The sub-structure of the NT, as understood by New Testament Scholar, Charles Harold Dodd, is based on,
“ … passages of OT scripture with their application to the gospel facts … it provided the starting point of the theological constructions of Paul, (and) the author of ‘To the Hebrews, and the Fourth Evangelist. It is the substructure of all Christian theology and contains already its chief regulative ideas.” ( C.H.Dodd, According to the Scriptures Nisbet, 1952, p.127).
This is not the perspective adopted by many contemporary Christians who, in practise, often seem ready to discard the OT.
But if this is a correct view, then it becomes important to understand the way that Jewish contemporaries of Jesus and his followers saw and used the OT scriptures.. James Dunn asserts (J.D.G.Dunn, Unity and Diversity in the New Testament, SCM Press, 2006, p.89 ) that the Jewish exegesis of the scriptures by the contemporaries of Jesus is the proper background to early Christianity.
To understand how the contemporaries of Jesus discussed the OT scriptures, we need to think of the categories that were current at that time. Dunn suggests there were five. These are, targum, midrash, pesher, typological and allegorical, but points out that the last three are often controversial.
I propose to discuss these five categories, starting tomorrow with the Targums,