The Right Doctrine, Wrong Texts: Can we follow the Apostles’ Doctrine but not their Hermeneutics?

In 1989, I published an article titled ‘Did Jesus and His Followers Preach the Right Doctrine from the Wrong Texts? An Examination of the Presuppositions of the Apostles’ Exegetical Method.’ 1 This was an article that surveyed the recent history of the use of the Old Testament in the New, with focus on the works of Richard Longenecker. Longenecker had argued that the trend of the New Testament was to use the Old Testament in non-contextual ways, which we today would consider illegitimate and which we certainly should not imitate in the way we interpret the Old Testament. I will summarize the essence of that article here and also integrate into it briefly the developments within especially evangelical scholarship on this issue since my 1989 article. Then I will take a single case study of a notoriously difficult text to see how one might approach other thorny uses of the Old Testament by the New.