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Like many others who make their living as theological educators, I do a fair amount of teaching in local church settings. It is often and increasingly the case that the majority, if not the entirety, of the audiences at these events are senior citizens, with most more than a bit beyond the fifty-five-year age minimum to get cheaper coffee at McDonald’s. Since I myself have school-age children at home, I understand and can sympathize with the fact that parents with children are stretched very thin, and if they aren’t altogether absent from church that day due to soccer practice, cheerleading, or a debate team competition, they are perhaps assisting in children’s worship, Sunday school, teen activities, or the like. While I have no doubt that this may very well be the case, the fact that so many of the regulars at the church events where I speak are septuagenarians, if not octogenarians or nonagenarians, is of great significance for the diagnosis that I offer here because one of the primary signs of language death is when only the elderly speak it.
Now let me be clear: I’m very thankful for the opportunities I get to teach, and I’m very thankful for any who will listen, whatever their age. Moreover, the elderly who so frequently predominate at my talks are, to borrow a churchy term, “the saints”—and that means that even if they aren’t particularly holy, they’ve at least been around the church barn a few times. The odds are that they are fairly faithful people, on various fronts, that they know their Bibles decently well, and, although they may not like what’s happening in the contemporary service, they’ll almost certainly be back next Sunday along with their tithe envelopes. Then too there is the additional fact that the saints, especially the quite elderly ones, always seem happy to have someone—especially someone (relatively) younger—come and spend some time talking to them.
But as I was teaching in a church in metropolitan Atlanta a summer or two ago, something shocking took place that I had never experienced before. I admit to being momentarily dumbfounded when it happened, but the full significance of what transpired didn’t hit me until later. I was teaching a two-week series on biblical poetry and was introducing the topic by pointing out the use of poetry at certain key junctures in the Bible. I had mentioned several examples from the Old Testament and had just turned to the New Testament. I began with the role of prophetic poetry at the start of Jesus’s ministry (the citation from Isa. 40:3; Mal. 3:1; and Exod. 23:20 in Mark 1:2) and then moved to the Passion Narratives, at which point I quoted Jesus’s well-known “cry of dereliction” from the cross: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”—in the King James Version, no less (to tap the recall of the elderly audience). Given what I had just said, I figured the class was following me and that it was relatively clear that this saying from the cross was (a) poetic and (b) a citation from the Old Testament. So I asked the class of hoary heads what Jesus was quoting. Where, I questioned, did his words come from?
Total silence.
No one knew. Or if they did know, they certainly weren’t telling. But the pause was long enough and the silence deafening enough to make it clear to me that this wasn’t a case of being tight-lipped. It was a case of not knowing. One sweet-faced, white-haired woman finally shook her head, confirming my suspicion. No, they did not know the answer to my question. Not even this elderly group of “saints” knew that Jesus’s cry was a direct quotation of Psalm 22.
That’s when I realized, in a way that I had never realized before, that the Old Testament was dying.
The Diagnosis, in Brief, with a Caveat
That, in brief, is my claim—or to employ a medical metaphor, my diagnosis: the Old Testament is dying. Much needs to be said about this claim to explain it, let alone establish it, but for now let me gloss it further by stating my firm belief that for many contemporary Christians, at least in North America,1 the Old Testament has ceased to function in healthy ways in their lives as sacred, authoritative, canonical literature. These individuals—or in some cases, groups of individuals (even entire churches)2—do not regard the Old Testament in the same way (or as highly) as the New Testament, do not understand the Old Testament, would prefer to do without the Old Testament, and for all practical purposes do exactly that by means of their neglect and ignorance of it, whether in private devotion or public worship or both. All of that is what I mean by the shorthand claim “The Old Testament is dying.” Indeed, in many circles, the claim “The Old Testament is dying,” as stark as it is, is not nearly stark enough. “The Old Testament is dead” is far more accurate.
