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“Reading the OT anew in light of the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection opens both text and reader to new, previously unimagined, possibilities.”—Richard B. Hays

To be frank, I was not taught a healthy view of the OT growing up. I was not taught that the OT was an abiding witness to the gospel, but was a bygone set of rules and regulations and outmoded worship forms. Passages like 2 Tim 3:15–17 were often made to refer to the NT, not the OT:

. . . and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work. (ESV)

But the OT is what Paul has in mind, and his assumption is that the Scriptures of Israel testify to the salvation of the gospel of Christ. Paul believes that the OT is all that is needed to learn the message of salvation in Jesus Christ, including the righteousness that flows from a relationship with him. Of course, this also applies to the NT today, which states even more explicitly the salvation of Christ. But Timothy lacked the benefit of the completed biblical witness of both testaments in his first-century Jewish context. Nevertheless, what he had in the Jewish Scriptures was enough for his instruction in the faith of Christ. For Thomas Lea and Hayne Griffin:

He [Paul] was not suggesting that a part of Timothy’s childhood instruction involved the New Testament. The aim of the content of the sacred writings is to relate God’s saving purpose in Christ. Timothy’s study of the Scriptures had grounded him in that wisdom and enlightenment that leads to faith in Jesus Christ. The Scriptures lead to salvation but only as they point to Christ. The Scriptures themselves do not provide salvation, but they do point to the Savior who can provide it. The phrase “through faith in Jesus Christ” shows how the Scriptures make individuals wise. They enlighten them to the necessity for faith in Jesus Christ.1

My past experience with the OT was one of practical neglect: it had no authoritative value for the life and function of the church. The OT was part of inspired Scripture, to be sure, but I was taught that the OT was not written primarily for Christians. In fact, we often used the moniker “New Testament church” to describe our adherence and allegiance to the NT, the “constitution” of the church.2 Granted, we studied the OT in Sunday school, seeking earnestly to digest its facts, figures, and predictive prophecies of the Messiah, but in no way was the Lordship of Christ the driving assumption of what the OT was really about. It was about Israel, not the church. We could count the number of messianic proof texts (i.e., various verses scattered throughout the OT), memorize them to support apologetic aims (i.e., prove that Jesus was the Messiah), and then forget about the rest of the OT for all intents and purposes. The OT did not play a major role in establishing our Christology beyond a few messianic prophecies. My colleague even told me that his mother literally cried when he told her he planned to get his doctorate in OT! While her emotional reaction may not be the norm, it reflects the practical neglect of the OT in many Christian traditions historically. Take my own Restoration Movement tradition as but one example that has attempted to more or less follow the NT church in its external forms and organization, but has largely neglected the inner workings of the Bible of the apostles, as well as its proper interpretation as a scriptural tradition that is primarily about Jesus Christ.

This book is an attempt to resurrect the OT to the place of authority it had for the “New Testament church,” and to read it like the NT does—as a witness to Christ. The OT was, after all, the Bible of the early church.3 It seems now to be a matter of common sense for Christian movements that seek to more or less pattern themselves after the NT church (to the extent that that is even possible 2,000 years later, or even theologically necessary to begin with), that it would also follow the apostles’ hermeneutical procedure of how to read the Jewish Scriptures.

I anticipate an objection to applying apostolic hermeneutics today: “That was okay for them but not for us; they were inspired and we are not.”4 Let’s trace that logic for a moment. We are expected to follow their lead at church planting, church government, church discipline, church doctrine, worship forms, etc., but not their interpretive approach to Scripture? So much for being “a people of the book.” If not the NT itself, where do we as “New Testament Christians” go to learn how to interpret the OT as Jesus and the NT writers interpreted it? Moisés Silva states it provocatively, “If we refuse to pattern our exegesis after that of the apostles, we are in practice denying the authoritative character of their scriptural interpretation—and to do so is to strike at the very heart of the Christian faith.”5 Andreas Köstenberger and Richard Patterson state similarly, “One important guiding principle for the way in which we today ought to read the Old Testament is the study of how the New Testament writers themselves read the Hebrew Scriptures. If we want to be biblical in our hermeneutical practice, there is no better place to look than the hermeneutical approach of the biblical writers themselves.”6

