Most people who struggle with the Old Testament aren’t failing at Bible reading. They have been handed half a story. The New Testament was written to readers who knew the Old, so its biggest claims about Jesus lean on covenants, sacrifices, prophets and promises that start long before Matthew. Read the second half alone and Jesus becomes a set of sayings rather than the completion of something. What you are missing is the first half of the story.
The struggle is common. Lisa Fields recalled a poll on the Jude 3 Project Instagram stories asking whether people struggle to interpret the Old Testament in light of the New, and by her account roughly 87 percent said yes. She also described the usual response: “some people just jettison it altogether and just read the New Testament.” That is an understandable move. It is also a costly one.
Is this a new problem, or have Christians always felt this way?
Dr. Cleotha Robertson, who teaches Old Testament at Alliance Theological Seminary, thinks something has shifted. From where she stands, it is a newer phenomenon. People of her generation, she says, grew up with the Old Testament stories. They knew Moses from Sunday school and from the films that came around every holiday season. The stories were simply part of the furniture.
What she sees now is different: “I think you now have a new generation of folk who, their Bible is the Psalms and the New Testament.” That is a precise observation. The Psalms survive because they sound like prayer. The New Testament survives because it is about Jesus. What drops out is the long middle: Genesis through Kings, the law, the prophets.
Her diagnosis goes one step further. People in this situation, she says, “do the hermeneutics by just having principles versus knowing the larger historical narrative.” In plain terms, they still interpret the Bible, but they do it by pulling out lessons rather than following the story. A principle can be lifted from anywhere. A story has to be read in order.
That distinction matters more than it first appears. If the Bible is a collection of principles, the Old Testament is mostly redundant: the New Testament has better ones, stated more clearly. If the Bible is one unfolding story, skipping the first thousand pages means you don’t know who the characters are when the climax arrives.
What exactly does the New Testament assume I already know?
Robertson’s central claim is that the two halves of the Bible are continuous: “you can’t see or totally understand all of the themes and ideas in the new, unless you see just the continuity with the old.” She names the threads: the people of God, the covenant of God, God revealing himself, God who speaks, God who acts. All of these, she says, are present in the Old and find their way into the New. When you see them, “it just makes Jesus make more sense.”
The New Testament itself reads this way. After the resurrection, Luke records that Jesus taught two disciples on the road to Emmaus like this: “And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). Notice what Jesus does. He doesn’t hand them a new set of principles. He walks them back through Moses and the prophets. The explanation of who he is runs through the Old Testament, not around it.
Robertson gives a small example from Matthew. When Matthew tells of the young Jesus coming back from Egypt, he writes that this fulfilled the prophet’s word, “Out of Egypt have I called my son” (Matthew 2:15). That line comes from Hosea 11:1, where God remembers loving Israel as a child and calling his son out of Egypt. Robertson describes Egypt as a recurring motif, with the patriarchs going back and forth there in times of drought, and she calls Matthew’s use of it a reuse of that text in the life of Jesus. A reader who doesn’t know the Exodus sees a travel note. A reader who does sees Matthew presenting Jesus as walking Israel’s path.
Why does Good Friday need Leviticus?
Robertson’s sharpest example comes from the book most readers abandon. When the New Testament presents Jesus as a sacrifice and as one who enters the holy of holies, she says, that imagery is built on the high priest entering the Holy of Holies in Leviticus 16. In her words, “it is taken straight outta Leviticus.”
Leviticus 16 describes the Day of Atonement. Once a year the high priest passed into the innermost room of the sanctuary with sacrificial blood to make atonement for himself and for the people. The book of Hebrews draws on this picture at length in chapters 9 and 10, presenting Christ as the high priest who enters with his own blood, once, and does not need to repeat it.
