One of the great gifts of biblical scholarship in the last century or so has been better knowledge of the Jewishness of the New Testament figures and authors. This movement has done much to demolish the obnoxious and at times dangerous view of Judaism as a backward religion that Christianity morally, if not outright sociologically, supersedes. For Gentiles two millennia later, this knowledge brings our New Testament to life, explaining much that is perplexing and highlighting details that don’t convey the same meanings to Gentile readers.

What is peculiar is that alongside this “re-Jewishing” of the New Testament has been a hands-off attitude toward the Old Testament for Christians. This undoubtedly has much to do with well-deserved shame and remorse over the appalling treatment of the Jews in the past century; Christians don’t want to be guilty of stealing “their” Scriptures on top of everything else. It somehow seems offensive to go looking for Jesus in the Old Testament. Of course, it is offensive. That is the root cause of the schism between the synagogue and the church. The synagogue has good reasons for its disagreement with the church over the interpretation of Israel’s Scriptures; it is neither irrational nor wicked to believe as they do. Christians betray their own lack of faith when they respond to Jewish unbelief with violence. But an unswerving commitment to nonviolence by Christians toward Jews does not in itself eliminate the disagreement between us.

More to the point, Christians cannot ignore the plain conviction of the New Testament that all things necessary to prepare the soul for Jesus the Christ can be found in the Old Testament. It is always useful to remember that when the New Testament mentions “the Scripture(s),” the term does not refer to itself but to the Old Testament—a title, by the way, that is bestowed by the book of Hebrews, not an anti-Semitic act of aggression. By my count these Scriptures are mentioned fifty-three times in the New Testament, in all the gospels and Acts and several of the epistles. It would be fair to say that New Testament expects and exhorts us to search for Jesus in those Old Testament Scriptures. Refusing to do so is, in some sense, refusing the gospel.

At this point the aforementioned danger in the Christian attitude toward Jews looms again. If the Old Testament contains all things necessary to recognize the Christ, then why don’t the Jews recognize him? The Jewish answer is: because Jesus wasn’t actually the Christ. A bad Christian answer is: because they are wicked and stubborn and deserve whatever they get. A better Christian answer is the one proposed by Paul the Jew in Romans 9-11: Jewish unbelief is the providence of God to facilitate the ingrafting of the Gentiles. God is faithful to His promises, including those to the Jews, and it is His business when and how the Jews come to believe in Jesus.

In the meanwhile, precisely to remember that we are ingrafted, Gentile Christians must obey the New Testament’s exhortations to find the Christ in the Old Testament. There are, of course, countless invocations of the Old Testament to explain a detail of Jesus’ story (the virgin birth, entering Jerusalem on a donkey, the soldiers gambling for his garments). The broader category, though, is the one of fulfillment, suggesting that all of the Old Testament points—however meanderingly—to the Messiah and his should-have-been-expected death on the cross.

For example, Jesus refuses to flee the cross since “all this has taken place that the Scriptures of the prophets might be fulfilled” (Matthew 26:56). Jesus counters the Sadducees’ doubt in the resurrection by saying: “Is this not the reason you are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God?” (Mark 12:24)—which means the fact of the resurrection is plainly to be found in the Scriptures. While walking along to Emmaus with the depressed disciples, the risen Jesus’ chosen task is not to reveal instantly his glorified body but rather, “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). Later he appears to the gathered disciples saying, “‘These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.’ Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures” (Luke 24:44-45). In John’s gospel, it takes more than three years, from the cleansing of the temple to the resurrection, before they finally get it: “When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believed the Scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken” (5:39). Indeed, for John the principle problem the disciples face on hearing the news of Jesus’ resurrection is that “as yet they did not understand the Scripture, that he must rise from the dead” (20:9). During the apostolic missions of Paul, the Jews in Berea listen with interest to his testimony, and test it by “examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so” (Acts 17:11). The great success of Apollos the preacher was that he could show “by the Scriptures that the Christ was Jesus” (Acts 18:28). Paul argues in Romans 1 and I Corinthians 15 that the gospel of Christ’s death and resurrection was “promised beforehand” in the Scriptures. Above all, the New Testament recommends searching the Old Testament in order to understand why the Messiah had to be crucified. That is stumbling block for Gentiles as much as for Jews.

Thus the New Testament demands a search for Jesus in the Old Testament and requires belief in the fulfillment of the Old Testament through Jesus’ New Testament in his blood. There are better and worse ways of carrying out these charges. Clearly the ways that lead to supercessionism and persecution of the Jews are wrong, both factually and morally. There can also be clumsy attempts to squeeze christological predictions out of the most unlikely verses, which probably indicate more fear than trust in the New Testament’s convictions. There can be blatant ignorance of the setting of the Old Testament or selective deletion of disadvantageous details.

Granted all that—and indeed, let’s put those errors behind us—to be a Christian is to believe that Jesus the Christ is also the subject of the Old Testament’s story, however veiled he may be at times. And if Jesus, then the whole Trinity. Done faithfully, this search for the Son of God, his Father, and their Spirit in the Old Testament should not cheapen or disrespect Israel’s Scriptures, but remind engrafted Gentiles all the more powerfully of their very deep roots in God’s chosen people.