Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Should christians see Jesus in every page of scripture? Should we find Jesus in places in the Bible where he's not explicitly mentioned? Should preachers always preach about Jesus and the gospel, no matter the text that they're preaching from? These are important questions. If the big picture of the Bible points us to Christ, how do we interpret the parts that don't seem to point us directly to him? Obviously, when Jesus or the gospel is explicit mentioned, we know that Christ should be a part of our interpretation. But when you're reading the Old Testament law in the book of deuteronomy, or you're reading about wisdom in proverbs, should our interpretation still be centered on Jesus? Should sermons on passages like these still be Christ centered? I'm Eric Rasmussen, and this is the concerning hymn podcast. And today I'm excited to have Bruce Henning on to discuss this fascinating and important topic. To try to answer this question, we dive into a few topics like how did the New Testament authors interpret the Old Testament scriptures? Is there a deeper or a fuller meaning to the Bible? And then how does all of this inform how we interpret or preach passages that don't explicitly talk about Jesus? Notice that the answers that Bruce gives to these questions are not as straightforward as you might think. Remember, the concerning him podcast is brought to you by Emmaus Bible College. For more information about Emmaus, please visit emmaus.edu. If you'd like to listen to other podcast episodes, read biblically centered articles, or listen to trustworthy biblical sermons, please check out concerninghim.com.
Bruce Henning, thank you for joining us today. Happy to have you on.
[00:01:41] Speaker B: Yeah, happy to be here, Eric.
[00:01:43] Speaker A: I'm excited. When you were here on campus, we never had the chance to get you on the podcast. It took you moving back to Michigan, and now we finally got you over video chat here. How are you doing today?
[00:01:54] Speaker B: I'm doing really well. I mean, I did a few podcasts with Drew when he was still running it, so we did before you. I did a few book studies, but nothing went the current concerning him stuff.
Yeah, I'm excited to talk with you.
[00:02:11] Speaker A: I'm excited to have you on. I'm excited to talk about this whole conversation of Bible interpretation, maybe related to preaching, some of how do we interpret the Bible with Christ in mind. Is Christ kind of hiding behind every passage of scripture? But before we get there, maybe we could just start with kind of your background for people that might not know you, your education, how the Lord's worked in your life, what you're doing now, all of that would be great.
[00:02:41] Speaker B: All of that. All right, well, I'll try to give you the cliff notes version. So my parents are both believers and so I was taught the gospel at an early age and accepted Christ after hearing a gospel message. And I've been interested in theology, in the Bible for a really long time and it was something of interest to me when I was a little kid and I continue to grow into that.
I went to school to get my degree in mathematics and then after that went into full time christian work and did some stuff in inner city Detroit for twelve years. And then after that, at that time while I was doing that, I also got my MDiv and my PhD at Moody Theological Seminary and then at Trinity College in Bristol, England. So after that I then taught Adamaeus Bible College and I was there for three and a half years and loved it there. And I'm so happy about the work that was there. But I'm originally from Michigan and a job opened up for me to teach at what is now cornerstone Theological Seminary, formerly Grand Rapids Theological Seminary. And so this position opened up and it was a chance for me to move back. So I'm happily teaching at seminary here, but I still have my foot in the door at Emmaus and do some adjunct work for their global campus.
[00:04:08] Speaker A: And what are you teaching specifically now?
[00:04:10] Speaker B: So I'm the assistant professor of New Testament, so anything that's New Testament gets thrown my way. So I do Greek, a couple years of that and then do some introductory courses, then also work in hermeneutics. I'm also advising thm theses.
[00:04:30] Speaker A: Sounds like a lot of fun. I'm sure you're.
[00:04:33] Speaker B: I love it.
[00:04:34] Speaker A: Well, we missed you here, but glad you're doing well.
Know you have a passion. You were just telling me before we started recording that you have a passion for this topic of biblical interpretation. You mentioned that it was somewhat of the content of your dissertation. Is that.
[00:04:55] Speaker B: Well, thinking back also to the way that I was raised, I was raised in a conservative brethren assembly and we did find Christ behind every rock and tree and he was everywhere in every Old Testament passage. So sometimes people bemoan christians not knowing the Old Testament. I felt like I got a pretty good training in the Old Testament actually, and a thorough lesson in typology growing up.
The second time I preached I was 18 years old and they wanted me to preach through Leviticus one through seven and discuss all the typology and the burnt offerings.
I've gone through that experientially.
