Psalms of Christ. Daniel H. Fletcher

but divine intervention; or, at least divine explanation. Luke writes, “He [Jesus] opened their minds to understand the Scriptures” (v. 45), as he had done earlier in Emmaus. Luke does not necessarily imply that they need a supernatural infusion of divine insight to understand the Scripture, but simply that Jesus gave them new insights, which they can only understand from a post-resurrection perspective.45 Nevertheless, for Luke, the message of the Scriptures is not self-evident; one’s mind must be opened to it, and they are rightly understood only in light of Jesus’s death and resurrection.46

We should be crystal clear about what has happened here in Luke 24. The followers of Jesus did not reason from the OT and come to the right conclusion. They tried this approach, and it ended in frustration because they did not see how the crucifixion fit the Messiah’s mission. It was not clear to them until after they encountered the resurrected Lord.47 Jesus gave them a post-resurrection perspective—a christological lens through which to read the story again, this time in reverse order. Not that they read the OT from the last canonical book to the first, but from the end of the story as the interpretive starting point. Starting from their experience of the resurrected Lord, Jesus himself “interpreted to them” (v. 27), “opened the Scriptures” (v. 32), and “opened their minds” (v. 45) to understand the OT. Again, we have to be honest about the reading strategy Luke teaches here. It is not “start at the beginning and you will figure it out if you try hard enough, dig deep enough with the right exegetical technique,” but rather, “start from the end and then you will see clearly how to read the OT story in relation to Christ.” Put differently, we must read the story backward with resurrection lenses on our eyes. Hays states it provocatively, “Jesus’ exposition of Israel’s Scripture will have to undertake the task of reading backwards: it will have to show retrospectively the pervasive presence of this theme—which had never been perceived by anyone in Israel prior to the crucifixion and resurrection.”48 In order to understand the OT as a witness to Jesus’s sufferings and resurrection, we must start with Jesus.

Enough has been said about reading the OT with the right interpretive lenses. Luke’s point is well taken: read the OT christologically in order to understand its true meaning as a witness to the gospel. However, we are not finished with Luke 24:44–47, and now come to the most salient point for the remainder of this study: if all of the Scriptures point to Christ, it stands to reason that this includes Psalms—not just some of them—all of them. In fact, the Greek text of verse 44 lacks the definite article for Psalms, and a more accurate translation is “Everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and Psalms.” There are a couple of reasons for stressing this particular translation. Some have taken Luke’s description as evidence of the threefold-division of the Jewish Scriptures at the time as “the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms.” While this has historical precedent in the Dead Sea Scrolls,49 the division was normally referred to as “the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Writings” (Psalms being the first book in the last division).50 More importantly, the use of a single definite article before “Prophets,” yielding “the Prophets and Psalms” is hardly incidental, and suggests that Psalms—the whole book—is prophecy.51 This most likely reflects Luke’s conviction that the Prophets included Psalms.52 Psalms, then, must be read christologically because it is a book of prophecy.

Simply stated, the Prophets and Psalms should be taken together, reflecting a Jewish assumption in the Second Temple period that Psalms is among the prophetic corpus of Israel’s Scriptures. In fact, the Dead Sea Scrolls demonstrate the belief that David, the archetypal psalmist, wrote thousands of psalms through the spirit of prophecy: “The total [psalms/songs] was four thousand and fifty. He [David] composed them all through the spirit of prophecy which had been given to him from before the Most High” (11Q5 27.10–11).53 Similarly, Luke states in Acts that David was a “prophet,” conveying the prophetic nature of Ps 16 as a prediction of Christ: “Brothers, I may say to you with confidence about the patriarch David that he both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day. Being therefore a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that he would set one of his descendants on his throne, he foresaw and spoke about the resurrection of Christ” (Acts 1:30–31). Green concludes, “For Peter and other apostles, David was as much a prophet as Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, and the psalms that bear his name were read as predictions of eschatological events, now fulfilled in the story of Jesus and his followers.”54 As noted previously, we need not limit this to royal and/or Davidic psalms because the entire the Psalter should be read in a prophetic and eschatological direction.55

In light of this discussion, Luke 24:44 groups Psalms with the Prophets as a grand corpus of prophecy that points to Jesus as Israel’s Messiah. Luke intends to highlight the Psalms as a key prophetic text.56 Therefore, it is in light of this prophetic trajectory that I interpret the various psalms in this book in an effort to read them christologically. To be clear, the psalms covered here are neither quoted directly in the NT nor among the standard messianic psalms. Even so, Psalms as a whole is filled with imagery and ideas that point to Christ. When read in the context of the Christian canon of Scripture, and from the post-resurrection perspective of the NT writers, all the psalms are messianic, evoking various aspects of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

1. Lea and Griffin, 1, 2 Timothy, Titus, 234.

2. Fletcher, “Constitution,” 1–17.

3. I recognize the lack of precision of using designations such as OT and NT when speaking of Scripture in the first-century CE because doing so imposes anachronistic canonical constraints on the ancients. Neither is it accurate to speak of the church’s use of the “Hebrew Bible” because the vast majority of scriptural quotations in the NT come from the Gk. tradition known as the Septuagint, commonly designated LXX. Yet it is also imprecise to refer to “the” Septuagint because it did not exist as a single entity, but as a Gk. tradition composed of multiple revisions. It is more accurate, therefore, to speak of the church’s use of “Israel’s Scriptures,” which does not impose modern canonical constraints—whether Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox—and takes into consideration the multiple text traditions available at the time in their Heb., Aram., and Gk. forms. With that said, I will use the OT/NT designations because of convention and convenience. While this book primarily appeals to the Protestant canon, which is identical to the Hebrew canon except for the ordering of certain books, it will refer to the Gk. tradition at times. This study follows the numbering of the Hebrew Psalter, which consists of 150 psalms.

4. For this basic view, see Longenecker, Exegesis, 197; Snodgrass, “Use of the Old Testament,” 223.

5. Silva, “New Testament Use,” 164.

6. Köstenberger and Patterson, Invitation, 195.

7. Snodgrass, “Use of the