How Did Jesus Interpret the Old Testament?

Question 1188.

If we want a model for biblical interpretation, we could have no better teacher than the Lord Jesus himself. He was raised on the Hebrew Scriptures, he quoted them constantly, and he settled every controversy of his earthly ministry by appeal to them. The way he handled the text is not one option among several but the pattern the church is meant to follow.

Jesus treated the Old Testament as the true and authoritative word of God, took its history as real history, and read the whole of it as pointing forward to himself. Those three convictions ran through everything he said about the Scriptures, and they still shape faithful biblical interpretation today.

He Treated Scripture as the Authoritative Word of God

For Jesus, Scripture settled the matter. When the devil tempted him in the wilderness he answered each assault with it is written, and the written word ended the argument. When his opponents pressed him he replied that Scripture cannot be broken, an astonishing claim for its unbreakable authority down to the smallest detail.

He even rested an argument on the tense of a single verb and on one word, showing that he held every part of the text to be the reliable speech of God. He never set himself above Scripture or corrected it. When he said, you have heard that it was said, but I say to you, he was not overturning the law of Moses but stripping away the false additions of the religious teachers and pressing home the true depth of God’s command.

He also affirmed the whole shape of the Hebrew canon as it stood in his day, speaking of the blood of the prophets from Abel to Zechariah as spanning the entire scope of Old Testament history from Genesis to Chronicles, the first and last books in the traditional Hebrew ordering. This was not a passing remark. It was Jesus placing his own stamp of approval on the very collection of books the church still receives as the Old Testament.

He Practised Biblical interpretation as Real History

Jesus read the Old Testament narratives as records of things that actually happened. He spoke of Adam and Eve as a real couple made male and female at the beginning, of Abel as a real man whose blood was shed, of Noah and the flood that swept them all away, of Lot and the destruction of Sodom, of Moses and the burning bush, and of Jonah and the great fish.

He did not treat these as edifying legends but as the dealings of God in history, and he based real teaching on their reality. This matters because some today wish to keep the spiritual lessons of these accounts while letting go of the events themselves. Jesus did no such thing. For him the sign of Jonah pointed to his own three days in the heart of the earth precisely because Jonah really spent three days in the fish. History and meaning stood together, and neither survives without the other.

This has practical weight for how we teach the Old Testament to our own congregations and families. If we present Noah, Jonah or the exodus as pious stories with a moral but no real history behind them, we are not following the pattern Jesus set. He staked serious theological arguments, including his own resurrection, on the plain historicity of these accounts, and a church that quietly lets go of that historicity while keeping the moral lessons has drifted from the teacher it claims to follow.

He Read the Whole Old Testament as Pointing to Himself

On the road to Emmaus, beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, Jesus interpreted to two bewildered disciples the things concerning himself in all the Scriptures. This is the heart of Christ centred biblical interpretation, the conviction that the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms all converge on one figure and one redemptive plan.

He told the religious leaders of his day that they searched the Scriptures because they thought that in them they had eternal life, and it is these that bear witness about me. He did not treat the Old Testament as a separate revelation running alongside himself but as a book written, ultimately, about him.

This is why the New Testament writers, following their Lord’s own example, so readily find Jesus in the sacrifices of Leviticus, the kingship of David, the suffering servant of Isaiah and the priesthood of Melchizedek. They learned this way of reading from Jesus himself, on the road, at the table, and in the days between the resurrection and the ascension when he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures.

He Distinguished the Text from Human Tradition

Alongside his high view of the written word, Jesus was sharply critical of the human tradition layered on top of it. He rebuked the Pharisees for making the commandment of God void by their tradition, honouring God with their lips while their hearts were far from him. This distinction matters for us. A high view of Scripture is not the same thing as a high view of every inherited interpretation of Scripture.

Faithful biblical interpretation has always required going back to the text itself rather than resting content with what previous generations assumed it meant, while still receiving with gratitude the labour of those who studied it before us.

He Used the Grammar and Detail of the Text

Jesus paid close attention to the actual wording of Scripture rather than a loose paraphrase of its general drift. Debating the resurrection with the Sadducees, he pointed to God’s self description to Moses in the burning bush, I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob, and drew out that God is not the God of the dead but of the living, an argument that depends entirely on the present tense of a single verb spoken centuries earlier.

This kind of careful reading models something important for anyone doing serious biblical interpretation today. Doctrine is not built on impressions or on isolated proof texts pulled loose from their setting, but on patient attention to what the text actually says, in its own grammar, before we ask what it means for us.

The same discipline shows up when Jesus corrects a popular misunderstanding of the sixth commandment, tracing the prohibition on murder back to the anger and contempt that produce it, so that the letter of the law and its full moral weight are held together rather than separated. Good biblical interpretation refuses to settle for the surface of a command when the text itself points deeper.

How This Shapes Faithful Interpretation Today

If Jesus is our pattern, then biblical interpretation in the church should hold Scripture as fully authoritative, read its history as real, and expect the whole of it to point toward Christ. It should also distinguish, as he did, between the text itself and the traditions that have grown up around it, however venerable those traditions may be.

This is not a licence for novelty. Jesus never invented a new meaning out of thin air. He drew out what was genuinely there, often hidden in plain sight until he opened the disciples’ minds to understand the Scriptures. Sound interpretation today works the same way, patient, humble, and always willing to be corrected by the text rather than imposing a system upon it.

I find this a steadying thought whenever a fashionable new reading of an old passage starts making the rounds. If a proposed interpretation would have been foreign to Jesus’s own approach to Scripture, treating the text as unreliable, or its history as negotiable, or its centre as anything other than himself, then whatever else it may be, it is not biblical interpretation in the pattern he taught us.

So, now what?

The next time you open the Old Testament and wonder what to make of a strange law, a violent conquest narrative, or a puzzling prophecy, ask how Jesus would have read it. He did not flinch from the hard parts, and he did not treat any portion of Scripture as beneath his attention.

Try reading through one of the Gospels and noting every time Jesus quotes or alludes to the Old Testament. You will be surprised how constantly he does it, and how naturally biblical interpretation flowed into his teaching, his arguments and even his prayers on the cross.

You might find my study on how the canon of Scripture was formed a helpful companion piece, along with my article on the Synoptic Problem for more on how the Gospel writers themselves handled their sources.

Above all, let the pattern encourage rather than intimidate you. Jesus did not hand this way of reading Scripture to scholars alone. He opened the minds of ordinary fishermen and tax collectors to understand it, and he does the same for ordinary readers today who come to the text expecting to meet him there.

“And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.”

Luke 24:27, ESV