I was interested in studying the Gospel of Matthew. And it doesn't take studying that very long before you find out that Matthew loves the Old Testament.
Hebrew scriptures also sometimes use the Greek, too, and yet he wasn't using it in the way that I was trained to use it. And he's well characterized as having a christocentric hermeneutic in which he does read the messiah into places where a lot of people scratch their heads and say, I can't quite follow your reasoning here, but what really interested me were times in which matthew picked up text from the Old Testament which had a lot of messianic potential, was used messianically in the second temple period, and yet he doesn't use it messianically. So kind of expanding that paradigm that he must be concerned about things besides simply the question of who is the messiah as he opens up scriptures. So that was the question that I was trying to wrestle with as I wrote my dissertation.
[00:06:45] Speaker A: And so I think we would agree, most christians would agree that in general, the main storyline of the Bible is the story that God sends his son, Jesus Christ as the messiah to save his.
So that's the big story. The overarching theme of scripture is christocentric, in a way.
[00:07:14] Speaker B: Yeah.
The question that you asked or the statement that you made does imply one meta narrative in scripture, which is a little bit tricky. Like, there is one theme, and for some books that works really well, books like maybe proverbs or ecclesiastes, job, you're like, well, that's not quite. That doesn't really fit into that meta narrative. So. Well.
Some have challenged the christocentric or like that descending of the Messiah is the main apex, wanting to a certain stead the arrival of the kingdom of.
I mean, but the kingdom of God and the Messiah are twin concepts. You got to have a king if you're going to have a kingdom, but it's just which one you're emphasizing.
[00:08:02] Speaker A: Yeah, that makes sense. But even still, even if it's the focus on the kingdom of God, you might still struggle with proverbs or ecclesiastes for sure, right? Yeah. I mean, you might be able to fit the law in there a little bit better, but, yeah, you would still struggle. So I guess my question is, if we could agree in general, that's kind of this big overarching concept. In mean.
The main question I want to ask you today is, should we then, in the little scriptures, are we looking for Christ? Or the mean, is that a part of our interpretation of scripture in things where it doesn't seem to be explicitly talking about the messiah, the gospel, how do we go about interpreting those?
[00:08:51] Speaker B: It's a fascinating question, isn't it? Yeah, you don't want your answer to be so specific that you end up making up rules which the apostles break.
Right. So I think a lot of us would say, well, no, you can't just read the messiah anywhere. And that seems fair enough, but there certainly are a lot of times where Matthew or Luke or Paul will read an Old Testament passage and you think, I can't read the messiah in there. And it turns out that's how they're using that.
So I'm a little bit Leery when people talk about one overriding master hermeneutic. This is the way it has to be done. And I don't think that jives with the evidence that we have, at least the evidence from the New Testament itself. Instead, we get a variety of ways that the New Testament is being used. So, yeah, I think sometimes the apostles do point us in the direction that, hey, there are these typological correspondences, and the messiah does come up in places that we wouldn't expect.
But obviously then there's the danger that that can be abused, and we need to find some way of capping our imagination.
And so that way we don't force the text to say things that either the original author never had in mind, nor can we make any sort of compelling case that even in some sort of a fuller sense, God, the Holy Spirit had that in mind either.
So I think we do need to be concerned about the meaning of scripture.
So it's not to say that all bets are off and we could read the messiah wherever we want to, but I think the New Testament example is pretty surprising in some ways that it reads the text messianically.
[00:10:49] Speaker A: So since it's surprising, which it is, how do we go about then, in the areas where the New Testament has not specifically interpreted it messianically or not interpreted messianically, how do we go through those and trust our hermeneutic then? You talk about being careful not to apply one general hermeneutic, but somebody sitting down reading their Bible. I mean, I think the classic one, at least I've heard a lot of people talk about, is David, and what are we to learn from David and Goliath? Is God going to help me beat all the giants in my life? Or is this talking about Christ conquering sin? Right.
How do we go about understanding these things?
[00:11:32] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a good question. In fact, I designed the biblical hermeneutics course for Emmaus and one of the first papers they have to do, because we go by genre, and when we go through the genre of narrative, I have them do David and Goliath and first Samuel 17, because I'm kind of fishing for whether or not they're going to take that approach and see how they're going to make an application and if it can be defended by the surrounding textual details. So, yeah, that's an interesting illustration of whether or not we can. I think, although the New Testament writers and other, not just the New Testament writers, but other scriptural writers will use scripture in surprising ways, that doesn't mean that they only use the scriptures in surprising ways.
