Is the New Testament the fulfillment of the Old Testament?

A:For Jews, no, the New Testament is not the fulfilment of the Old Testament. They point out that Jesus is never mentioned anywhere in the Tanach (Old Testament), either by name or even indirectly in any way by which he could be identified.

For Christians, yes, the New Testament is the fulfilment of the Old Testament. They point to many Old Testament passages that they believe prophesy or prefigure events in the New Testament.

Objectively, some of the references used by Christians are not really from the Old Testament in the original Hebrew but from the Septuagint, a flawed, early Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, and as such do no more than demonstrate that parts of the New Testament were written by men to fulfil the wrong scriptures.

In other cases, the gospel authors seem to have misunderstood the Hebrew texts. Matthew says that Jesus was born in Bethlehem to fulfil a prophecy in the Old Testament. He quotes Micah 5:2 as: "And thou Bethlehem, in the land of Juda, art not the least among the princes of Juda: for out of thee shall come a Governor, that shall rule my people Israel," whereas the actual text of Micah 5:2 is "But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah[Bethlehem], though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from days of yore." Micah expected that another king of Israel would be born in little Bethlehem. He did not mention Jesus, and Jesus was never the king of Israel nor were all the Jews to become his followers, as another sense would imply. The link between Micah 5:2 and Matthew is so tenuous that some Christian Bibles have improved Micah 5:2 to make it a more apparent prophecy of a divine king, translating the verse into English with 'everlasting' rather than 'days of yore', but I have provided the original.