Once as a Christian, then later as a non-Christian, I read the "Old Testament," (sorry for the demeaning phrase), all the way through. The second time I finished it, (and I don't even mean this as a technical or theological point, but merely as a literary criticism point), it was embarrassingly obvious that the religion of the Torah is so utterly opposed to the religion of the Apostle Paul that it's actually weird that the Christians put Jewish writings and Pauline Christianity writings under the same book-cover. Forget picking at little technical points and haggling over this verse and that verse. It's just that the very overall voice of the Jewish scriptures simply seems wildly alien to the voice of the Apostle Paul, whose doctrines finally dominate Christianity through his letters in the "New Testament." Any honest reader, even a child, can see that the two religions are deeply, profoundly and inherently incompatible. Christianity cannot ever be the "completion" of Judaism because it is an obvious and thoroughgoing repudiation of it. How the world ever fell for this idea that Christianity "continued where Judaism left off" simply confounds me. The answer to this whole thing lies beyond haggling over individual verses and their possibly esoteric meanings. The answer is simply this: Judaism has street credibility at the time, so Paul sought to co-opt or appropriate it into his gospel just to give it artificial marketing power. That's all. Other than that, Christianity is simply a Greek cult faith simply, and really awkwardly, pastes over a Judaism that is utterly unrelated to it. How the world still falls for the Judaism-Christianity continuity theory — I'll just never know. One thing though, most Christians read the "Old Testament" in random bits here and there. The ones who read it straight through without stopping, twice, (not once), will, if they honest, admit that the gospel of Matthew seems like a "book from space" considering the overall gist of the Old Testament. Christianity, however they may weasel and swing and spin it, is an outright betrayal of the monotheism of Judaism, and I say that as a Hindu polytheist. Compared to the monotheism of Judaism, Christianity looks like polytheism badly-packaged as a second-rate monotheism look-alike.