If we do not get our interpretive practice from the NT, where do we get it? Again, a common response is, “We follow the NT approach to the OT only in the specific passages laid out for us in the NT, but we cannot extend it to other passages because they are not explicit examples.” In other words, because the NT does not interpret a passage christologically, for us to do so “goes beyond what is written.” As Klyne Snodgrass describes it, we should not expect to find “new instances”—beyond those explicitly laid out in the NT—of verses applied to Jesus by using the exegetical methods of the apostles, presumably because we do not share their authoritative revelatory role.7 Yet, are we really only to read the OT christologically in the few places where the NT does so? So much for Jesus’s words that the “all the Scriptures” are about him (Luke 24:25–27; cf. John 5:39). Should we apply a “canon within the canon” approach where we read only certain OT passages christologically and practically ignore the rest; or at most, memorize facts and figures and moralize OT stories? According to this logic, if the NT does not expressly exegete an OT passage, it is “hands on” from a grammatical-historical perspective, but presumably “hands off” from a christological one.8 So much for Ps 23! So much for Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones! So much for the book of Esther—its main point is the salvation of God’s people! We can also ignore the so-called protoevangelium of Gen 3:15. The NT does not interpret any of these passages christologically; so, according to the traditional logic, we should not either. Again, what is one to make of Jesus’s claim that “all the Scriptures” witness to him, when several OT books are not quoted in the NT messianically or otherwise (e.g., Judges, Ruth, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Lamentations, Obadiah)?9 Do these not witness to Jesus Christ?

Given the traditional reasoning, none of these texts or myriad of others carries any christological import simply because the NT is silent about them. This reduces the Christian approach to the OT to a catalog of messianic proof texts at the expense of the rest of the OT. As Dan McCartney confirms:

If our perception of the larger divine intent in the Old Testament is limited to solely those passages for which the apostles inspiredly spelled it out for us, it seriously limits a Christian use of the Old Testament. Further, the christocentric interpretation by the apostles is itself derived from the teaching of Jesus, who appears to be the fountainhead of this whole messianic way of reading the Old Testament.10

I am convicted, therefore, that the NT writers have given us examples of how to read the OT christologically, and they expect us to apply their post-resurrection hermeneutical perspective in our own reading of the OT, and not restrict ourselves to their examples as the only “approved” ones. In short, they have given the church an inspired interpretive trajectory for understanding the OT rightly (i.e., christologically). To use a common—albeit imperfect—analogy, they have taught us how to fish, not given us a fish. As for the NT writers being authoritative interpreters of OT Scripture, I agree that they are foundational for the church as bearers of unique divine authority, commission, and revelation; yet, is this not even more reason to adopt their overall interpretive approach to the OT? It is precisely because of their inspired authority that our interpretations should be rooted in their use of the OT. In short, when we implement their interpretive strategy today, we are not relaying the foundations of scriptural interpretation, but are moving about freely in the house God has built for us in Christ.

I believe we have in the NT a “go and do likewise” scenario where Jesus and the NT writers give the interpretive map for christological readings of the OT, even “non-messianic” passages. Yes, they give methods of exegesis too, but these are subservient to the larger goal of interpreting the OT christologically. Put differently, there is nothing inherently “Christian” about grammatical-historical exegesis, typology, intertextuality, allegory, or predictive prophecy; these are all evident in the OT itself. But what is distinctly Christian is the hermeneutical starting point of the apostolic church: Israel’s Scriptures are about Jesus Christ. They point to him; he is their ultimate goal and meaning, and the Holy Spirit enables Christians to read the OT as a comprehensive witness to the gospel of Christ.

