According to the Scriptures

The OT comprises approximately 75% of the text of the Christian Bible. Yet, some believers are so disturbed by its content or puzzled by its relevance, that they either reduce it to children’s stories or dismiss it altogether as of interest only to historians.

In this study Roy Ginn sets out to tackle one of the problems. This concerns passages in the New Testament where we are told that things happened ‘according to the scriptures’, or to ‘fulfil the scriptures’, or that certain scriptures speak directly about the Lord Jesus. The scriptures concerned are the Hebrew Scriptures, the Christian Old Testament, and the difficulty is that often the supposed link turns out to be obscure or the context seems strangely irrelevant.

In order to understand what is going on we need to appreciate how Jewish scholars read and interpret their scriptures, and this booklet gives us a clear and concise introduction to that ‘art’. Moving stepwise from the reasons for believing the Jews have some advantage in this, we are taken through the PaRDeS system, and given examples of how each of the four levels is put into practice. Although the method is not always straightforward or easy to apply, after working our way through this publication, we can begin to understand why and how the Apostle Paul could confidently say that ‘Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and that He was buried and that He rose again, according to the Scriptures.’