Thank you for clarifying that, Barry; I was feeling very stupid. My book study group is currently doing a series on the Gospel of Matthew, and the instructor was saying that to properly understand the New Testament one must know the Old Testament -- and I don't. I find the Old Testament very confusing.
I'm certainly not a scholar on the subject, Kathy, but I studied The Old Testament in grade school. It covers a longer period of time than The New Testament and there are a few chapters in the first five books that were rewritten at a later time and appear twice. Maybe that makes it a bit confusing and out of order. Even then, my teachers introduced Isaiah to us as a prophetic and allegorical book. The verses in Isaiah have always fascinated me.
We never studied The New Testament, but I read that on my own. I always felt that The Gospel of Matthew presented Jesus as a bit of a "radical' compared to the other gospels. In this 1964 Italian movie, The Gospel According to St. Matthew, Jesus often appeared angry and detached...