Robertson’s warning is simple: without some knowledge of Leviticus and its sacrificial law, she says, a reader will miss much of the symbolism. This is where neglect stops being a gap in trivia and becomes a gap in understanding the cross. If you don’t know what the high priest did, the language of Jesus as priest and sacrifice sounds like religious decoration. If you do know, it tells you what the death of Jesus was understood to accomplish. Seeing these connections is a reading of how the New Testament writers themselves used the Old, which is why Hebrews makes the argument explicitly.
Isn’t Leviticus just rules that no longer apply?
This is the objection most people actually have, and Lisa Fields raised the standard version: the Old Testament forbids shellfish, the New Testament lets us eat it, so how do you tell which laws matter?
Robertson starts somewhere unexpected. She says the question itself shows something good: a desire to live in accordance with God. Then she reframes the book. For her, “the overall idea in the book of Leviticus is how does a holy people interact with a holy God?” The rules about clothing, food and worship are a prescribed way of life answering that question.
She also sorts the laws into kinds. There are personal laws about what to eat and wear. There are laws for priests on how they should conduct themselves. There are ritual laws about approaching the sanctuary and what to bring in worship, and she notes the conviction behind them that “there’s no such thing as empty handed worship,” with provision for both poor and well-off worshipers to bring something. And there are economic laws like the Year of Jubilee, which in her reading aimed to keep people from permanent poverty by returning ancestral land.
That sorting changes how the book reads. Leviticus stops looking like a random list and starts looking like a picture of a whole community’s life ordered around God’s presence, from the dinner table to the economy.
Robertson argues that the underlying concern carries into the New Testament as zeal for the Lord and a life shaped by God’s word. When Christians ask whether they can eat meat or drink alcohol, she points to Paul, whose guiding concern was community and witness. Paul puts it this way: “Wherefore, if meat make my brother to offend, I will eat no flesh while the world standeth, lest I make my brother to offend” (1 Corinthians 8:13). The question shifts from what I am permitted to do toward how my freedom affects the body of Christ.
Christians who love Scripture hold different views on how exactly the Old Testament law applies today. Some divide it into moral, civil and ceremonial categories; some read the whole law as fulfilled in Christ and binding only as the New Testament restates it; others work in still other ways. Robertson’s approach is to trace the purpose behind a law and follow it forward. Her point holds across those views: you cannot even ask the question well if you have never read the book.
What do I lose if I skip the prophets?
The cost here is different. Skipping Leviticus blurs the cross. Skipping the prophets tends to split the Christian life in two.
Robertson defines a prophet as someone, man or woman, who speaks for God, with a message that is God’s rather than their own. In Israel, as she and Lisa Fields discussed, there was no division between sacred and secular, and the prophet addressed everything at once: personal conduct, family, worship and the life of the nation.
Lisa Fields observed that modern readers often cut the prophets in half. Some take only the justice passages, others only the personal holiness passages, though a single prophet speaks to both. She pointed to Malachi addressing the priests about how they treat their wives while also speaking of justice. Robertson agreed: “it’s not either or, but it’s both and.” Her example is Amos, the eighth-century prophet, who is concerned with personal ethics and with the abuses of society, and for whom the two are connected. When people are cut off from God in piety and practice, she argues, the effects spill into society as a whole.
She connects this to Martin Luther King Jr., whom she describes as challenging white Christians in the 1960s to follow their personal beliefs into concern for society. Of piety and justice she says, “the two are symbiotic. You can’t have one without the other.”
She adds a point about how the Old Testament thinks about persons. Western readers, shaped by individualism, tend to read the Bible as addressed to isolated individuals. Robertson argues that both parts of Scripture are group oriented: “I individually worship the Lord, but I worship the Lord as a part of a larger collective.” Lisa Fields offered examples that fit: Ezra praying in terms of “us,” and Jesus teaching a prayer that begins with “Our Father.” A reader who never spends time in the Old Testament can miss how deeply Scripture assumes that one person’s faithfulness affects many.