And so there still is a lot to just narrative criticism or just let's, let's just read this as a story. And the story of first Samuel 17 is one stage in the process in which Saul is falling down and David is on the rise. And so it needs to be appreciated for that. So I don't think we need to have an either or type approach either.
But then your question was, if we are to follow the apostles lead and find the messiah in places where we might not expect him, how do we know that we're doing it right?
And this is an important question real quick. I said before about that first sermon of me preaching through the levitical offerings, I just read book after book and just racked my brain because I would read one person's proposal and I'd think, well, that makes a lot of sense, and read somebody else's proposal, and I'd think, well, that makes a lot of sense, but Sunday is coming and I've got to pick one path and go with it. How do I know that I've gotten it right?
So obviously, the more that we have some sort of New Testament precedent, the better we can scour the New Testament for scouring the New Testament for times when the apostles or the New Testament writers will themselves use it. And that kind of gives us a good clue there and then. I think it's kind of like we need to scale our certainty with the evidence.
So if there are other reasons, for example, that we should connect Jesus with David, then that increases the likelihood that the Holy Spirit has something in mind when messianically behind a text. Does that make.
And then, of course, there's the bounds of orthodoxy as, I mean, if you end up using this typology to say that some unorthodox heterodox statement, then we've gone too far.
[00:14:51] Speaker A: Yeah, you talk about the Holy Spirit's purpose. I mean, how do you view that idea of a deeper or fuller meaning where the Holy Spirit might intend something that the human author didn't necessarily intend? What are your thoughts on that?
[00:15:09] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a question that has plagued me for a long time, Eric.
I remember when I went through seminary, and I really just hated that was dead set against it. And I felt like I was beating my head against a brick wall, because as I kept studying things, I was like, it just seemed impossible that the original authors of scripture always had all of the meanings in mind.
So I think one of the quintessential examples of this is in Genesis two, where we're told about, therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined into his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.
And you can pull out all your tools in your hermeneutical toolbox to try to understand that passage.
But it's still tricky then to say, well, why is it that Paul in Ephesians five says, this is talking about the great mystery of Christ in the church, I think is an interesting example of a time where the author of Genesis, whom I take to be Moses, I can hardly think that he has Christ in the church in mind as he wrote those.
[00:16:35] Speaker A: So you're essentially saying Paul is kind of assuming, at least in there, that there was a deeper meaning, or at least in Paul's writing, he's making there become a deeper meaning to that.
Again, I'd have to agree with you.
Yet it does make interpretation more trick. I mean, if the only interpretation of a text, the only way to interpret a text is what did the author mean?
It's a lot more straightforward, right?
Historical, grammatical interpretation, and that's it. We're just looking for this literal. What did the author mean? When you throw in a deeper or a fuller meaning, and then obviously we could dive into a million things. Theological interpretation of scripture, interpreting scripture with the historic church, all those things. But when you throw in a deeper meaning, it gets tricky for the individual.
Right? Which is why I mentioned theological interpretation of scripture. But it gets tricky for the individual to then trust that the way in which they're assuming what this deeper meaning is, is accurate, if that makes sense, obviously within the bounds of orthodoxy. Not necessarily. I mean, we mentioned before we started recording like Aquinas in the fourfold sense of scripture, and Aquinas, with that he would talk about, and maybe this is getting too into the weeds here, but Aquinas would talk about how the literal sense is always the primary sense so that you cannot come up with something spiritualized that can't be found in the literal sense elsewhere in scripture. So you can't just use this to jump off and make scripture be about whatever you want to be about. But anyways, it does make it tricky to say, well, I think there's a fuller meaning to this text. Who am I to say there's a fuller meaning to this text?
I'll sit at home, read my Bible, or if I'm preparing to preach a sermon, how can I do that? With confidence? How can I interpret the scriptures with confidence?
[00:18:45] Speaker B: Yeah.
I think one really important idea in knowing that we've arrived for the right interpretation when we're navigating those difficulties is to keep in mind the whole scope of scripture.
And by knowing how the story plays out, we are then in a better position to read mean. And here I'm pulling from Richard Hayes's work, reading backwards and his echoes of scripture stuff that we know how the story ends, so that the unfolding of later revelation sends us back to earlier revelation, and we can then reread it. And it's only by knowing the end that we can say, aha, now I see what was meant all along, because it fits with what's going to happen later on. And I think that this really is so prominent in a lot of Paul, where he talks about mystery.