Does this also apply to so-called “non-messianic” passages? It is fairly obvious that the NT writers have applied christological interpretation when they quote an OT passage as referring in some way to the person and work of Christ. What about OT passages not cited in the NT, or those that do not make the traditional “messianic” lists? Are they messianic too? Patrick Reardon observes:

The correct interpretation of certain psalms comes more readily than others, and the task is rendered easier still if a psalm’s meaning has already been made plain in the New Testament. The New Testament is, after all, the key to the full (that is to say, Christian) understanding of the Old. When the New Testament tells us the meaning of some passage in the Old Testament, then the matter of authentic interpretation, for us Christians, is settled.11

For example, Psalms12 is quoted more often than any other OT book in the NT.13 Reardon sees the Psalter as so perfused with Christology that “Christ walks within the psalms.”14 Psalms citations in the NT vary where some are directly related to Christ (Ps 22:1 quoted in Matt 27:46), while others are indirectly related to him (Pss 69:25 and 109:8 quoted in Acts 1: 20 as being fulfilled in Judas). It is worth noting that nowhere does the OT speak of “the Messiah” per se; the definite article “the” is always omitted.15 Therefore, identifications of “messianic psalms” vary considerably because the scholarly community lacks objective criteria for what makes a psalm messianic. Nevertheless, a basic assumption is that messianic psalms are, in one way or another, related to the Messiah’s person and work within the establishment of God’s kingdom in Israel and the world.16 But this depends on whether one is looking at it from a strictly OT perspective, NT perspective, or a combination of both as the unfolding of God’s plan throughout redemptive history.

From an OT perspective, for example, royal psalms (2, 18, 20, 21, 45, 72, 89, 101, 110, 132, 144)17 are often understood in a messianic sense because they relate to Israel’s earthly king, and anticipate God’s end-times king—the Messiah, the son of David. While these psalms do not refer to “the Messiah” in an absolute sense, the noun Messiah (“anointed one”) occurs nine times in these eleven psalms, and twice in verbal form (“to anoint”).18 Given that the royal psalms were retained during the Babylonian exile, when Israel had no king, their existence must point beyond the immediate situation to keep alive the hope that the Davidic dynasty would rise again.19

There is a scholarly consensus that the postexilic community shaped the Psalter into five books, including the royal psalms, in a world that the community did not control, in eager expectation of a new order of its national identity under a future Davidic king.20 As C. Hassell Bullock notes, “The royal psalms, once the Davidic dynasty had fallen, helped to keep alive the hope that it would rise again, although that was not likely their original purpose. And when that hope did not materialize in its historical form, it turned into a hope for the appearance of the Messiah, the Anointed One.”21 The royal psalms were therefore “reinterpreted in the expectation of a time when a new Davidic ruler would appear.”22 Brevard Childs echoes this general outlook on the messianic function of the royal psalms: “Although the royal psalms arose originally in a peculiar historical setting . . . they were treasured in the Psalter for a different reason, namely as a witness to the messianic hope which looked for the consummation of God’s kingship through his Anointed One.”23 To be clear, such messianic import was most likely not clear to the original authors of the royal psalms. But again, God is the ultimate author of Scripture, and biblical texts should be understood within his larger redemptive plan. As Tesh and Zorn remind us, “This messianic significance in the Psalms may not have been understood by the psalmists, nor those who heard them, but it was in the mind of the Spirit who inspired them.”24

In addition to the royal psalms, many have understood the psalms “of David”25 as de facto messianic based on their connection to King David, not because they speak of the Messiah per se, but because David is an illustration of one who lived his life in the hope of the reign of God.26 Due to many disappointments in Israel’s history following King David—not least of which were the eventual deportations of the northern and southern kingdoms into Assyria and Babylon, respectively—a messianic hope emerged whenever the Psalter mentioned Israel’s second and greatest king. Many years of exile and a dissolved Davidic monarchy provided the catalyst for interpreting the royal psalms in an end-times fashion. Doug Green notes that a growing number of scholars now agree that the Psalter was edited in such a way that encouraged readers to interpret it no longer simply as prayers and hymns rooted in the experience of ancient Israelites, but as prophecies of events at the climax of Israel’s history (i.e., eschatologically).27 The “David” of the Psalter, then, evokes hopes for an end-times “anointed one” reminiscent of historical King David. Therefore, a christological reading of Psalms sees the “David” of the Psalter as a figure of Christ; David’s kingship offers us an Old Testament image or figure of Jesus Christ’s kingship.28 Bullock observes along the same lines that the royal psalms readily lend themselves to the NT messianic view.29 However, this is only partially true because from a NT perspective, messianic psalms extend beyond the royal and Davidic psalms to find their ultimate fulfillment in Jesus Christ. The royal psalms have not been transmitted within a specific collection but are instead scattered throughout the Psalter,30 and this weighs against isolating them too narrowly from other psalms in a hyper-messianic sense to the exclusion of non-royal psalms. Belcher’s observation is well taken: “A psalm can be considered Messianic if it deals with the person of the king. However, if only psalms that deal with the person of the king are Messianic, then the number of Messianic psalms is limited severely.”31