Before going further, I want to clarify what I do and do not mean by this claim that the Old Testament is dying if not already dead. First and foremost, I do not intend any connections with the earlier (in)famous “God Is Dead” controversy of the 1960s.3 Given the not-so-serendipitous convergence of the language, I admit to having entertained a different title for the present book by rephrasing it altogether as a question, “Is the Old Testament Dying?” While I have opted for the indicative formulation, it is nevertheless true that what follows is an essay, not a final or definitive statement, and it is the nature of all such claims to be contestable.4 Some will no doubt challenge what I present here, and that is well and good. I would be beyond delighted to be proven wrong—indeed, to borrow words from Bill McKibben,5 it is my prayer to be proven wrong, but thus far my prayers have gone unanswered, and so I remain convinced that my diagnosis is correct. I have based my assessment on the available data at hand and my interpretation of those data, but I admit that “the parties” involved in my study—the Old Testament and its life within contemporary Christianity—are very large subjects, and so any one person’s assessment cannot help but be limited, perspectival, and to some degree anecdotal.6
Let me be clear: I have no doubt that the Old Testament is read, at least occasionally, by many Christians and in many churches, but part of my larger point—not to mention the larger problem—is not simply if the Old Testament is present (somehow), read (intermittently), or preached from (sporadically), but how it is present, read, preached from, and so on and so forth. The Old Testament was also present in Nazi Germany, at least for a while, but how?—which is to ask, To what end?7
Further, even at the points where I do make firm claims, where I do mean to describe the terminal state of the Old Testament among certain people or groups, my argument should not be confused with an affirmative or prescriptive statement on my part. As will be obvious in what follows, the death of the Old Testament is not something I endorse. Far from it! Instead, it constitutes my greatest sadness.
The Old Testament Is (Like) a Language
My diagnosis that the Old Testament is dying, if not already dead, depends on a linguistic analogy. The analogy is that the Old Testament is a language or very much like a language; hence, like other languages, it can die out relatively quickly, even definitively, never to return in living form. But what does it mean to say that the Old Testament is a language or very much like one? I begin with what I do not mean by this statement.
First, I do not mean to discuss the language of the Old Testament itself, which, in truth, is not one language but several. When studying the Old Testament “in the original,” one must actually reckon with many ancient languages: Classical (or Biblical) Hebrew primarily, of course, but also Biblical Aramaic for those bits of Genesis, Jeremiah, and especially Daniel and Ezra that exist in that language. Next in importance, though very important in and of itself, is the Greek of the Septuagint (LXX), which in turn is a complex entity comprising “one” (yet again, one out of many) of the most important textual witnesses to the Old Testament, together with those apocryphal or deuterocanonical books that survive exclusively or primarily in that language.8 This listing doesn’t yet include the many other languages that have preserved important versions of the Old Testament—the Latin Vulgate, for instance, or the Syriac Peshitta, both of which contain additional deuterocanonical material—nor does it include certain languages that have proved to be particularly useful for the study of the Old Testament in terms of understanding low-frequency words, analyzing poetry, or providing crucial historical and cultural contexts for the biblical texts. One thinks here of the ancient Near Eastern languages, especially of Hebrew’s close Northwest Semitic cousin, Ugaritic, but also and especially the massive gold mine that is Akkadian in its various dialects and periods.
All of these languages are important, and the most competent biblical scholars work with several at a time, but it should be quickly admitted that a thorough knowledge of even just one, even Biblical Hebrew itself, while of great help, does not (re)solve every problem one encounters in the Old Testament. Part of why that is the case is precisely due to the nature of these languages and how they differ from our own.9 Walter Brueggemann has this to say about Biblical Hebrew specifically:
Of all that could be said of this script [the Bible], my initial point is a simple but crucial one. It is in Hebrew, not Latin. I do not say that to suggest that one cannot read it without knowledge of Hebrew grammar, though such knowledge is a good idea and a real advantage. I say it rather to make the point that this text, in its very utterance, in its ways of putting things, is completely unfamiliar to us. . . . Hebrew, even for those who know it much better than do I, is endlessly imprecise and unclear. It lacks the connecting words; it denotes rather than connotes; it points and opens and suggests, but it does not conclude or define.10
Or, as another Old Testament scholar, Peter Enns, has written: “Knowing the original Hebrew does not always make the text ‘come alive’! It often introduces obscurities that English readers are not aware of.”11
The point here, however, is not the number of languages necessary for a minimally adequate interpretation of the Bible; neither is the point how difficult these various languages can be. Despite the truism about how much is “lost in translation,”12 one hopes that one’s native vernacular will suffice for much biblical interpretation (particularly if we are speaking of minimum competency), especially given the large number and range of excellent translations of the Bible into English, not to mention the countless resources for the study of the Bible that are based on its original languages, even for those who know none of them.13 Instead, my point is that the Old Testament itself is a language, or, to back off ever so slightly, very much like a language.