Not everyone agrees on this, but I take it that what he means by mystery language is something that was there in the Old Testament, but indiscernible.
[00:20:04] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:20:05] Speaker B: But is only now discernible because of the advent of Christ, that now we can go backwards and we could find things. So he'll talk about the gospel and the mystery of the church, for example, that it was evidenced by the prophets, but is only now revealed.
I'm thinking like in Romans three, or even at the end in Romans chapter 16, where he says that, but now the righteousness of God without the law is manifested, being witnessed by the law and the prophets. So it's been there all along, kind of like hiding in plain sight.
So the illustration that I like to use is when you watch these murder mysteries and all the data is there working up towards the very end. But it's only at the end when Herkil Poirot, or Charlote comb, or whoever it is, says, ahad, let me tie all these things together for you. And now you know who the villain is. And in the same way, because of the new Testament, we can go back and read the Old Testament. And aha, now I know where all of this has been heading, but we need the witness of the New Testament in order to really make sense of what was going on before.
[00:21:26] Speaker A: I think that makes a lot of sense. And so then, with that all in mind, and we've kind of got into the weeds a bit here, but I'm enjoying it.
All of these things have been on my mind a lot recently, so I'm glad to talk them through with you. But when then I sit down and open the book of proverbs, am I looking for Jesus in proverbs?
And then maybe even the next step that I'd love. If you address, if I'm preaching on wisdom from proverbs, do my sermons need to have Christ? Should it be a Christ centered sermon if proverbs from a plain reading of it does not appear to be a Christ centered book?
[00:22:13] Speaker B: Right. This is such an interesting question. I'm glad that you brought that one up, because our assembly right now is going through proverbs perfect. And so this is something that we're thinking about. And one of the concerns that I had as we were kind of planning it all, is I said, if we're going to have x amount of Sundays dedicated to proverbs, we've got to be careful that we don't go that many Sundays without preaching. Christ.
Again, referenced earlier, how I'm concerned about saying there's only one way to do it, and you talked before about Aquinas and that the literal sense, and that you can't ever go against that. And so how could a person say that we ought not preach the literal sense?
And there's obviously truth and important ideas that are there, and so you could never pull the preacher aside and say, listen, you only gave the literal sense of proverbs one. How dare you?
That's good. And that needs to be preached.
But proverbs is a trickier one. But I think there are ways in which we can think about big themes in proverbs and how that culminates in the person of Christ. There's so much in the New Testament, for example, about him being the wisdom of God that's there. I was also thinking about Hebrews has a really interesting use of proverbs. In chapter twelve, one of the key words in Hebrews is son. I mean, it's there from chapter one, and it goes all the way through, and about how Christ has the name of Son, which is the name that is better than the angels. No angel has ever been called a son, and that we are called sons. And that means we partake in the great destiny of humankind that was started for us and which Christ has paved the way for us. Does it mean it's a huge theological concept. And then he turns to the proverbs in chapter twelve, and he says, you've forgotten the exhortation which speaks to you as sons.
So when he says that, he's bringing in all this theology of sonship which is alien to proverbs, if your scope is only looking at proverbs, that's not really the theology of proverbs. This idea of sonship and ruling the world and inheriting the world to come, and the messiah being called the Son of God, I mean, that's not there in proverbs, but that's the way it's used in Hebrews. He says, you've forgotten the exhortation which speaks to you as sons, my son. Do not despise the chastening of the Lord or faint when you are rebuked by him and for whom the Lord loves, he disciplines and so on. So that would be a time in which we can read some.
I would want to call richer theological concepts into proverbs, but we're clearly following the New Testament's lead, which we're doing. So.
[00:25:08] Speaker A: So I guess all of know, I'd have to ask. You talk about not wanting to go x amount of Sundays in a row without preaching Christ. I think there's a lot of people out there that would say, if you preach a sermon and it doesn't have some aspect of the gospel, obviously, Spurgeon was the extreme right. He talked about every scripture. He makes a beeline for the gospel, and maybe not always great hermeneutics there, but if you go a sermon and you preach and you're preaching essentially what people might call morality, and then is the message that the people listening, taking away with is the key to life, is just to do better, to try harder if it's proverbs, is to be wiser, and that's the key to life. And rather than the gospel message is you need Christ, you can't live up to God's standard. And so if we're preaching in such a way that is not Christ centered, and again, this is. Maybe there's some application here. It's not straight interpretation, but that starts to get complicated. Do you know what I'm saying? And are you worried about preaching a sermon that doesn't include Christ and the message that sends, or how do you view all of that?