The NT does not solely connect royal or Davidic psalms to Jesus (e.g., Ps 78:2 quoted in Matt 13:35); as we will see later, the entire Psalter speaks of him. I appreciate Green’s reservation with the traditional “messianic” category, which limits it to psalms quoted in the NT as direct prophecies of Christ: “Instead of treating the small group of psalms that the NT ‘applies’ to Jesus as a special group of direct prophecies of the Messiah, I regard these psalms as the tip of a prophetic and messianic iceberg. It is not that the NT quotes all of a small group of messianic psalms. Rather, it quotes from a few of a very large group of messianic psalms.”32 Put differently, the whole Psalter is messianic, anticipating God’s eternal reign through the long-awaited Messiah.33

The traditional list of messianic psalms is as follows: Pss 2, 8, 16, 22, 40, 45, 68, 69, 89, 109, 110, 118, 132.34 Again, the list varies among commentators because there are some psalms that the NT quotes, but that do not make the messianic list: Pss 31, 35, 41, 78, 102.35 My concern in this book is with psalms that the NT does not quote (but may nonetheless allude to), and my thesis is that we should read these messianically. Some might object that it is inconsistent to speak of christological interpretation of psalms that are not mentioned in the NT (the explicit examples argument earlier), but not if Jesus has anything to say about it; he declared that all the Scriptures witness to him (Luke 24:25–27, 44–47; John 5:39). I will interact in more detail with specific passages later, but suffice it to say here that at a minimum, they reveal that the OT is ultimately about Christ and cannot be reduced to a select number of messianic proof texts explicitly evidenced in the NT.

The NT basis for christological interpretation of the OT comes from the mouth of Jesus himself:

And he said to them, “O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself. (Luke 24:25–27)

Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, and said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.” (Luke 24:44–47)

You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life. (John 5:39–40)

The first two passages are the most relevant to this study because they specifically mention the prophets and/or Psalms.36 The first is in the context of Jesus talking with two disciples—one named Cleopas and the other anonymous—on the road to Emmaus after the resurrection. Their faces are downcast; their dreams dashed because they were hoping that Jesus was the liberator of Israel. In their way of thinking, the crucifixion of Jesus proves otherwise. Yet they do not realize with whom they are talking as they travel on the road—none other than the resurrected Christ. We know better as later readers of Luke’s Gospel. We know it is Jesus himself because Luke tells us so (Luke 24:15).

I sometimes think that as Christians, who have nearly 2,000 years of Christian reflection on the story of Jesus, expect everyone to understand the story as clearly as we do today. We have the benefit of a completed NT canon that provides supporting evidence to substantiate Jesus’s claims about his divinity and mission. We also have the benefit of knowing that the fruit of Jesus’s life, death, resurrection, and ascension is a worldwide church committed to the proclamation of the gospel story. But the disciples on the road to Emmaus have none of these retrospective insights. As a matter of fact, because they do not realize that Jesus has been raised from the dead, their perspective is vastly different from ours today, as we stake our very faith on that claim as a historic reality. We read the story with post-resurrection lenses. The Emmaus disciples still had hazy crucifixion lenses on their eyes, thinking the cross was the end of the Jesus story. They understand the story only in terms of what happened on Friday, but Jesus wants them to understand it also in connection with what happened on Sunday. Again, we suppose that they should have been able to “figure it out”; that the OT testifies to the suffering, death, and resurrection of Israel’s Messiah. Jesus even says as much by noting their slowness of heart to believe the Scriptures (24:25). However, they did not understand from the Scriptures the narrative of the gospel of a crucified and risen Savior. To be sure, it is not a matter of knowing more biblical content, but of having the proper interpretive framework. For Richard Hays, “The puzzled Emmaus disciples have all the facts but lack the pattern that makes them meaningful.”37 Their knowledge of the OT was deficient regarding its relationship to the person and work of Christ.

