Why It Might Not Be a Good Idea to Find Jesus in the Old Testament

Is Jesus in the Old Testament? Is Jesus there at creation, chiming in or looking on with approval as the cosmos are spoken into being? Is Jesus’s face known to Israelites scattered throughout time—to Jacob or Joshua, to Shadrach, Meshach, or Abednego? Is Jesus, the Christian savior, to be found in every step of the redemption of Israel? My guess is no.

This answer runs the fairly serious risk of heresy, yet I think it is worth insisting upon. I do not think (though I may be wrong) that Jesus is active in the Old Testament.

Perhaps you, being a shrewd and knowledgable theologian, are thinking to yourself, “Ah, Daniel is priming me for a bait-and-switch; he knows that Jesus was not present throughout history, but the divine Son was!” This is fair, my wise reader—a distinction between Jesus and the Son of God must be made. Jesus was the carpenter’s son from Nazareth, but the Son is the second person of the Godhead. Jesus was born around 4 BC, but the Son has no beginning—he has been in eternal communion with the Father. Jesus is simply the human embodiment of the Son; he is God given flesh. Yet even with that clarification and if you were to sub in “the Son” in each of my original questions, I don’t think my answer changes. I don’t think we can find Jesus or the Son in the pages of the Old Testament.

And never one to live safely, I think I’ll push my luck even further: I’m inclined to think that neither Jesus nor the Trinity nor any Christian thing you can think of was present in the Old Testament. The idea that they are—the common expectation that the Christian faith has been around all along—is what I want to challenge. Too many times I’ve spoken with people regarding the wider canon of Scripture and been surprised by how fundamentally they assume they’ll find the New Testament in the Old—like saintly easter eggs scattered throughout.

Reading the Trinity into the Genesis creation account or seeing every poetic stanza of the Old Testament as a prophecy for Jesus may seem like harmless issues to you—and in some ways they are—but they’re important for us to wrestle with here. At the very least, correcting this misunderstanding fosters more intelligent reading of the Bible, but—more importantly—I think that this sort of faulty reading blinds us to the nature of Christianity. When we expect religion to operate one way, and someone rudely demonstrates how it’s another, it can hurt if we’re not prepared.

To Whom is God Speaking?

“Let us make man in our image.” Iconic words. Yet for all the weight of that simple sentence, there is an impressive amount of confusion regarding who God is talking to.

The first answer I remember hearing to explain the “us” in Genesis 1, was an appeal to the royal we. Just like Queen Elizabeth, the Pope, and me when I’m feeling fancy, God here speaks as a plurality even though there is no one else to respond. This possibility is given added credit by the fact that the word for “God” in Genesis 1 is Elohim, a common though slippery name for Yahweh in Hebrew. Elohim is noteworthy for being both a plural word that is often used as a singular title. Most often, however, when it is used as a singular name for God, it is accompanied with singular verbs—which it is not here in Genesis 1. This way of reading “us” and “our” in God’s speech is reasonable but unlikely given how the Bible normally proceeds.

The second answer I remember hearing is more at the heart of our concern here—and that is that God the Father is speaking to the other persons of the Trinity, the Son and Spirit. Again, that’s certainly possible, but consider for a moment how ridiculous it also is. Even if the Father did confer with the other members of the godhead at creation, why would that be included in this ancient Hebrew story? For the 1000 or more years between when Genesis was written and the doctrine of the Trinity was understood by Christians, how were Jews to read those cryptic words?  Did the author of Genesis hand over his completed copy to the Jewish community, explaining, you don’t know who God is talking to in this first chapter but you will someday—and then wink at them? Surely these words had meaning to their original audience.

Now the next two possibilities I want to discuss are far less common and certainly stranger than the previous two, but I think they ultimately make more sense for explaining the biblical language. The first of these options is that God is stating his will to the angels around him. As we see in other books of the Bible (think Isaiah and Ezekiel), Yahweh keeps a sort of “divine council,” and it is possible that the heavenly creatures surrounding the throne predate creation and are actively engaged in this momentous work. Some are skeptical of this answer for two reasons: it suggests that God included the angels in the divine work of creation (problematic for multiple reasons), and it doesn’t seem to align with the vision we get of the divine council in other places in Genesis and the rest of the Old Testament.