[00:26:36] Speaker B: I just think we need to know our audience, and I think there's a need for oversight that really has their finger on the pulse of what's going on with the assembly. And again, I'm loathe to prescribe one master method to rule them all.
Sometimes, yeah, I think it's fine to preach proverbs one and to talk about the value of wisdom.
I don't think that clearly, if I'm talking to somebody for the very first time and they say, you know, I've, I've always been interested in the Bible. I don't know anything about it. What's one thing I need to know from the Bible?
That's not the one lesson that I'm going to jump to there. Instead, I'm going to present the gospel to that individual.
But there might be times in which a person does need to hear the proverbs, and that's been the case. I did some work in youth ministry, leading a youth group, and eventually we had gone through major doctrines and theological concepts, and I felt just this burden that what we need to do is talk about the benefit of wisdom and carefully thinking about our lives. And so we went through a series on that and there really wasn't a lot of gospel application.
So, yeah, I think that's fine.
[00:28:06] Speaker A: This is really helpful. I'm thankful that you're sitting down and talking me through all this. And do you have any other topics that we kind of haven't hit on? Obviously, you've done a lot more writing and reading on this than I have. So you might be saying, eric, you're not asking me this question. You're skipping this thing. What am I missing here? Is there any.
[00:28:26] Speaker B: Oh, this is such a wonderful topic that there's so many ways that we could go with it. One thing that I have been studying and thinking about lately is the church's obligation and authority and responsibility to reproduce what we can call messianic hermeneutics or apostolic hermeneutics.
Sometimes people will study the way that Jesus uses the Old Testament or the apostles use the Old Testament, and they'll say, well, that was. I mean, they're apostles. I mean, it's Jesus. So I guess he can break whatever rules he wants to. But for us today, we've got our own set of rules, and we've got to follow those we can't follow. In fact, we ought not to follow their interpretational scheme.
This was Longanecker's biblical exegesis in the apostolic period came out, I don't know, 2030 years ago, maybe even longer than that. But he kind of famously argued that for that position.
[00:29:38] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:29:39] Speaker B: And then that received a decent amount of pushback. But one thing that particularly interests me, and you mentioned some of the writing that I was doing, I'm working on a book right now on the way in which Jesus not only is a teacher in his earthly ministry, but then he's training disciples as apprentices to continue to do the sort of thing he's doing in the way that he's doing it.
So he's training Peter, James, John to go out and preach as well. And of course, he's training them to be preachers like himself.
But the way that the synoptic gospels in particular read is that these are like, to a great extent, these are characters in which the audience is to put themselves.
So we are to imagine ourselves being Peter, James and John, following Jesus around. And so when Jesus tells Peter to pick up his cross, he's telling Bruce to pick up his cross.
So their commission is my commission in some very significant ways, and there are some ways in which that's not the case, but there are a lot of ways in which that is the case. And so one of the things that I'm working on right now is answering this question of, to what extent is the church's mission to continue the preaching mission of Jesus.
So, I mean, when he arrives on the scene, his message, in so many words, is to the Pharisees and to the Sadducees and to the Herodians and to the zealots and others, that you've got the scriptures all wrong.
You're reading them upside down. You don't understand what this is really about.
Let me rearrange them for you. So now you can understand God's message, but he didn't finish that task. With his death, the church picks up that mantle and carries it forward and continues like, no, no, this is the way the Old Testament needs to be oriented and understood.
[00:31:45] Speaker A: So what does that look like for the church to do that?
[00:31:50] Speaker B: Well, I think it involves all sorts of things.
I think it does mean that when we read the Old Testament, we read it with the whole of scripture in view, that we understand that this is all going somewhere without then. So we're respecting the original authorial intent and what just can be known, like about proverbs or about Genesis, just from that text itself. But we also see that it's just part of a much greater whole, and that since this is God's story, we have the authority to say, no, that's what this text means.
I know the whole picture, and, I mean, I know the meta narrative.
And if you're into philosophy and postmodernism and stuff, those are fighting words, right?
And a person would say, well, who gave you the authority to know the meta narrative? Who says, this is the meta narrative?
And you say, well, Jesus, he's the risen Lord, and he's the one who gave us this authority. And so that's how we know what this like with Paul, that's how we know what Genesis two means.
[00:33:05] Speaker A: Okay, this is all really great stuff.