Therefore, the resurrected Lord gives them a crash course in hermeneutics. Israel’s Scriptures testify to his mission of redemption—Moses, all the Prophets, all the Scriptures coalesce around his identity. Luke’s use of the word “all” in 24:27 emphasizes the comprehensive nature of the OT witness to Christ. It is worth noting that Luke does not identify any specific passages as messianic per se. While it is safe to assume that his second volume, the book of Acts, records several of these on the lips of the apostles and their associates (e.g., Acts 2:25 [Ps 16:8–11]; 2:34–35 [Ps 110:1]; 3:22–23 [Deut 18:15, 18, 19]; 3:25–26 [Gen 22:18; 26:4]; 4:11 [Ps 118:22]; 4:25–26 [Ps 2:1–2]; 8:32–33 [Isa 53:7–8]; 13:33 [Ps 2:7]; 13:34 [Isa 55:3]; 13:35 [Ps 16:10]), the emphasis here is on the totality of the Scriptures as a witness to Christ’s sufferings and glorification. Granted, the texts in Acts do in fact span from the books of Moses38 to the prophetic corpus, but not all the Prophets are represented, nor obviously are all the Scriptures. Therefore, it is better to understand Luke’s comment as suggesting “the whole narrative of God’s dealings with Israel unlocks God’s purposes that culminate in Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection.”39 Lest we reduce the OT to a handful of messianic passages, we should recognize in it a larger, unified story of God’s redemption of humanity. Tremper Longman III and Al Groves comprehend the OT story as a grand story pointing to Christ:

Jesus did not arrive unannounced; his coming was declared in advance in the Old Testament, not just in explicit prophecies of the Messiah but by means of the stories of all of the events, characters, and circumstances on the Old Testament. God was telling a larger, overarching, unified story. From the account of creation in Genesis to the final stories of the return from exile, God progressively unfolded his plan of salvation. And the Old Testament account of that plan always pointed in some way to Christ.40

The second passage, Luke 24:44–47, is most relevant to this study. Iain Duguid calls it a “summary of Jesus’s master class in Old Testament interpretation.”41 In the context of Luke 24, the scene shifts from Emmaus to Jerusalem, from two disciples to the eleven apostles (minus Judas). They are not a little confused about the events of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. Although Jesus has repeatedly taught them the necessity of his passion and his subsequent resurrection in Luke’s Gospel (9:22, 44; 13:33; 17:25; 18:31–33), they still do not understand. One might think that seeing the resurrected Lord would be enough to give them unobstructed clarity on the teaching of Scripture regarding his person and mission, but this is apparently not the case. Luke reports that while in the very presence of Jesus they were “troubled,” and “doubt” had arisen in their hearts (24:38). Jesus once again gives a lesson in biblical hermeneutics. Seeming surprised at their lack of understanding of the Scriptures and their testimony to the Messiah’s mission, Jesus reminds them that he has already taught them previously during his earthly ministry about his relationship to the Scriptures: “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you . . .” (24:44). In other words, this is not the first time they have heard from Jesus a scriptural description of his mission. Being Jesus’s inner circle as his chosen apostles, Luke may be implying that they are (or should be) more informed than the two disciples in Emmaus. Therefore, Luke’s description of their unbelief is thick with irony. He gives essentially the same hermeneutical lesson as earlier in the chapter on christological interpretation: the entirety of the OT is a witness to Christ, especially his sufferings and resurrection (v. 46). Steve Moyise notes, “It is clear Luke believes that all of the Scriptures point to Jesus, and that during his final days on earth he explained this to his disciples. More specifically, he believes that Jesus explained how the Scriptures speak of a messiah who must first suffer and then enter into his glory.”42

