The Old Testament citations were similar to these snippets, but also much more powerful, because in addition to using only a few words to create a complex image in the mind of the reader, the quotations were of holy scripture. By bringing them into the New Testament (which wasn’t scripture yet), the authors incorporated the divine into their work. This is why the Jews did the same thing with their early-first-millennium-A.D. texts like the Midrash and worship services—the difference being that for the Jews their secondary texts were never considered on a par with the Old Testament. (This is
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