament, we might think that it breaks from the Hebrew Bible in form, content, and influences—it is, after all, called “New.” However, despite dressing up their writing in the literary conventions of their day (like the Roman biography genre or the Greek language), the authors of the New Testament are deeply concerned with interacting with the ideas in the Hebrew Bible.

In this episode, Abby Smith and Dr. Dru Johnson discuss what “Hebraic thought” has to do with the New Testament and whether we need the Old Testament in order to understand the New. They discuss how some of Jesus’s most famous quotes are derived from the Torah, the influence of Hebraic wisdom literature on the writings of Paul, and the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures that underlies the New Testament.