Investigation: The Psalms and Jesus

"And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? which is, being interpreted, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Mark 15:34). The words are the first line of Psalm 22, in a form close to Aramaic. Luke's Jesus dies with Psalm 31:5: "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit" (Luke 23:46). John sees the soldiers dividing his clothes as fulfilling 22:18 (John 19:24).

After the resurrection, Luke's Jesus says "all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning me" (Luke 24:44). Early Christian preaching used Psalm 16 for the resurrection (Acts 2:25–31), Psalm 110 for his exaltation (Acts 2:34–35), Psalm 118 for the rejected stone (Acts 4:11), and Psalm 2 for his sonship (Acts 13:33).

To understand that use, a reader needs to hear the psalm first in its own voice: a sufferer, a king, a worshipper. The early Christians read those voices as pointing beyond themselves. That is an act of interpretation, and it has a history.

How New Testament writers read

Several methods are visible: (1) prophecy and fulfilment ("that the scripture might be fulfilled," John 19:24); (2) the righteous sufferer: Jesus as the one who prays the laments in their fullest sense; (3) Davidic typology: what was said of David's king is true of David's greatest son; (4) argument from wording, often the Greek wording (Hebrews 2 and 10; Acts 2's "corruption"); (5) Jewish interpretive techniques such as reading "my Lord" in 110:1 as someone David addresses (Mark 12:35–37).

Three time periods, kept distinct

Original setting: the psalmist, the king or the congregation in ancient Israel. Second Temple Judaism: messianic and eschatological readings (Psalms of Solomon, Qumran) and the Greek translation's own choices. Christian reading: Jesus as the one in whom these psalms are fulfilled. Equating them (as if each psalmist consciously described Jesus' crucifixion) erases the first two; dismissing the third ignores how the New Testament writers actually read and why. The site shows all three.

Jewish reception of the same psalms

Psalm 22 was read of Esther and of Israel in exile (Midrash Tehillim); Psalm 110 of Abraham (Nedarim 32b) or of David; Psalm 2 of David or the Messiah; Psalm 118 is sung in the Hallel at Passover, Shavuot and Sukkot, including "The stone which the builders refused" (118:22), traditionally applied to David. Jewish readers have also challenged Christian readings, notably on 22:16 ("like a lion" or "they pierced"). Both sides of that debate, and the manuscript evidence, are on the passage page.

Patristic and later

Augustine's Expositions of the Psalms read the whole Psalter as the voice of Christ, head and body (totus Christus). Athanasius's Letter to Marcellinus, copied at the front of the Psalter in Codex Alexandrinus, calls the Psalms a mirror in which each person finds his own soul. Luther called the Psalter "a little Bible." Modern Christian scholars range from those who read many psalms as direct prophecy to those who read them typologically or by later application.