Page:04.BCOT.KD.PoeticalBooks.vol.4.Writings.djvu/65

Christ. Therefore the innermost truth of the Old Testament has been revealed in the revelation of Jesus Christ. But not all at once: His passion, resurrection, and ascension are three steps of this progressive opening up of the Old Testament, and of the Psalms in particular. Our Lord himself, both before and after His resurrection, unfolded the meaning of the Psalms from His own life and its vicissitudes; He showed how what was written in the Law of Moses, in the Prophets and in the Psalms was fulfilled in Him; He revealed to His disciples the meaning τοῦ συνιέναι τάς γραφάς Luk 24:44. Jesus Christ's exposition of the Psalms is the beginning and the goal of Christian Psalm-interpretation. This began, as that of the Christian church, and in fact first of all that of the Apostles, at Pentecost when the Spirit, whose instrument David acknowledges himself to have been (2Sa 23:2), descended upon the Apostles as the Spirit of Jesus, the fulfiller and fulfilment of prophecy. This Spirit of the glorified Jesus completed what, in His humiliation and after His resurrection, he had begun: He opened up to the disciples the meaning of the Psalms. How strongly they were drawn to the Psalms is seen from the fact that they are quoted about seventy times in the New Testament, which, next to Isaiah, is more frequently than any other Old Testament book. From these interpretations of the Psalms the church will have to draw to the end of time. For only the end will be like the beginning and even surpass it. But we must not seek in the New Testament Scriptures what they are not designed to furnish, viz., an answer to questions belonging to the lower grades of knowledge, to grammar, to contemporary history and to criticism. The highest and final questions of the spiritual meaning of Scripture find their answer here; the grammatico-historico-critical under-structure, - as it were, the candlestick of the new light, - it was left for succeeding ages to produce.
The post-apostolic, patristic exposition was not capable of this. The interprets of the early church with the exception of Origen and Jerome possessed no knowledge of the Hebrew tongue, and even these two not sufficient to be able to rise to freedom from a dependence upon the lxx which only led them into frequent error. Of Origen's Commentary and Homilies on the Ps. we possess only fragments translated