Something that’s been bugging me for a while now - why in the books of the Bible does God, or rather his character, seem to change so much from the Old Testament to the New?
For example, in the Old, we have a wrathful, jealous God who engages in genocide with the Flood, wipes out Sodom and Gomorrah, sends plagues to Egypt and interferes with free with to do so, orders murders of innocents, condones slavery, etc etc. “The LORD is a man of war: the LORD is his name.” - Exodus 15:3
Then in the New, JC, who is God, seems to do a complete 180. He is no longer wrathful and jealous, he is merciful and loving. He cures the sick, tells you to love your enemies and neighbours, tells you to turn the other cheek, aid the poor, etc etc. “Now the God of peace be with you all. Amen.” - Romans 15:33
To me having the books of the New Testament follow on from the Old is like a DVD boxset of episodes of Mr Rogers’ Neighbourhood following on from episodes of The Sopranos. Marcion thought similar, thinking we should throw out the whole Old Testament. He was declared a heretic.
So, three questions -
Is my premise that the New Testament is more lighter and softer than the Old sound?
Well, they were written a thousand years apart, more or less. A few things changed in that time. They also represent two different religions, despite being melded together and having points of similarity. And, all due snark aside, Alessan nailed it. The OT was written by the wise men of a tribal society; the NT was written by by a bunch of godstruck acolytes (and a small bunch at that, one that voted a lot of similar godstruckness off the island).
You might as well ask why the NT and Qur’an are so different.
Hundreds. Maybe close to 1,000 but not “thousands”.
And if you read the OT, you see God changing over time within that collection of books (it’s not one book) probably because they were composed at different times.
I think most people, Christians and non-Christians alike, will agree with this statement.
There’s many different books written by many different people from many different societies over hundreds of years. Also consider that compared to the Old Testament, the New Testament was written over a fairly short period of time by a small number of people with similar views. So it’s reasonable that there’s a level of consistency in tone across the New Testament that contrasts with the Old Testament, especially with the earliest stuff.
There isn’t a single response to this. The most fundamental will either flat out deny a difference in tone, or make convoluted arguments that say it isn’t really as strong as it seems. Some will argue that while it is divinely inspired, it is still filtered through humans, so it makes sense that more primitive tribal people would have a different spin on God. Some will take it a bit farther and even say some people were manipulating parts of it. Some will say that, in fact, God’s tone did change with Jesus. Personally, I think it’s a combination of several of these factors.
Well, I said thousand not thousands; but yes, the entire span is about 1,000 years, not the span between them. The span between the last OT writings and the first significant NT writings is about 400 years.
Way I’d put it is this: whenever the books of the OT were actually redacted, the stories in the OT tapped, in some cases, into an oral tradition that was considerably older. That’s why you find literary “fossils” in the OT that seem, in some cases, to predate the version of Judaism practiced by the redactors.
In contrast, the books of the NT were not only redacted over a comparatively short time, they were all referring to reasonably recent (if already mythologized) events; they do not represent an attempt to collect ancient storytelling traditions.
To answer the question in the OP: from a secular VP, the reason is pretty clear: religious notions concerning the nature of god in the Jewish tradition evolved considerably over the lifetime of Judaism as a religion. The OT captures these changes up to a point - the point where the OT ceased being “added to”. Thus, even within the OT, the nature of the god depicted isn’t consistent.
The NT taps into the Jewish tradition at a considerably later date.
One thing non-Jews are often not aware of is that Judaism as a religion is, for most forms of Judaism, not based on the OT alone, but rather based on the OT as interpreted by and supplemented with the “oral Torah” as transmitted in works such as the Talmud. The version of god as depicted in Judaism (based on the “oral Torah” which records, in effect, the changes in the religion since the OT was redacted) thus actually has more in common with the kinder, gentler god found in the NT that the thunderous old sky-chief as found in some parts of the OT.
That’s why, when a famous near-contemporary of Jesus, the Jewish Rabbi Hillel, was asked to summarize what Judaism consisted of, he repsonded with the Golden Rule, saying that the rest was just commentary … it is pretty clear that both Hillel and Jesus (or rather, those who recorded anecdotes concerning these figures) were tapping into a common tradition in Judaism that emphasised a philosophy of morality over the blood-and-thunder found in the more ancient parts of the OT.
During a religion course I took in college, the professor said that the dominant cosmology at the time the OT was written was Sumerian/Babylonian (flat earth suspended in open area created by ‘firmament’ pressing back the water which until creation had been the entire universe*), while the dominant cosmology when the NT was written was neoplatonism (corruptable round earth, surrounded by incorruptable heavens, moon halfway between heavens and earth and therefore made of something between incorruptable and corruptable matter).
Different background awareness for the different writers, not to mention different audiences.
