I started working on this ding-dang blog more than a full year before I even published the first post.  This effort mostly consisted of me writing drafts of blog posts, deciding that they didn’t work that well, scrapping them, and trying another draft. The basic problem that I have been running into is that, having read the Bible regularly, critically, thoughtfully, and with some level of depth for quite a few years at this point, I have quite a few half-baked ideas about what the Bible means. And when I say half-baked, what I really mean is that these ideas are in many cases plausible hypotheses about how Scripture should be interpreted, and in some cases I am even pretty confident that those hypotheses are right. But when I sat down to write out some daggone blog posts elaborating them, I realized that I perhaps lacked the Scriptural evidence that I really wanted to have to back those arguments up. For the most part, this realization is a good thing for me, since the whole point of sitting down to write these blog posts out is to force me to structure my thinking and research in new ways, so that I can have richer insights into Scripture as a whole. 

This struggle continued for a while without any clear path forward, and then I purchased a different edition of the Greek New Testament, the Nestle-Aland edition (abbreviated NA28).  The actual Greek text of this version of the New Testament is the same as the version I had been using before, but the key difference is that the NA28 italicizes scriptural quotations and has marginal notes identifying quotations and allusions that the passage is making to Hebrew Scripture. Thus I noted that Zechariah was being cited in a couple of key places in Matthew, which in turn led to the series of blog posts on Zechariah and its appearance in Matthew. 

I really liked this approach to reading Scripture, for a few reasons. The first is that it hewed quite closely to the text, and kept me from running away from arguments that weren’t actually supported by evidence. The second is that I am not actually that familiar with the prophets. This is not to say that I haven’t read the prophets, but when I have read them in the past I haven’t always taken that much away from the experience. Adding a bit of structure to how I read Zechariah helped me to get more out of the text than I otherwise would have.  Finally, it is quite clear that many New Testament authors got a loooooooot out of the prophetic books of the Bible that isn’t always intuitive to me, a modern reader.  And so a structured look at how Scripture was used by Matthew really helped me to understand Matthew much better. 

The downside to this approach is that Zechariah is a pretty minor book of the Bible (which you may have forgotten even existed).  Fortunately, the NA28 has a list of every citation and allusion from Hebrew Scripture that is made in the New Testament.  This let me figure out which books are actually cited quite heavily, which in turn led to me deciding to focus on Isaiah as the next prophet to read. This next series of blog posts will be focused on Isaiah and will probably be quite a bit longer than the series about Zechariah was.  Isaiah is much longer than Zechariah, is much more cited, and seems much more foundational to New Testament authors’ understanding of Christ than Zechariah, so it deserves quite a bit more attention.