Why do Christians bother reading the old testament without a Talmud?
If the OT laws don't apply anymore, why are you reading it in the first place? The Torah is only part of the story; the Talmud is the explanation of what the terms actually mean. The Talmud says "eye for an eye" means giving monetary compensation, but since Christians don't have a Talmud they completely misunderstand this verse and think it's literally taking out an eye.
Again, why bother reading the OT when it's distorted without a Talmud explaining it?
Are you kidding me?
When Jesus came and corrected the Jews for being apostate, he did so by negating much of the Talmud.
Much of the OT is not just laws, but there are many many prophecies that have millennial application. Some of the laws are the same way. To dumb them down to present day application fails to take into account their prophetic use. You actually lose very much by clouding the OT with the Talmud. The New Testament is the best clarified of the Old Testament for its original intent.
Because the NT clarifies much about the OT. Such as 'Do unto others as you would have done to you' or 'Judge not unless you be judged'. No it is not literally talking about an eye for an eye, we know that.
We reap what we sow, that is clear in the OT and the NT.
In the early years of Christianity, Christians were more interested in the Gospels and in the writings of the apostles. They were more interested in what Jesus had to say when he was still alive. Later, as the church grew and more Christian intellectuals came to the fore, they started going back to the Old Testament, to find what the Prophets said concerning the Messianic promise. At that time, the divide was already made between Judaism and Christianity; consulting the Talmud, a collection of commentaries by generations of Jewish scholars would have been seen as backsliding, for at that time the early Christians were already zealous of their identity(this was the time when ritual circumcision was not anymore followed by the mainly Hellenized Christian communities - but that's another story) The Christian scholars did not see the Talmud as bad, but because they were written from the point of view of Judaism's experience with God, it was deemed almost irrelevant. I have to take issue when you say the OT without the Talmud is distorted. Remember, the OT is the Word of God, the Talmud is not. The Christian interest in the OT can be likened to your parents' love story. As their children, we are also interested in how they met, how they developed their love, quarreled even and kissed and made up - before they finally married. Scholarly studies also made us realize that many OT passages would appear confusing until we put Christ in the picture, such as Isaiah's Suffering Servant; the death of the godly King Josias; the insistence by Exodus not to break the bones of the Paschal Lamb; the royal plural used in much of the OT; the "erotic" passages of the Song of Songs, the inter nationality of Ruth, and many, many others. Interestingly, the Gospel of St. Matthew, written by Levi, the former Jewish tax collector for the occupying Romans, is full of passages from the Old Testament to prove the coming of Jesus was the very one talked about in more than two thousand years of Jewish religious history. I think he started the trend. Lastly, while the Jewish Talmud contains explanations of hazy provisions of the Law, Christians are more interested in how God's plan for salvation unwrapped itself down the centuries from the very beginning until that moment in time when the world was already prepared to meet its Savior.
As so many of the previously given answers have shown you, it is extremely important for Christians to insert Jesus into the "Old Testament." After all, the Torah clearly states that there is only one G-d, and there can be no other gods besides him. But Christians believe Jesus also to be divine - so how can it be that he's not there, when he is so crucial?
That's where the Talmud presents a huge stumbling block for Christians. If you are going to translate verses in new ways that suddenly sound like they are referring to Jesus, then it won't do to have thousands of years of rabbinical explanations of the meanings of those verses. If all of those Torah scholars are right, then Jesus isn't there. And he HAS TO BE THERE. So therefore, they throw out the Talmud.
After all, all you need is the NT to make the Torah make sense. So what if it doesn't actually translate correctly and goes against hundreds of generations of longstanding tradition? The NT puts Jesus back into the Torah, so a Christian can feel like his religion is based on something concrete. Plus it lets them throw out all those pesky Torah laws. The Talmud states that they are eternally binding - so they clearly can't have that.
Why do Christians bother reading the old testament without a Talmud?
