Abstract:
The fact that the New Testament authors often referred or alluded to, or quoted from their
Scriptures (roughly what is known today as ‘the OT’), and then very often linked those
quotations, references, and allusions from their Jewish Scriptures to the Christ-event, has led
to the viewpoint of some that ‘Christ is found in the OT’ – that is, that the OT prophesised
about the events that took place regarding the person, Jesus of Nazareth. It is the intention
of this contribution to confirm the position of mainstream biblical scholarship that the Old
Testament does not predict the events surrounding Jesus of Nazareth, but that the New
Testament writers interpreted the Jesus-events in hindsight in the light of the Scriptures of
Israel. The current study attempts to firstly unfold the meta-narrative of the New Testament
in five acts. Against the backdrop of the last of these acts, the case of the crucifixion of Jesus as
interpreted by Paul to the early Christians in Galatia receives particular attention. It is argued
that Paul’s presentation of the crucifixion in Galatians – as based on Deuteronomy 21:23 – is
done retrodictively to portray Yehoshua ben Yoseph as liberator of the law in Asia Minor. This
study proposes the coinage of a new term in canonical biblical scholarship, namely the term
‘retrodiction’ – in opposition to the term ‘prediction’.
