Old and New Testaments (Bible)

Solomon's Knot. A symbol from antiquity associated with king Solomon, son of David, representing wisdom and strength.

Christ drives the Usurers out of the Temple, a woodcut by Lucas Cranach the Elder and commissioned by Martin Luther in Passionary of Christ and Antichrist.

Title page of Martin Luther's great work On the Jews and Their Lies

The Old and New Testaments are the two foundational books of the Christian Bible, together forming the scriptural canon that narrates the divine economy from creation through covenant to fulfillment in Christ. Most scholars agree that the Old Testament was composed and compiled between the 12th and the 2nd century BC. Jesus and his disciples based their teachings on them, referring to them as "the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms [...] the scriptures". Old Testament used during time of Jesus Christ and first century Israel was the Aramaic Old Testament. The Hebrew Old Testament that is used today is an extremely corrupt Old Testament written many centuries later by Jews who didn't believe in Jesus Christ. The New Testament is a central element of Christianity, and has played a major role in shaping modern Western culture.

History

• The Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) is not a seamless Mosaic revelation but a layered anthology forged through centuries of redaction, with its Pentateuch reaching final form primarily in the exilic and post-exilic eras (sixth to fourth centuries BCE). Critical scholarship, rooted in the Documentary Hypothesis and its refinements by scholars such as Wellhausen, Graf, and Kuenen, identifies at least four distinct literary strata—Jahwist, Elohist, Deuteronomist, and Priestly—woven together by Judahite priestly editors to retroject later concerns with ritual law, temple purity, and ethnic separatism onto earlier traditions. From a critical vantage, this editorial process reveals emerging Judaism as an increasingly legalistic and particularistic construct: a survival strategy that prioritized halakhic boundary-marking and national election over universal ethical monotheism, thereby enshrining a covenantal framework that, while adaptive under Persian and Hellenistic rule, remained tethered to ethnic exclusivity and sacrificial formalism.

• The New Testament writings, composed between roughly 50 and 120 CE amid the final decades of Second Temple Judaism, document the emergence of a messianic movement that both arose within and decisively critiqued that matrix. Historical-critical analysis—drawing on form, redaction, and socio-rhetorical methods—demonstrates how the Gospels, Pauline corpus, and Hebrews re-read Torah and Prophets as preparatory and ultimately superseded by the new covenant in Christ, exposing the Mosaic law’s provisional character and the insufficiency of temple and ethnic markers for eschatological salvation.

In this light, post-70 CE Rabbinic Judaism appears as a parallel yet incomplete development: a reconstruction that preserved ethnic and legal structures after the Temple’s destruction but forfeited the prophetic trajectory toward inclusive, grace-centered redemption, leaving the church as the true continuation and corrective of Israel’s vocation.

A critical stance consistent with classical Christian theology (and the supersessionist perspective from our prior discussion) would note that Judaism's post-70 CE emphasis on rabbinic Oral Law and halakhic expansion can appear, from a New Testament viewpoint, to prioritize legalistic interpretation and ethnic particularism over the prophetic spirit of grace and universal redemption fulfilled in Christ.

Jewish theology

Mainstream Jewish theology—across Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform traditions—rejects the Christian claim that Jesus (Yeshua) is the Son of God in the unique, divine sense affirmed by the New Testament and historic Christian doctrine.

Jews affirm strict, indivisible monotheism as expressed in the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4): “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.” They view any attribution of divinity, incarnation, or co-equality with God to a human being as incompatible with this oneness and as a form of idolatry (avodah zarah).

Jesus is therefore not regarded as divine, as God the Son, as part of a Trinity, or as an intermediary between humanity and God. He is generally seen as a first-century Jewish teacher or figure whose followers developed claims about him that diverged from Jewish faith. This rejection is rooted in:

• The Hebrew Bible’s emphasis on God’s absolute transcendence and incomparability (e.g., Isaiah 40–45, which stresses there is no other God and God does not share His glory).
• The Jewish understanding of “son of God” language in the Tanakh as metaphorical—applied to Israel collectively, to kings like David, or to the anticipated Messiah as God’s anointed servant—but never implying ontological divinity or eternal sonship within a Godhead.

From the perspective of classical Christian theology, this Jewish denial is not merely a neutral difference but reflects the fundamental cleavage between the two faiths. The New Testament presents Jesus’ divine sonship as central to the new covenant: He is the eternal Word made flesh (John 1:1–14), the only-begotten Son who reveals the Father (John 14:9), and the one whose death and resurrection accomplish universal redemption beyond the provisional Mosaic system. Rabbinic Judaism’s post-70 CE emphasis on Torah observance, ethnic election, and rejection of any divine-human figure is seen by many Christian thinkers as a hardening into legalism that missed—or actively resisted—the prophetic fulfillment in Christ.

Christianity, by contrast, holds that this confession is essential to salvation and to rightly understanding the Old Testament’s trajectory toward its fulfillment in the incarnate Son. The disagreement is not peripheral but definitional, marking the historic parting of ways between the synagogue and the church.

See also

• Christianity older than Judaism

Bibliography

• Joseph Wheless (1868–1950):
  • Is It God's Word? Kessinger Publishing, 2010, ISBN 978-1169800984 – first published in 1926
  • Forgery in Christianity. A Documented Record of the Foundations of the Christian Religion, Filiquarian Pub Llc, 2007, ISBN 978-1599869100 – first published in 1930
• Revilo P. Oliver:
  • Christianity: A Religion for Sheep, National Vanguard, June 21th, 2018 (first published 1980 under the pseudonym Ralph Perrier, Liberty Bell Publications)
  • Christianity and the survival of the West, 1973
  • The Origins of Christianity (posthum)
  • Reflections on the Christ Myth (posthum)
• Kenneth Humphreys: Jesus Never Existed. Can you handle the truth? Historical Review Press, 2005, ISBN 978-0906879146
• Avi Brickner: The Jewishness of the New Testament, 2010
• Evropa Soberana: Rome contra Judaea; Judaea contra Rome, Essays of May 2013, translated and edited by César Tort; also represented in the book: C.T. (Editor): The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour, Fifth Edition, 2019, ISBN 978-1387749027, book presentation
• Richard Carrier: On the historicity of Jesus: why we might have reason for doubt, Sheffield Phoenix Press, Sheffield 2014
• Axe of Perun: All Christians Are Cucks, 2017; e-book – modern reflections on Christianity from a racial POV, 2017
• K. D.: Christianity’s Criminal History. Daybreak, 2018, ISBN 9780359124565. An abridged translation of some chapters of the first three volumes of the magnum opus of the German author Karlheinz Deschner: Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums, translated from the Spanish edition, slightly edited by César Tort, book presentation
• Ferdinand Bardamu (pseudonym): Why Europeans must reject Christianity, edited by César Tort, also represented in the book: C.T. (Editor): The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour, Fourth Edition, 2018, ISBN 978-1387749027, book presentation

External links

• Rabbi Shmuley is wrong about the New Testament and Evangelical Christians