Our final option is similar but a little more radical: perhaps God is talking with other gods. It may be that the creator God is conferring with other divine beings in his divine council. This is not to say that these beings are just as powerful as Yahweh (or even that they’re real). Rather it is possible that the writer of this creation account has in mind a council of divine beings—the hosts of heaven—that simply pay respect to the will of the supreme God, regardless of whether such a group really exists (and I imagine we can agree that they don’t).

These latter possibilities for understanding Genesis lead us into a wider discussion of ancient Israelite religion and the concept of henotheism. You’ve probably heard of monotheism, and henotheism is a related topic. Henotheism refers to the ancient belief that there were, in fact, many gods, but that only one of them was truly powerful and worth worshipping—in our case, Yahweh. There are lots of places throughout Scripture that suggest that the Israelites were originally henotheists; they believed that other gods existed but that their god was the best god. Over time, however, this belief faded, and was replaced with monotheism, the belief that there is only one god. The concept of a divine council sticks around, but instead of other deities, we get other heavenly creatures (like angels), powerful but nonetheless creaturely.

Is that what’s being referenced here? I’m not sure, but I think so. Maybe you prefer the angelic option or even the royal we, but for many of us, this is not the only place we like to see Christianity in the Old Testament—so let’s keep moving.

Where Were the Other Two?

Well, actually, let’s not go too far. In fact, if we look earlier in this same chapter, we see something else that looks a little peculiar: is that the Holy Spirit in verse 2?

The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

This does not look good for the case I’m making, but before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s take a moment to consider the development of the doctrine of the Trinity.

It is no secret that the word “trinity” appears nowhere in the Bible. But rather than label it unbiblical, most orthodox Christians would explain that it is a term for recognizing what we see in the Bible. And we should probably be more specific: it is a term for recognizing what we see in the New Testament. There is a reason that the term Trinity did not evolve earlier—it is born out of a need to describe the uniquely Christian perspective of the divine. It is not until Jesus of Nazareth comes on the scene, accepting the title “Son” of God and speaking of our heavenly “Father,” that the early Christians start to think there is more to the God we call Yahweh. But they don’t stop at attributing divinity to Jesus Christ—they see also a third party in the divine dance: the Spirit.

To be clear, this is new. This “Holy Spirit” is something separate, like Jesus the Son. It is at once the same as the God we’ve always known but somehow distinct—a new person of God.

In the beginning, this recognition is slower and less certain that the acknowledgment that there is both a Father and a Son in the godhead. But the signs are there. As Stanley Grenz describes, 

The New Testament gives evidence to a complex understanding of the Holy Spirit. The writers speak of the Spirit in personal terms. They employ masculine pronouns for what in the Greek language is actually a neuter term. They attribute to the Spirit aspects of personality, such as intellect, will, and emotion (e.g., 1 Cor. 2:10; 12:11; Rom. 8:26-27). In addition to seeing the Spirit as personal, the early believers also knew him to be divine. Their tendency to ascribe deity to the Spirit is evident in Peter’s declaration to Ananias and Sapphira that in lying to the Holy Spirit they had lied to God (Acts 5:3, 4).

This marks a subtle but pivotal departure from the Spirit of the Old Testament (the Spirit seen in Genesis 1:2). In the Hebrew Scriptures, the Spirit of God is seen as an extension of the one God—not an independent being. It would be similar to me saying, “My spirit is at rest…” I’m not referring to a separate entity but a circuitous way of referring to myself and my feelings. In the New Testament, however, the writers (probably building on Jesus’s own language) begin to refer to the Spirit as a person, as another individual.

Just as people often mistakingly spy the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament, so they frequently see Jesus make appearances. These are sometimes described as “theophanies,” and the most common examples include the stranger who appears to Abraham by the terebinth trees of Mamre, the man who wrestles with Jacob through the night, the commander of the Lord’s army in the Book of Joshua, and the fourth being in the fiery furnace, whose appearance was like the “Son of God” (KJV).