While Luke is explicit about the content of Scripture—Jesus’s sufferings and resurrection—it is by no means limited to these events. For Luke, Scripture also speaks to Jesus’s incarnate birth (1:69–70), his inaugural ministry (4:18–19), his rationale for teaching in parables (8:10), the triumphal entry (19:38), etc. Jesus repeats in sweeping terms the pervasive witness of Scripture to himself: “Everything” written about him must be fulfilled (24:44). What is more, he uses a three-part division of Israel’s Scriptures to convey the comprehensiveness of scriptural testimony concerning himself: “ . . . in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and Psalms” (my trans.). Once again, the focus of his teaching was not on a few “messianic” texts here and there, but rather the entire Old Testament.43 Adding up all the messianic passages in the OT results in only a small portion of the OT pointing to Christ. As N. T. Wright has noted, the comprehensive christological hermeneutic of Luke 24 “looks more like a way of reading the entire scriptural story, and within that the entire book of Psalms, than an attempt to pluck a few key texts out of a mass of otherwise unhelpful material.”44 What Luke has in mind here is a christological hermeneutic where the OT is a coherent and comprehensive witness to the gospel. But all is not well. The apostles, in spite of hearing the resurrected Lord’s description of the pervasiveness of the gospel in the OT, are apparently still obtuse. What is needed is not more rigorous study, more precise exegesis, or more meditative introspection, but divine intervention; or, at least divine explanation. Luke writes, “He [Jesus] opened their minds to understand the Scriptures” (v. 45), as he had done earlier in Emmaus. Luke does not necessarily imply that they need a supernatural infusion of divine insight to understand the Scripture, but simply that Jesus gave them new insights, which they can only understand from a post-resurrection perspective.45 Nevertheless, for Luke, the message of the Scriptures is not self-evident; one’s mind must be opened to it, and they are rightly understood only in light of Jesus’s death and resurrection.46

We should be crystal clear about what has happened here in Luke 24. The followers of Jesus did not reason from the OT and come to the right conclusion. They tried this approach, and it ended in frustration because they did not see how the crucifixion fit the Messiah’s mission. It was not clear to them until after they encountered the resurrected Lord.47 Jesus gave them a post-resurrection perspective—a christological lens through which to read the story again, this time in reverse order. Not that they read the OT from the last canonical book to the first, but from the end of the story as the interpretive starting point. Starting from their experience of the resurrected Lord, Jesus himself “interpreted to them” (v. 27), “opened the Scriptures” (v. 32), and “opened their minds” (v. 45) to understand the OT. Again, we have to be honest about the reading strategy Luke teaches here. It is not “start at the beginning and you will figure it out if you try hard enough, dig deep enough with the right exegetical technique,” but rather, “start from the end and then you will see clearly how to read the OT story in relation to Christ.” Put differently, we must read the story backward with resurrection lenses on our eyes. Hays states it provocatively, “Jesus’ exposition of Israel’s Scripture will have to undertake the task of reading backwards: it will have to show retrospectively the pervasive presence of this theme—which had never been perceived by anyone in Israel prior to the crucifixion and resurrection.”48 In order to understand the OT as a witness to Jesus’s sufferings and resurrection, we must start with Jesus.

Enough has been said about reading the OT with the right interpretive lenses. Luke’s point is well taken: read the OT christologically in order to understand its true meaning as a witness to the gospel. However, we are not finished with Luke 24:44–47, and now come to the most salient point for the remainder of this study: if all of the Scriptures point to Christ, it stands to reason that this includes Psalms—not just some of them—all of them. In fact, the Greek text of verse 44 lacks the definite article for Psalms, and a more accurate translation is “Everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and Psalms.” There are a couple of reasons for stressing this particular translation. Some have taken Luke’s description as evidence of the threefold-division of the Jewish Scriptures at the time as “the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms.” While this has historical precedent in the Dead Sea Scrolls,49 the division was normally referred to as “the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Writings” (Psalms being the first book in the last division).50 More importantly, the use of a single definite article before “Prophets,” yielding “the Prophets and Psalms” is hardly incidental, and suggests that Psalms—the whole book—is prophecy.51 This most likely reflects Luke’s conviction that the Prophets included Psalms.52 Psalms, then, must be read christologically because it is a book of prophecy.