*That’s why Noah’s flood was so effective. The flood wasn’t rain. God opened holes in the firmament both above and below the earth, and The Universal Water entered the bubble.
If, as a number of OT scholars think, the OT was largely redacted after the Babylonian captivity and diaspora, during the time of Ezra/Nehemiah, then, considering the editors wanted (consciously or not) to shape them into a collection of books that built and fostered a Hebrew identity of a separate, chosen, exclusive people. On the other hand, the NT books are largely written to explain the gospel to the gentile nations, and thus are universal and inclusive.
Marcion, an early Christian leader, had a ready answer. He and his followers said that the God of the Old Testament was not the same being as Jesus. Marcionism had a distant impersonal God who was the source of other distinct beings. Yahweh was the original of these; this was the being who created the world and appeared in the Old Testament. Yahweh ended up only caring about one group of people and treated even them pretty badly. Jesus was a separate being who came to the world to rescue us from Yahweh.
Marcion was pretty influential back in his day. He even compiled the first New Testament. But obviously his views did not win out. Christian leaders with other views suppressed his works.
Theologically, it would have been easier for the early Christians to just renounce Jewish scripture. They could have essentially said, “Yes, our founder was Jewish and we arose from Jewish culture. But we don’t recognize Jewish scripture as authoritative. We aren’t trying to reconcile Jesus’ message with the Tanakh anymore than we reconcile it with Hesiod’s Theogony.” They could have said that Christianity was completely distinct from Judaism.
But there were good reasons why early Christians didn’t do this. First, they were originally looking to win over Jews and it was much easier if they said their movement was a continuation of Judaism rather than a rejection of it. Later when they were converting non-Jews to their movement, they had to consider how the Romans felt.
The Romans overall were a very traditional people. To a Roman, the best ideas were old ideas. No Roman would have respected a religion that had been founded only a few decades ago. So the Christians essentially said, “No, we’re not a new religion. We’ve been around for a couple of thousand years. All that stuff in the Jewish scriptures? That was us. It was all just the set-up for Jesus’ appearance. So even though Jesus himself appeared only a few years ago, we’re actually a very ancient religion.”
Christian perspective here. All the words and actions of Jesus have their root in Jewish scripture, tradition, and culture. On the surface level, it is easy to see Jesus’ attitude as entirely the opposite of Jewish attitudes expressed in the Old Testament. The more one studies the Bible and the available material on ancient Jewish beliefs, the more one notes and appreciates the many ties between the Christian message and the Jewish background that it came from.
For instance, “love your enemies” actually comes from the Book of Proverbs. Healing the sick, feeding the hungry, acting out of love and mercy all have plentiful support in the Old Testament. There are countless other instances where information is needed beyond merely the text of the Old Testament. For example, several gospel passages depict Jesus in conflict with the Pharisees over healing on the Sabbath. Supposedly the Pharisees taught that it was completely unallowable to heal the sick on the Sabbath, while Jesus instead taught that it was always best to do good, and tossed out micromanaging restrictions about what could and couldn’t be done on the Sabbath. Many people have believed that the position assigned to the Pharisees is the one that all ancient Jewish tradition held. However, Bible scholar E. P. Sanders has convincingly demonstrated that the position that Jesus held on the matter was, in fact, the default position among the Jews during the era of the Roman Empire.
There are, of course, passages in the Old Testament that don’t fit at all with Jesus’ teachings, most obviously condemnations of entire nations and stories in which God supposedly commanded the Israelites to conquer and exterminate entire nations. Jesus was adamant that the Gospel was for all nations, without exception. So what’s the deal with those Old Testament passages? Who knows? No one can say with certainty when, where, or by who those passages were written or how much relation they have with actual historical events.
As an adult convert to Christianity (from Buddhism), 20 years ago, I read the whole Christian Bible starting with Genesis all the way through. Admittedly I skimmed some of the more boring parts of the OT. The difference between the Old and New Testaments when read this way is almost shocking. It’s like unexpectedly stepping into a river after a long long trek across the desert. The most striking to me was how much more human, personal, and compassionate the narrative is. Jesus is always physically touching people and forgiving people, two things that happen very rarely in the Hebrew scriptures.
Christianity in some obvious ways is a reform of Judaism; there are quite a few parallels with Buddhism as a reform of Hinduism – make compassion the center of your religious practice, cast aside your dependence upon ritual and hierarchy, leave the world behind in the search for unmediated truth, which is accessible to all, no matter your station in life.
This should be stressed: the OT is not ‘Judaism’ any more than it is ‘Christianity’. Certainly the OT is very, very important to Judaism; but as a religion, Judaism is based on the Talmud. The OT, in Judaism, is interpreted through the humanistic lens of the Talmud, and so Judaism as a religion contains very little of the ‘blood and thunder’ found in the OT.