Excerpt From The Interview

“I think many ordinary Christians reading their Bibles have stumbled across passages where the New Testament is clearly quoting the Old. You look up the old and it provides context. Then you scratch your head and say, how does that work? How did we get from point A to point B? I suspect that what many of us do in that situation is say, well, I don’t know but my pastor does. I’ll have to ask him someday. If it’s not the pastor, it’s the person who taught us at seminary. I’m sure he’s got a way of answering this. 

So we satisfy ourselves with locked conduits. We don’t know what to do. Some instances where the New Testament quotes the Old are very straightforward. And then there are others where it’s hard to see what the connection is at all. Many Christians have had difficulty along those lines over the years. I remember reading John Broadus’s commentary on Matthew many years ago.

One of the interesting things about that commentary is that whenever he comes across a passage where Matthew quotes the Old Testament and Broadus doesn’t understand what’s going on, he would simply say, I don’t know what’s going on here. But this is the word of God. We hold that it’s true. And someday perhaps I’ll understand it, which is at least a humble note approaching the whole thing. But nevertheless, I am convinced that we are supposed to understand more than we sometimes do.”

About D.A. Carson

Don Carson is emeritus professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, and cofounder and theologian-at-large of The Gospel Coalition. He has edited and authored numerous books. He and his wife, Joy, have two children.

Links Mentioned

Dictionary of the New Testament Use of the Old Testament by D.A. Carson

Watch the highlights and full version of this interview on our Youtube channel.

For more inContext interviews, click here.