Simply stated, the Prophets and Psalms should be taken together, reflecting a Jewish assumption in the Second Temple period that Psalms is among the prophetic corpus of Israel’s Scriptures. In fact, the Dead Sea Scrolls demonstrate the belief that David, the archetypal psalmist, wrote thousands of psalms through the spirit of prophecy: “The total [psalms/songs] was four thousand and fifty. He [David] composed them all through the spirit of prophecy which had been given to him from before the Most High” (11Q5 27.10–11).53 Similarly, Luke states in Acts that David was a “prophet,” conveying the prophetic nature of Ps 16 as a prediction of Christ: “Brothers, I may say to you with confidence about the patriarch David that he both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day. Being therefore a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that he would set one of his descendants on his throne, he foresaw and spoke about the resurrection of Christ” (Acts 1:30–31). Green concludes, “For Peter and other apostles, David was as much a prophet as Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, and the psalms that bear his name were read as predictions of eschatological events, now fulfilled in the story of Jesus and his followers.”54 As noted previously, we need not limit this to royal and/or Davidic psalms because the entire the Psalter should be read in a prophetic and eschatological direction.55

In light of this discussion, Luke 24:44 groups Psalms with the Prophets as a grand corpus of prophecy that points to Jesus as Israel’s Messiah. Luke intends to highlight the Psalms as a key prophetic text.56 Therefore, it is in light of this prophetic trajectory that I interpret the various psalms in this book in an effort to read them christologically. To be clear, the psalms covered here are neither quoted directly in the NT nor among the standard messianic psalms. Even so, Psalms as a whole is filled with imagery and ideas that point to Christ. When read in the context of the Christian canon of Scripture, and from the post-resurrection perspective of the NT writers, all the psalms are messianic, evoking various aspects of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

1. Lea and Griffin, 1, 2 Timothy, Titus, 234.

2. Fletcher, “Constitution,” 1–17.

3. I recognize the lack of precision of using designations such as OT and NT when speaking of Scripture in the first-century CE because doing so imposes anachronistic canonical constraints on the ancients. Neither is it accurate to speak of the church’s use of the “Hebrew Bible” because the vast majority of scriptural quotations in the NT come from the Gk. tradition known as the Septuagint, commonly designated LXX. Yet it is also imprecise to refer to “the” Septuagint because it did not exist as a single entity, but as a Gk. tradition composed of multiple revisions. It is more accurate, therefore, to speak of the church’s use of “Israel’s Scriptures,” which does not impose modern canonical constraints—whether Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox—and takes into consideration the multiple text traditions available at the time in their Heb., Aram., and Gk. forms. With that said, I will use the OT/NT designations because of convention and convenience. While this book primarily appeals to the Protestant canon, which is identical to the Hebrew canon except for the ordering of certain books, it will refer to the Gk. tradition at times. This study follows the numbering of the Hebrew Psalter, which consists of 150 psalms.

4. For this basic view, see Longenecker, Exegesis, 197; Snodgrass, “Use of the Old Testament,” 223.

5. Silva, “New Testament Use,” 164.

6. Köstenberger and Patterson, Invitation, 195.

7. Snodgrass, “Use of the Old Testament,” 223.

8. This is also defended in Longenecker, Exegesis, 198.

9. I admit the tenuousness of such lists because it is not always easy to decide whether a NT passage quotes or alludes to an OT one; further, quotations may, at times, be duplicates within the OT itself, making it difficult to determine which book is being cited.

10. McCartney, “Hermeneutics,” para. 7.

11. Reardon, Christ, 61.

12. For consistency, “Psalms” refers to the Psalter (the book of Psalms), and “psalms” refers generally to individual psalms without reference to its number, and is understood from the context (e.g., “the psalm recalls the exodus”).

13. Bullock, Encountering, 46; McCann, Theological, 163; Longman, How to Read Psalms, 65; Just, “Quotations.”

14. Reardon, Christ, xvi.

15. Tesh and Zorn, Psalms, 71.

16. Belcher, Messiah, 30; Tesh and Zorn, Psalms, 70. I recommend Belcher’s brief history of interpretation on the development of the term “messianic” in relation to Psalms (Messiah, 21–30).

17. The list is taken from Bullock, Encountering, 178. Bullock has a fine exegetical analysis of the development of messianism in the royal psalms (pp. 177–86).

18. Ibid., 182.

19. Belcher, Messiah, 118.

20. On the postexilic shaping of the Psalter, see deClaissé-Walford, Introduction, 45–57. Although, the exilic community also played a role in shaping the Psalter.