Robertson also notes that God’s particular people were never meant to be closed. Israel was set apart, but its role was to be a light to the nations, and “that group is not closed.” She names Ruth, a Moabite, and Rahab, a Canaanite, as people drawn in. That thread runs straight into the New Testament mission to every nation. Without the Old Testament, the Great Commission can look like a new idea. With it, it looks like a promise being kept.
Does neglecting the Old Testament leave people open to being misled?
Yes, and this may be the most practical cost. Robertson puts the danger plainly: “you can take a text out of its context and you can almost make a text say, mean anything.”
Her test case is Deuteronomy 28:68, a verse some Hebrew Israelite teachers use to argue that African Americans are the true Israel. The verse warns that the Lord will bring the people back into Egypt in ships, where they will try to sell themselves as slaves and no one will buy them. Robertson’s response is to read the surrounding chapters. Deuteronomy 27 and 28 are blessings and curses spoken by Moses to the tribes of Israel as he prepares to leave them. The verse concerns the consequences of covenant unfaithfulness for that people. In her view, nothing in the passage is about Black Israelites, and she says you would not find that interpretation in any reputable commentary or scholar, whatever their view of Scripture.
Lisa Fields drew the lesson out. In her experience engaging Hebrew Israelites, much of how people are swayed comes from not knowing how the Old Testament and the New Testament fit together. Her principle is direct: “if you don’t know the truth, then you’ll be easily deceived.” Rather than chasing down every claim of every group, she argues, “you need to know what you believe first.” Someone who knows the shape of Deuteronomy can answer a misused verse with its own context.
The broader point applies far beyond one movement. A Christian who only owns isolated verses is defenseless against anyone with a different arrangement of isolated verses. A Christian who knows the story can ask where a verse sits and what it was doing there.
Where should I actually start?
Robertson’s first instruction is the plainest: “I would challenge people not to neglect the Old Testament.” Then read it, not just the parts quoted elsewhere. She warns that “a lot of times they’ll cherry pick a verse or look at how a verse is quoted in the new from the old without knowing the larger context.”
Her practical steps are these:
- Use a readable translation alongside the King James. She says, “I still love the poetry of the King James, but the challenge is with many of us that sometimes we don’t know what the King James is actually saying.” She suggests reading a modern translation such as the NIV, ESV or Good News Bible alongside the KJV and comparing them.
- Read whole books. Her guiding principle is that “a passage has a meaning in its context.” Major events in a book run through the whole of it. Reading Exodus 20 alone and then jumping elsewhere invites pulling texts out of context.
- Get a study Bible with cross-references, so you can see where a passage is picked up in the New Testament.
- Use a readable companion. She uses A Survey of the Old Testament by Hill and Walton in her classes, with short chapters you can read alongside a biblical book. She also mentions a book on Christ in the Old Testament by C. H. Wright, and How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth by Fee and Stuart, which walks through the different types of biblical writing.
None of this requires seminary. It requires reading more than you have been reading, in order, with help.
Quick answers
Why do I find the Old Testament so hard to understand?
Often because you have met it in fragments. Read as scattered principles, it feels strange and disconnected. Read as a story with covenants, a people and a God who acts, its parts start to explain each other.
Can I understand Jesus from the New Testament alone?
You can learn a great deal, but you will miss what the writers assumed. Robertson’s example is the cross, whose priestly and sacrificial language comes from Leviticus 16.
What is Leviticus mainly about?
In Robertson’s reading, it answers how a holy people can live with a holy God, covering personal, priestly, ritual and economic life.
Should I stop reading the King James Version?
No. Robertson still loves it. She recommends reading a modern translation alongside it so archaic wording doesn’t hide the meaning.
The deeper cost of neglecting the Old Testament is not that you miss some stories. It is that Jesus becomes harder to see as he presented himself: the one Moses and the prophets were talking about. Reading the first half of the Bible is not a detour from knowing him. It is the road the risen Jesus took when he explained himself.