Old & New Testaments

Maybe if you have two cars, you likely have an old one and a new one. Or maybe you got rid of the old one? If you have a new house, most people had to sell the old one and it’s now gone out of your lives. No need to mow the lawns around there any more.

Does the ‘Old Testament’ mean that it’s now out of date? Does the ‘New Testament’ replace it and make it irrelevant? If you were a religious Jew, what would you think of your Hebrew scriptures being called ‘old’?

And what does ‘testament’ mean anyway? How else would you normally use that word in a sentence? Well, you wouldn’t, unless maybe you were a lawyer or the executor of a will. What other word could we use? Maybe ‘covenant’ or ‘agreement’ or ‘contract’ or something else entirely? Of course, there’s no label in the Hebrew or Greek that’s translated ‘Old Testament’ and ‘New Testament’. Someone made up those terms hundreds of years ago and we’ve been stuck with them since.

Why hasn’t anyone updated the terminology? The answer is simple: we don’t want the retail department sending all those Bibles back because they won’t sell. Yes, it’s too hard to change. Well, not for the Open English Translation—we’re aiming to jump-start improvements in Bible translation traditions for the 21^st century.

We don’t have a final decision yet, but we’re leaning towards ‘The Hebrew scriptures’—not just referring to the Hebrew language that they’re mostly translated from, but also meaning the Hebrew (now Jewish) people.

For the last quarter of your Bible, we’re leaning towards ‘The Messianic update’. Remember that most or all of the ‘New Testament’ was also written by Jews and is mostly about Jewish people like Yeshua (Jesus/Yaysous), Shaul (Saul/Paul), Yacob (Jacob/James), Miriyam (Mary/Maria), etc. The Greek word translated ‘Christ’ is the equivalent of the Hebrew ‘messiah’, so why add a separate Greek word when there’s already a good Hebrew word that works fine? And it’s an update because it refers to the fulfillment of many prophecies from ‘The Hebrew Scriptures’ and not expected to stand alone.

Oh, that’ll take so long to get used to! If you say that, then possibly you haven’t spent much time trying to explain the scriptures to non-churched people on the street or in the marketplace or office? Give it a go…

Robert Hunt, 1 September 2023