Composite Quotations

Any attentive reader of the New Testament will notice how it quotes the Old Testament is often pretty weird. Sometimes it seems pretty arbitrary and other times it looks like it is misquoted. If you have ever wondered about this and how the New uses the Old in general, the following interview of New Testament scholar Seth Ehorn certainly helps address these questions. The interview, which is for Deeper Waters Podcast, is centred on his two-volume series he co-edited with Sean Adams Composite Citations in Antiquity (Vol. 1 2015, Vol. 2 2018, T&T Clark.)

I had noticed before the phenomenon of composite quotations in the New Testament so I really appreciated learning more about how they precisely work from Dr. Ehorn. Beyond learning some new things I really appreciated its importance for the faithful reading of scripture. There is the Old Protestant hermenuetical maxim that scripture interprets scripture, which Dr. David Starling’s insightfully points out means being apprentices of how scripture itself interprets scripture. Dr. Ehorn’s work on composite quotations is I think a wonderful example of this, of how we can be faithful students of the biblical authors who were literary masters in their own right.

*You can download the first chapter of volume one for free here.