Journal: Journal of the Institute of Reformed Baptist Studies
Volume: JIRBS 07:1 (NA 2020)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous

JIRBS 7 (2020) p. 111

Book Reviews

Canon, Covenant and Christology:
Rethinking Jesus and the Scriptures of Israel,
New Studies in Biblical Theology
Matthew Barrett
(InterVarsity Press, 2020, 387pp.),
reviewed by Craig A. Carter*

^* Craig A. Carter, is Professor of Theology, Tyndale University and author of Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Baker Academic, 2021).

The essential thesis of this book is that it is impossible to take seriously Jesus’ claims that he fulfills the Hebrew Scriptures unless one supposes that he consciously and with full comprehension of the implications believed the Scriptures to be the inspired, inerrant, and authoritative word of God.

If this is true, and if Jesus is Lord, then a high view of biblical inspiration and authority rests not on a few proof texts from the pastoral epistles but on the NT witness as a whole. It also means that acknowledging the Lordship of Christ logically entails having a high view of Scripture. The two are so intertwined that all attempts to separate them apart ultimately fail. It cannot be said that Jesus and the early church “adopted” the Hebrew Scriptures because that presumes that a time existed when Jesus and the early church existed and then decided to adopt the Hebrew Scriptures. There was no such time; it is more accurate to say that “the Scriptures give birth to Jesus himself and are the genesis of his church” (197). From the perspective of faith, the Hebrew Scriptures (i.e., OT) are basic to everything. Barrett says, “It was not a matter of reading Jesus back into the Old Testament: the Old Testament itself was the seed that blossomed into its own fulfillment with the coming of the messianic king” (201). The unity of the Bible, therefore, is rooted in the fit between what was promised and predicted in the OT and the fulfillment of those promises and predictions in the NT.

JIRBS 7 (2020) p. 112

Barrett also argues that the emergence of the church out of Judaism occurred because of a disagreement over Jesus’ messianic identity:

The great divide between Jews who rejected Jesus and Jews who followed him comes down to this: the former did not believe Jesus was the fulfillment of the scriptures of Israel, but the latter did and based everything on that foundational belief. (200)

This perspective is crucial because it undermines the “Jewish versus Christian” frame that is the basis for anti-Semitism. It shows that belief in Jesus divided Jews from one another and Gentiles joined the debate on both sides. Faith in Jesus as Messiah is more basic than one’s Jewish or Gentile ethnicity. Christian believers are more fundamenta...