What I mean by this linguistic analogy, then, is that the Old Testament, like any other piece of literature or art—like any other way of figuring the world—is, or at least can be, a way of constructing reality, a way of understanding the world, a way of perceiving all that is, including ourselves.14 Just as language—preverbal, nonverbal, and verbal—allows us to make sense of the world and ourselves, the Old Testament provides (or can provide) a kind of grammar for constructing, perceiving, and understanding the same.15
There are several ways to unpack this notion of the language that is the Old Testament.
First, we might observe that the languages used in the Old Testament—Hebrew primarily, but also Aramaic, Greek, and all the others—reflect a certain way of perceiving reality (see further below). This is a basic insight regarding the social construction of reality familiar from the work of, among others, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman.16 Biblical Hebrew (or Aramaic or Greek, etc.) is thus hardly unique at this point. Every society constructs reality in a certain way, with language serving as a primary vehicle of the construction.17 The same holds true for religious societies and/or for religious aspects of a society.18
A second, closely related way to understand the notion would be to observe how the Old Testament itself—as a complex whole, not simply by means of its specific linguistic form(s)—is a way of constructing and understanding the world. In this view, the issue is not, for example, to notice how interesting (if not odd) it is that deep emotions are often associated with the bowels in Hebrew anthropology, or how rage is located in the nose.19 Neither is the issue to wonder how Hebrew conceptions of time seem oriented, to some degree at least, toward the cardinal points of the compass, with the speaker evidently facing the past, since “the past” is קדם/qdm, a word related to what lies “before” or “in front of,” which means the speaker rows backward into “the future,” which in Hebrew is related to אחר/ʾḥr, “behind.”20
The way Hebrew terms reflect anthropology and time are both interesting points and not without significance, yet to speak of the Old Testament writ large as a language says that it is more than the sum of its (specific Hebrew) parts in the same way that the book of Job is more than a list of its vocabulary items. Thus the language that is the Old Testament is more than just one book, such as Job. The book of Job may be one piece of the language—perhaps a lexical item or a syntactical unit, maybe even a sentence, paragraph, or larger unit of discourse—having to do with suffering, for example; yet certain other pieces of the language of the Old Testament also have something to contribute to that subject: Proverbs, say, or Deuteronomy. Calling the latter two “lexemes” that are antonyms to Job’s “word,” or calling them “sentences” that are antithetical to Job’s, isn’t entirely wrong, but it also isn’t very helpful, mostly because the word/antonym structure is too simplistic for complex compositions like these ones.21 Even so, an important point in this second way of understanding the linguistic analogy of the Old Testament as (like) a language is that, in this construal, in order to “speak the language,” especially with any sort of fluency, one would need to know both Job and Proverbs, Job and Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy and Proverbs, and so on and so forth. Otherwise one isn’t speaking the full language but something significantly less than that: an incomplete or severely abbreviated version of the language—baby talk, as it were.22
A third way to understand the notion of the Old Testament as being (like) a language is to consider the possibility that someone could conceivably adopt one or both of the former approaches and so construct one’s own world similarly. This would be an exercise in forming what is sometimes called a “biblical worldview.” Such worldviews are rarely constructed in terms of the first understanding offered above. Few indeed would advocate reconceptualizing modern understandings of cognition so as to locate it where ancient Israelites believed cognition was housed, not in the brain at all, but in the “heart” (לב/lēb). Only a very few and rather unique individuals, that is, have the wherewithal and zaniness to spend a year “living biblically”—in an extreme sort of way, at any rate—though evidently doing so can occasionally lead them to write best-selling books.23 (But even these people can only stand a year of it!) Instead, the idea of a “biblical worldview” is almost always predicated on something similar to the second understanding: perceiving reality in terms commensurate with the Bible. In this perspective, Christianity is a way of “imagining the world Scripture imagines.”24 Of course, so too is Judaism, especially with the yearly remembrance of the exodus in the Passover Haggadah: “We were slaves in Egypt. . . .”25
For some people the idea of constructing a biblical worldview makes good sense (probably because they are thinking in terms of the more sober option above); to others the exact opposite is the case (especially if they are thinking in terms of the more zany option above). Either way, it is safe to say that, whether consciously or not, intentionally or otherwise, worldviews are being formed all the time—to one degree or another—and literature and other works of art are a part of that formation, if not the primary way they are formed.26 It thus should come as no surprise, and there is no obvious rebuttal to it (at least in theory), that the Old Testament could be used in similar ways. To put the matter more directly: it seems clear that the Old Testament works (or can work) on readers in these world-constructing ways quite apart from intentional use or conscious awareness. One example of this kind of “work” is found in the Revised Common Lectionary (RCL) and how it (re)presents the Bible as a lens through which one can and does—perhaps even must—reflect on a season in the Christian year or the themes of that particular liturgical season, assuming one uses it.27 This example granted, there still remain significant problems with the notion of a biblical worldview and with constructing one—not the least of which is that there is no one, simple, unified “biblical worldview” (recall above on speaking “only Job”), and even if there were just “one,” getting it from back there—from “Bible Land” where it was written in “Bible-ese”—to here and now is no small task or mean feat.
