ABSTRACT
Two great religious traditions, Judaism and Christianity, appeal to virtually the same set of Hebrew texts as having divine authority. In Christianity the Hebrew texts are identified as the Old Testament, and in Judaism as the Tanakh. For Jews, properly speaking, these texts could not be the Old Testament. Judaism has no New Testament in the strict sense of the term, even though they have later documents that have considerable religious authority. Frequently, in Christian communities, the designation Old Testament has also subtly implied the inferiority of these texts relative to the New Testament. For the writers of the New Testament who alluded to the Isaiah text and echoed its words, the prophetic images became a way of understanding the suffering and significance of Jesus on the cross. The words of Isaiah gave the early church a way of making sense of the redemptive implications of Jesus' death.
