Amazingly, I get this question quite a lot from my students–either explicitly or implicitly–and I teach at a Christian seminary. Most students at least grudgingly or guiltily think that the Old Testament is worth passing attention; it is still in the church’s book after all. However, most need to be persuaded that they should give the OT equal attention as the NT.
There are many answers that one could give to the question, “Why should we study the Old Testament?” but Richard Bauckham provides one of the better ones:
We should never forget that the New Testament was never meant to be an independent collection of Christian Scriptures. The New Testament writers themselves assume the Old Testament as given, and the process of collecting and authorizing their writings to form the New Testament canon was understood by the church as a matter of supplementing the Old Testament, which already formed a canon of Scriptures recognised as authoritative for the Church. So it is not surprising that what is already well established in the Old Testament is not repeated in the New.1
In other words, if you only study the New Testament you will, at best, only gain a partial understanding of biblical perspectives. At most, you might misunderstand certain themes entirely.
- The Bible and Ecology: Rediscovering the Community of Creation (Sarum Theological Lectures; Waco: Baylor, 2010), 141. [back]
There is such a simple reason: it is lovely. I wrote elsewhere what our small study group discovered with just a little close reading of the text: people are really surprised at how lovely the text is – how beautifully shaped, how carefully crafted, and in both Psalms and Job, how the prayer emerges with such confidence even in the midst of trouble.
I find your students’ response fascinating. My tradition (Mennonite) splits with Protestantism on a number of significant issues–one of them being how we view scripture. There are many parts to it, but one is that we do not have a “flat” view, which is (or apparently was) common in Protestantism (assuming your school is Protestant). Our faith and how we approach the rest of scripture pivots around what we see and hear Yeshua doing in the gospels. Particularly the Sermon on the Mount, which could almost be called the Anabaptist Torah. Everything else outside of Yeshua’s life and witness is of secondary importance–if even that. I am usually the only one who is more interested in Hebrew Bible than New Testament in my community… and the only one pursuing a degree in it.
I love the Hebrew language. I love the Hebrew Bible. What a treasure-trove our texts are. What an ancient and refined repository spanning such vast stretches of human history, culture, religion, myth, folklore, mystery, and emotion. When I read my New Testament, I see a guide to following Yeshua. But when I read the Hebrew Bible, I see texts laid out before me that whisper to me the wisdom of a thousand sages, that struggle with all the issues that plague humanity, epic tales that rival modern fiction, ancient mysteries about people, places, events, or perspectives obscured by the sands of time, riddles about beginnings and endings, mysticism about what lay beyond us, explorations into what lay within, the presence and absence of the divine, love, death, horror, evil, tragedy, freedom, justice, peace. I find it difficult to understand why someone would NOT want to get into this.