Despite the problems besetting this third approach—or at least simplistic versions of it—it remains reasonable to think that the Old Testament is (like) a language in the sense that the Old Testament could be used in the creation of a biblical worldview (the third approach), or in the sense that it could be used to perceive the world (the second approach), whether that perception is modern in orientation or outcome (the second and third approaches) or ancient—meaning, in the last case, Israel’s articulation of its own reality (the first approach). Whether the Old Testament would be so used (and in the best-case scenarios) is precisely the question at hand.
One could appeal to yet other disciplines beyond those of the Bible or linguistics in support of the notion that the Old Testament is (like) a language, useful for understanding the world. In systematic theology, for example, George A. Lindbeck famously advocated a “cultural-linguistic” understanding of Christian doctrine.28 More broadly and in truth more fundamentally (since Lindbeck depended on anthropological theory), one could note the use of linguistic analogies, structures, and concepts in cultural anthropology in order to understand social systems along the lines of linguistic ones.29 To quote Claire Jacobson, the translator of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s classic work on the subject, Structural Anthropology: “Language can . . . be treated as a conceptual model for other aspects of culture; these aspects can also be regarded as systems of communication.”30 So it is that many fields have taken “the linguistic turn.”31 Close to the Old Testament proper, we might cite the iconographic work of Othmar Keel and Christoph Uehlinger, who have used similar insights to depict ancient Israelite religion as a massive “symbol system” replete with an artistic grammar and correlate syntax.32
Indeed, the linguistic analogy of Christian belief, along with its foundational texts, as being (like) a language has informed two recent books by two very different theologians, both of whom, despite their deep disagreements, write about “speaking Christian.”33 Marcus J. Borg argues that to be Christian is to speak Christian:
Why do I express this crisis [in the ability to “speak Christian”] as a problem of language? Because language is the medium through which people participate in their religion. To be part of a religion means being able to speak and understand its language. Every religion has a basic vocabulary: its “big” words and collections of words, spoken and heard in worship, embodied in rituals and practices.
Thus to be Jewish means “speaking Jewish”; to be Muslim means “speaking Muslim”; to be Buddhist means “speaking Buddhist”; and so forth. By “speaking” I do not mean merely knowing either the ancient languages of these religions or their modern descendants. I mean something more basic: the way practitioners use the concepts and ideas from their religion as a lens through which to see the world, the way they use them to connect their religion to their life in the world. . . .
In this respect, being Christian (or Jewish or Muslim) is like being French (or Turkish or Korean). One of the criteria for being French is the ability to speak French. Another is being able to understand French. We would not think someone fluent in French if that person could speak it but not understand it. In the same way, literacy means more than simply being able to make sounds out of written words. It also involves having some understanding of what the words mean. Christian literacy means not simply the ability to recognize biblical and Christian words, but also to understand them.34
Stanley Hauerwas asserts that theology is “work with words,” and therefore “the work of the theologian is word work.”35 Like Borg, he believes that the problem facing Christianity is mostly a linguistic one:
I think the characterizations of the challenges facing those going into the ministry are the result of the loss of the ability of Christians to speak the language of our faith. The accommodated character of the church is at least partly due to the failure of the clergy to help those they serve know how to speak Christian. To learn to be a Christian, to learn the discipline of the faith, is not just similar to learning another language. It is learning another language.36
Not all of the disciplines of study mentioned above (systematic theology, cultural anthropology, ancient Israelite religion) use language in exactly the same way—no more than do Borg and Hauerwas agree on every detail—but they do represent a confluence around the usefulness of the linguistic analogy, which also commends its use and utility with reference to the Old Testament.