21. Bullock, Encountering, 182.

22. Belcher, Messiah, 25.

23. Childs, Introduction, 517.

24. Tesh and Zorn, Psalms, 73.

25. Authorship of the so-called “Davidic psalms” is notoriously difficult. The Heb. preposition le, often translated “of” in Eng., which is found in the superscriptions of many psalms, has a range of possible meanings—much like the Eng. counterpart. It is commonly understood to indicate authorship, as in “by David,” and this may well be the case; but this cannot be established from the preposition itself, much less the superscripts of the psalms, which were added later in the Psalter’s composition history. It can also indicate possession (“belonging to”), most likely belonging to a group of psalms (e.g., “of the sons of Korah”). The preposition can also indicate relationship (“about” or “pertaining to”). Or, it can mean “for” someone (i.e., on behalf of, in dedication to, or at the direction of). Thus, “of David” conveys the idea of being related to David in some way. The meaning of the psalms does not depend on the precise identification of their author; therefore, I will refer to the “David” of the Psalter out of convenience, and do not intend a rigid statement of authorship. For this issue, see Tesh and Zorn, Psalms, 45–46, 49–50; deClaissé-Walford, Introduction, 145–55; Longman, How to Read Psalms, 40–42. Aside from “of” as possibly indicating authorship, one should notice the intentional ambiguity of Psalms of Christ, the title of this book.

26. Belcher, Messiah, 25.

27. Green, “Christ’s Shepherd,” 36.

28. Collett, “Christology,” 393.

29. Bullock, Encountering, 184.

30. Childs, Introduction, 515–16.

31. Belcher, Messiah, 29. Green estimates the number of psalms that some scholars deem traditionally “messianic” to be less than fifteen (“Christ’s Shepherd,” 34).

32. Green, “Christ’s Shepherd,” 38.

33. Mitchell, Message. For a more concise version of Mitchell’s thesis, see Mitchell, “Remember David,” 528–29.

34. Green, “Christ’s Shepherd,” 35.

35. Ibid., 36.

36. Although John’s christological use of the Prophets and the Psalms should not be ignored. See Brendsel, “Isaiah”; Daly-Denton, David; Manning, Echoes.

37. Hays, Reading Backwards, 14.

38. There is another way to interpret this verse that emphasizes the role of Moses as the first rejected prophet of all the OT prophets. This makes good sense of the context, which centers on the sufferings of Christ. Nevertheless, the emphasis on “all the Scriptures” still stands. For this, see Tannehill, Luke, 356.

39. Garland, Luke, 954.

40. Longman and Groves, foreword to After God’s Own Heart, ix–xi.

41. Duguid, Is Jesus in the Old Testament?, 10.

42. Moyise, Jesus and Scripture, 65.

43. Duguid, Is Jesus in the Old Testament?, 10.

44. Wright, The Case for Psalms, 33.

45. Black, Luke, 393.

46. Culpepper, Luke, 486.

47. What is more, it is not clear until they share a meal with the resurrected Lord. Scriptural understanding is not just about cognition but also relationship. David Garland is worth quoting at length: “The meal after Jesus’ exposition of the Scriptures on the road reveals that the proclamation of the Word is necessary for understanding, but it alone does not bring understanding. Understanding comes in the meal fellowship of the community and in welcoming and feeding strangers. Meal fellowship alone is insufficient. It needs to be accompanied by instruction related to Jesus” (Luke, 168–69).

48. Hays, Reading Backwards, 14.

49. “ . . . to you we have written that you must understand the book of Moses and the words of the prophets and of David . . .” (4QMMT 96). See Martínez, Dead Sea Scrolls Translated, 79.

50. Culpepper, Luke, 967. The prologue to Sirach has “The Law, the Prophets, and the others.”

51. For the Granville Sharp Rule for definite articles in Gk., see Black, Greek, 80.

52. Green, “Christ’s Shepherd,” 37.

53. Martínez, Dead Sea Scrolls Translated, 309.

54. Green, “Christ’s Shepherd,” 37.

55. Ibid. David Mitchell notes that the figures whose names head various psalms—David, Asaph, Heman, Jeduthun, and Moses—were regarded as prophets from biblical times; therefore, the editor of the Psalter would have regarded the psalms bearing their names as future-predictive (“Remember David,” 529).

56. Culpepper, Luke, 967.