It seems to me our conversation has kind of morphed, which I think is a good thing, because I think the question I was asking you is, should we be interpreting Christ in every scripture? And it's really come down to, well, how do we interpret every scripture and how do we understand the author's meaning? And I appreciate what you're saying is we don't want to be taking away from the author's intent. If the author intended this, then, I mean, that's right. Correct?
[00:33:42] Speaker B: Yeah, that's right. I mean, there's this idea in hermeneutics that used to get more pressed, but I don't see it being talked about as much. And that's the progress of revelation.
[00:33:52] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:33:54] Speaker B: People, for some reason, it seems to me like they've stopped talking about that. But the idea, the progress of revelation, is that God is slowly unfolding his plan. But at each stage of the unfolding, what God says is true.
So later revelation does not contradict earlier revelation.
So that means that literal sense is true. So we do need to affirm that. It doesn't mean that we have to stop there, but we do need to.
[00:34:20] Speaker A: Affirm those things later revelation doesn't contradict earlier revelation, but it might inform, correct, it might inform our understanding or will inform our understanding of that earlier revelation.
[00:34:31] Speaker B: And there might be some ideas.
[00:34:33] Speaker A: What's that?
So in that sense, then, if you're thinking about that, then in a lot of ways we can understand, or a lot of these texts that might not have specifically been talking about the Messiah might or probably should cause our minds to think about the messiah, to think about Christ.
It doesn't mean that he is the main focus or specifically what the author was talking about. But knowing the bigger picture, knowing that this is leading up to the cross, knowing that this is talking about salvation, I can read the laws in deuteronomy and have it think about. My thoughts can be on. If I'm reading in deuteronomy, it was it 28 talking about curses, how Christ takes the curse, right? Things like that, where that might not be the specific interpretation, but I know from later revelation. Is this correct? Am I understanding you correctly?
[00:35:30] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's absolutely correct.
That's what Paul does with it.
Paul specifically brings up deuteronomy 30 with the.
This word is not too hard for you? It's easy. It's in your mouth. And Paul says, ah, that's the word of faith which we preach. If you will confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead, you will be saved. So, yeah, I think Paul, for example, continues to read deuteronomy, and as he does so, he's thinking about what he knows about the messiah. I think that's especially when we think about someone like Paul. He's a fun case study because he never stops becoming a reader of, like, as great as his conversion was, in a sense, he wasn't, like, converting from, deconverting from Judaism. Like, I'm going to now go home and burn all my Torah scrolls. Right. He still sees them as authoritative. This is the word of God. And so he reads them, but the whole time he's reading them, he's also thinking about this great revelation he had on the Damascus road. And what does all this mean?
So, and I think we should be thinking about the same thing.
How could we set our knowledge of the gospel aside and be like, I'm going to pretend like I don't know that as I'm reading deuteronomy, but the challenge is to not force a text to say something that you really can't defend it. That's what it means.
[00:37:13] Speaker A: I think that makes a lot of sense.
I think we'll probably just for the sake of time and knowing that whatever diving board we jump off next is a pretty deep water to swim in. And I think there's a lot to go into from here, but I think you've done a great job just kind of giving us an appetizer for this whole conversation. I didn't ask you to prep for this, but do you have any resources you'd recommend if people are kind of interested in this whole topic?
[00:37:42] Speaker B: Oh, my. Eric, you should have prepared me for.
There's just. There's a lot that's written on the subject.
Beel and Carson's commentary on the New Testament use of the Old Testament is kind of a gold standard. It's kind of big. They just came out with a dictionary of the New Testament use of the Old Testament that just came out last.
Mean, I got it right here on my shelf. It's one of these big dictionaries. That's kind of a bit much.
I really appreciate Richard Hayes'work echoes of scriptures in the gospels, and I found that really very helpful. Beale and Carson also have a small little book, a handbook on the New Testament, use of the Old Testament. And if you're not looking for something like a giant Tom, their handbook is helpful as. Okay, or I really need to say this.
Like I said, I'm working on that book, and I'm working on something for Baylor University press that should come out, I don't know, the next year or two. So hang tight and you can buy my book. It'll be called the Messiah's Apprentices.
[00:38:56] Speaker A: Well, once it's published, we'll get you back on and we can talk specifically just about that book. All right, well, thanks for coming on, Bruce. Really enjoyed having you on, and I'm sure we'll do it again.
[00:39:08] Speaker B: All right, thanks, Eric.
[00:39:09] Speaker A: Thank you.
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