Plan of the Book and Two Additional Caveats
Now if the linguistic analogy is apt and instructive for the Old Testament, this would mean that, just like any other language, the Old Testament could be taught, learned, and spoken, whether well or poorly, fluently or haltingly. It would also mean that, like any other language, the Old Testament is subject to the same kinds of processes that affect all other languages. These processes include linguistic growth and change, but also, depending on the language and the circumstances, linguistic decline, demise, and ultimately death—the full extent, in other words, of the language life cycle. The death of any human language is a tragedy, given the amazing repositories of knowledge that each encodes in its own unique way.37 The death of religious language is similarly tragic, and often accompanied by serious sociohistorical, even geopolitical ramifications.38 In the case of the (seemingly imminent) death of the Old Testament, the problem is acute for the reasons already expressed, as well as other reasons presented in chapters 2 and 4–6. But the gravity of the situation is already signaled in several of the testimonia used as the epigraphs to the present book. Deficient knowledge of the Old Testament leads to defects in Christian knowledge, according to Wilhelm Vischer; all theological questions are related in one way or another to the hermeneutical problem of the Old Testament, according to A. H. J. Gunneweg; indeed, understanding the Old Testament is the master problem of theology, according to Emil G. Kraeling. All of these points are made even more poignant by G. Ernest Wright’s remark that, for many, the Old Testament is nothing but an ancient monument, which means that a “positive treatment” of its theology is a subject that is not only neglected but almost entirely forgotten; and by Frederick Buechner’s comment: it is no small miracle that the language clothing Christianity “has lasted as long as it has.” Finally, the passage from Karl Barth underscores once more what is at stake: the “language of Canaan” is absolutely necessary if one wishes to speak precisely about—or better, to confess—the essence of Christian faith.39
Given my diagnosis that the Old Testament is dying, the problem of language death is of special concern here. But before addressing that issue directly, it is helpful to step back and offer some (semi)empirical evidence as proof that the Old Testament qua language is truly in dire straits. This “initial testing” of the patient is carried out in chapter 2 with reference to four distinct data sets, the first of which concerns the health of the Old Testament (not to mention some other religious subjects) among the general populace, while the other three speak to the life (or rather, death) of the Old Testament in Christian liturgical practice(s).
With these preliminary tests confirming the initial diagnosis, chapter 3 addresses language death proper, including how languages die, why they die, and what is lost when they die. Treating these matters requires some background on how languages grow and change, as well as some discussion of the linguistic processes known as pidginization and creolization, because these bear directly on how languages change and survive and how they disappear and die. Indeed, pidginization and creolization are on further display in the signs of morbidity that are the focus of chapters 4–6. On the one hand, the signs of the patient’s demise discussed in those chapters offer nothing new: they simply confirm the diagnosis and the results of the initial testing. On the other hand, they are especially important and troubling because they showcase the death of the Old Testament in three discourses or areas that are in many ways larger and more public—and thus more problematic—than those treated in chapter 2. The three discourses are the so-called New Atheism, Marcionites Old and New, and what I am calling, for lack of a better term, the New Plastic Gospels of the “happiologists.”40 In each of these three areas, the Old Testament seems to be on its last breath. In truth, in the case of the first two, the patient has already been laid to rest, without even the dignity of a proper funeral. Regardless, chapters 4–6 demonstrate that it is precisely the death of the Old Testament as a language that permits these three discourses to flourish after their own fashion and in their own way—fashions and ways that, in my judgment, are deeply flawed both theologically and ethically.
