Introduction

INTRODUCTION

As far as Jesus and the New Testament writers were concerned, the Jewish Scriptures that Christians call the “Old Testament” were the Scriptures. In saying that, I cut corners a bit, as the New Testament never gives us a list of these Scriptures, but the body of writings that the Jewish people accept is as near as we can get to identifying the collection that Jesus and the New Testament writers would have worked with. The church also came to accept some extra books, the “Apocrypha” or “deuterocanonical writings,” but for the purposes of this series, which seeks to expound the “Old Testament for Everyone,” by the Old Testament we mean the Scriptures accepted by the Jewish community...