Can Christians and Jews Share A Bible?

1 Peter 2:6

‘For it stands in scripture: “See, I am laying in Zion a stone, a cornerstone chosen and precious; and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame.”’

There are two scriptures that speak to our faith.  The first is what we have in the pew bibles of our churches, Genesis to Revelation, the Old Testament and the New Testament, sixty six books written over thousands of years by dozens of authors, covering a multitude of literary types, a grand mishmash.

Then there is the scripture in which Peter is standing.  It runs Genesis to Malachi, what we call the Old Testament, or, when we do not want to offend our Jewish brothers and sisters by implying they use something outdated, we call it the ‘Hebrew Bible’.  From what I have been told, Judaism refers to it as the Tanahk. 

Peter is reaching into the book of the prophet Isaiah, drawing together a couple of passages to connect to Jesus, building on the argument that has come before. 

This is a level of authority above and beyond the authority that Peter received from Jesus directly as his head disciple (look for ‘keys of the kingdom’ as a Google word search for more).  Peter is talking to other Jews and seeking to convince them of the reality of the authority of Jesus. 

So he goes where he knows they will go, into the Tanakh.  Now, we Christians can look at those passages and smile while we declare that we have found Jesus in the Old Testament.  A number of Jews who have come to the same conclusion (the largest group call themselves “Messianic Jews”, not adopting the title of ‘Christian’-which I cannot blame them for considering our bloody history), well, these Jews, I believe, will find Jesus in the pages of the Old Testament.  But the mainline Jews of Judaism, who have a very different relationship with Jesus, well, they are not so convinced.

What Peter has done is coopted ‘their’ Holy Book, although it was technically his as well, and overlaid Jesus in its interpretation.  And that is okay because Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, so there, want to argue with the Son of God?

What I have found is that a healthy respect for the preservation of the text of the Tanakh as a Jewish Holy Book, and not the Christian ‘prequel’ to the coming of Jesus, has a whole lot to teach us.  Theirs is the complexity of the religion of Jesus, lived through the eyes of countless generations before Jesus ever came on the scene.

What I have come to realize is that our faith can be ever more deepened if we take the theology of the Jewish faith, even when it is separate from our own, when we take it seriously, we cannot help but learn even more about the God who gave us both.