Old Testament

Another important issue relevant to use of Hebrew Bible rather than Old Testament is the documented misunderstanding of the sense of old in Old Testament. In Christianity old in Old Testament essentially refers to time. In French it is Ancien Testament, in Latin Vetus Testamentum (like Vetus Latina Old Latin), in Greek hē palaia diathēkē (Ἡ Παλαιὰ Διαθήκη, palaios gives several English prefixes like palaeography). There is additional, confessional implication, but the semantics of this is non-trivial, related to the meaning of Testament rather than the meaning of Old.

Christian commentary on the New Testament understanding of the relationship between the Testaments became controversial in the 2nd century. Consensus was eventually achieved, well before the Catholic-Orthodox division, so all major divisions of Christianity have inherited that consensus.

The controversy arose when Marcion and his followers held the Hebrew scriptures to be superseded. So strong were Marcion's views that even New Testament books that quoted the Old were excluded from his canon. He was not entirely consistent in applying this rule, because nearly every book of the New Testament makes such quotations. Along with Gnosticism, this view has the dubious distinction of being one of the first to be classed as heretical by the early Christian "peer review" process. The Catholic Encyclopedia notes that Marcion "rejected the writings of the Old Testament" and claims that the Marcionites "were perhaps the most dangerous foe Christianity has ever known."

Both Gnosticism (with its additional pseudepigraphal gospels) and Marcion (with his limited canon) stimulated early Christian efforts to find consensus regarding a canon of scripture. Ultimately consensus excluded Gnostic books and included the Hebrew scriptures (most often the Greek Septuagint translation of them), but remained elusive regarding some New Testament books, see also Antilegomena. The continued use of the Hebrew scriptures as scripture was a deliberate and significant decision. It was a decision that meant they were accepted as authoritative on matters of doctrine and normative for matters of everyday life.

The word testament is a traditional English translation of the Hebrew word berit (covenant, contract or deal). The Jewish Encyclopedia notes several covenants between God and man in the Tanakh, including: Noah, Abraham, Moses, Aaron and David. It also discusses Jeremiah's prophecy of a "new covenant" (berit hadashah in Hebrew, Jeremiah31:31) and comments, "Christianity . . . interpreted the words of the prophet in such a way as to indicate a new religious dispensation in place of the law of Moses (Hebrews 8:8-13).”

Christians of all traditions could be cited that would acknowledge the understanding the Jewish Encyclopedia expresses in this article. However, just as the Jewish Encyclopedia acknowledges a series of covenants, that are nonetheless in some sense united, so in fact does ecumenical Christianity. The term dispensation is common in English language Christian theology in addressing the complicated issues Christians have found in understanding the relationships between the covenants in the Hebrew scriptures, and between those covenants and what the New Testament (often associated with the New Covenant) says about its own relationship to prior covenants (see Dispensationalism).

In covenant theology (a theological framework distinctive of, but not exclusive to, the Reformed churches), the scriptures are interpreted as teaching that God's original purpose was to create for himself one covenant people, which was to be found in the people of Israel in the years before the Messiah, and later expanded to universal salvation through the Messiah.Under this interpretation, old in Old Testament refers to the age before expansion of the covenant through the Messiah.

The New Testament documents themselves present Jesus and his followers as being opposed for preaching this message of gentile (non-Jewish) inclusion. Essentially, the New Testament appropriates the Jewish tradition, such as B'nei Noah, to the benefit of Christians. This is a serious matter for believers in both faiths, and a matter that scholars of those faiths often wish to leave out of contention when co-operating on projects of common interest, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls. This is another reason non-confessional terms like Hebrew Bible suit themselves to academic, and other, discourse.