Ratzinger and Sacred Scripture

Judaism as we know it today is a late appropriation of the Sacred Scripture.

With the Old Testament professor Friedrich Stummer..."the Old Testament was opened up and became precious for me.

"More and more I came to understand why the New Testament is not a different book of a different religion that, for some reason or other, had appropriated the Holy Scriptures of the Jews as a kind of preliminary structure.

"The New Testament is nothing other than an interpretation of 'the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings' found from or contained in the story of Jesus.

"Now, this 'Law, Prophets, and Writings' had not yet, at the time of Jesus, grown together to form a definite canon; rather, they were still open-ended and, as such, offered themselves spontaneously to Jesus' disciples as a testimony to him, as the Sacred Scriptures that revealed the mystery.

"I have ever more come to the realization that Judaism (which, strictly speaking, begins with the end of the formation of the canon, that is, in the first century after Christ) and the Christian faith described in the New Testament are two ways of appropriating Israel's Scriptures, two ways that, in the end, are both determined by the position one assumes with regard to the figure of Jesus of Nazareth.

"The Scripture we today call Old Testament is in itself open to both ways."

Joseph Ratzinger, Milestones, pp. 53-54.