Thus far, then, my primary claim is that the Old Testament is dying, if not already dead. I have referred to this claim, both here and in the book’s subtitle, as a “diagnosis,” a word typically defined as “determination of the nature of a diseased condition; identification of a disease by careful investigation of its symptoms and history.”41 The problem of language death and the signs and symptoms of this pathology in the life of the Old Testament are presented in chapters 2–6. But, lest I seem completely pessimistic about the patient’s future—that the Old Testament is completely incurable, altogether terminal—let me also draw attention to the other part of the book’s subtitle, the part that mentions “recommended treatment.” Part of my diagnosis—a word that also means “the opinion (formally stated) resulting from . . . investigation” of an illness42—is that the disease need not be terminal and so, in chapters 7–9, I move from diagnosis to prognosis, asking what can be done to prevent the death of this particular and precious language known in Christian circles as “the Old Testament.”43 Here too I draw from linguistics—not only with regard to the preservation, revival, and even resurrection of dead and dying languages, but also via insights from children’s language learning and second-language acquisition. These theories will, in the end, highlight the importance of two crucial factors in the future life of the Old Testament as a vibrant living language of faith that is “spoken here”: the significance of children and the important role of poetry and music. As we will see, these are profoundly interrelated.
Finally, two caveats are in order. First, I am aware that my linguistic analogy—that the Old Testament is (like) a language—like any other analogy, is imperfect. There are several reasons for this. One is the nature of analogy itself: there is no one-to-one correspondence in analogy. But further, on the linguistic side of the analogy, we might recognize that the study of languages is an inexact science, and it is inexact precisely on matters relating to several crucial differentiations—when, for instance, a dialect is no longer a dialect but a truly distinct “language,” or how “languages” themselves are something of a construct because languages are, in truth, complex conglomerations of many smaller though similar idiolects spoken by individual speakers.
On the biblical-theological front, there is the constant temptation to reify the linguistic analogy in some way such that (or with the result that) the Old Testament (or belief system or sacred text of whatever sort) becomes unlike any real language. As chapter 3 makes clear, every language—even a freshly invented one—is subject to change, growth, and development.44 Why shouldn’t the language that is the Old Testament do the same, especially if and when it is regularly practiced? Indeed, reification of any “cultural-linguistic” system is doubly problematic if (and when) it seems to reflect only a cognitive approach to meaning, belief, and language. Matters of meaning, belief, and language are all best understood as embodied,45 and one must not neglect that crucial insight, nor the importance of practice as such in any “language” of whatever sort.46 A closely related issue is that one must guard against implying that there is (or ever was) a pure, original “language” of “biblical belief” and that all subsequent developments are somehow deficient or substandard.47 The Old Testament itself bears witness to multiple dialects and diachronic change—whether that is in terms of the Hebrew used within the Bible,48 in stories about (and data from) ancient Israel and its linguistic realities (e.g., Judg. 12:4–6; cf. Isa. 19:18; Ps. 114:1), or in the analogical sense discussed above (the “Job” dialect vs. “Deuteronomy” dialect). Which dialect was “the original”? Which stage was most “pure”?49
I will return to these issues in various ways in the chapters that follow. For now, though, it is enough to point out that since the analogy is imperfect, we shouldn’t press it too hard or far. It remains an analogy. Even so, despite any and all problems, the analogy remains highly instructive, helping to explain, among other things, why the saints in that church in metropolitan Atlanta didn’t know their Psalm 22, and why that (non)telling vignette is, upon further reflection, a very disturbing story indeed.
Second, although I am at pains here to diagnose and prevent the death of the Old Testament, and therefore the talk is everywhere about the Old Testament, I nevertheless believe that the argument also holds true for the entirety of the Christian Bible. If the Old Testament dies, the New Testament will not be far behind it, even if that process takes a bit longer (see chaps. 4–7 for proof of the point). The “linguistic” problems that face the Old Testament also face the New. In the main, then, I believe the data show that it is the language of Scripture as a whole—not just that of the Old Testament—that is seriously threatened. Even so, as Christians move further away from Scripture, they surely move furthest away from the Old Testament, since it is at the farthest remove from them in terms of chronology, ideology, ethics, theology, and so on.50 That is why it is increasingly difficult for Christians to understand and speak “Old Testament.” Of course, that is only true for the uninitiated—those who are novices in the language of Scripture. The biblically fluent, by way of contrast, already know that the Old Testament provides the deep structure for the New Testament and thus the Bible’s deep language, maybe even its universal grammar.51 This is further proof of how the death of the Old Testament bears directly and profoundly on the death of the New Testament. After all, the saints who didn’t know Psalm 22 also, and as a direct result, didn’t know the Gospel of Mark.