The nature of these visitations is indeed mysterious. Is it wrong to interpret them as the second person of the trinity who reveals God? Maybe not—we’ll talk about that more below. But as we’ve seen, it certainly isn’t Jesus of Nazareth, a human born centuries later. I’m not sure it’s even appropriate to speak of the Son here rather than a novel manifestation of the one God.

Is It Always About Jesus?

When John of Damascus, Church Father of the late seventh century, explains that in Moses dipping his staff into the Red Sea that brought about the salvation of Israel, we are to read the implanting of the cross into the hill of Golgotha that brought about the salvation of the world, I imagine most of us are a little skeptical. 

And rightfully so. The dividing of the Red Sea is a grand event, but it is not an allegory for the life of Christ. It is meant to be read as an historical event, about a man and a wooden rod and a body of water. We take it vastly out of context if we read it otherwise. And yet, we do this all the time with other passages of the Old Testament.

“…he shall bruise your head, / and you shall bruise his heel.”

Is this not a clear prophecy of Christ’s triumph over Satan?

“…and in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because you have obeyed my voice.”

Who would fulfill this promise to Abraham but Jesus?

“But he was pierced for our transgressions; / he was crushed for our iniquities; / upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, / and with his wounds we are healed.”

What is this but a statement of substitutionary atonement doctrine?

You’re probably expecting this, but… none of those have in mind Jesus Christ. In fact, it’s alarmingly hard to find any Old Testament passage that has in mind—even generally speaking—the Messiah that is to come. When you broaden your gaze a little more, the context of these passages (and countless others) has a much more immediate focus: the history and plight of Israel.

The same goes for other Christian doctrines, not just expectations of Christ. We like to look to Ezekiel 28’s cherub cast “as a profane thing from the mountain of God” as a history of the devil’s fall from grace. Yet, a more thorough reading of the major prophet (or just checking the chapter headings) would inform most readers that we’re dealing with flowery language to describe one of Israel’s enemies, the King of Tyre.

Now hopefully some of these examples have raised some red flags with you. The Isaiah 53 reference, in particular, is of critical importance to most Christians, and they will quickly point to the Apostle Philip and the Ethiopian Eunuch in Acts 8 (or as many as six other references to the chapter found in the New Testament). There. In the Bible. Philip explains that this is about Jesus. All of it.

You’re right; I can’t argue with that. We see it time and time again in the New Testament, especially by Paul. We see the writers and developers of the Christian faith take content from the Jewish Scriptures—words and verses seemingly referring to something ancient and irrelevant—and announce authoritatively that it speaks of the gospel of Jesus. We see, in essence, the writers baptize the words of the Old Testament.

Paul does this most blatantly in Acts 17, “…even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are indeed his offspring.’” Paul takes something outside of the faith and gives it relevance. He baptizes it.

Christianity has an accepted history of baptizing. We take something outside—something worldly—and we make it our own. We make it holy. Most notably, we’ve done this with pagan holidays. We absorbed a pagan spring festival into our celebration of the risen Lord. We took the winter solstice and made into Christmas. We sanctify the world by baptizing it. 

---

I’m the heretic here, but I’m willing to push out from the shore. I see the value in baptizing the Old Testament, to making it Christian, but I think we can only do this once it’s ingrained in us that this is not what it was originally about. The scandal of Paul and the Gospel was that they seized something that already had meaning and gave it a new meaning. We’re not doing that if we teach children from their earliest days that Isaiah always had Jesus in mind.

I’ve used the analogy before, but many Christians approach the faith like a bad Star Wars fan. Many fans of the sci-fi franchise have a history of neglecting the world in which their favorite films were made and instead opt for internal consistency across all of the movies. To anyone outside of this fandom, it’s easy to recognize that the story shifted and transformed as it was developed.

What I hope for is that we will recognize this transformation in our own story. If we convince ourselves that our narrative has always been static, we lie to ourselves and—what’s maybe worse—we rob ourselves of its richness. There is a history there, and we look back only with gladdened eyes to know the full story.